Effective Use of Math E-Learning with Questions Specification

MATH ON WEB, STACK, and Maple T.A. are the prominent mathematics e-learning systems used in Japan. They can assess answers containing mathematical content freely written by students as opposed to only answers to multiple-choice questions. However, there are two major challenges while using these systems: inconvenience in inputting answers and heavy content-development workload. We have developed two math input interfaces, MathTOUCH and FlickMath, using which students can easily input mathematical expressions. The interfaces were developed as part of a project aimed at accelerating the spread of math e-learning systems using a question-sharing environment among heterogeneous systems such as MATH ON WEB and Maple T.A. Further, they form a part of mathematics e-learning question specification (‘MeLQS’) system, which is currently being developed in our project to realise this objective. We would like to emphasize the importance of building a common base, ‘MeLQS’, for creating questions in math e-learning.