May 31, 2024, by Ben Atkinson

Mathematical Notation In Moodle

There are many disciplines across the University of Nottingham who make use of mathematical notation in their teaching. From the Faculty of Science to Engineering and beyond. Below we have shared some of the tools that you can use to embed mathematical notation in your teaching resources inside your Moodle module and in other formats which can be shared with students.

MathJax

MathJax is an open-source Javascript display engine for LaTeX and other formats that can represent mathematical notation. The University of Nottingham currently has the MaxJax filter installed in our Moodle VLE to enable mathematical notation to be displayed within module pages.

MathJax can be used to display mathematical notation within Moodle by using the text editor. This is particularly useful for:

• Adding mathematical notation to Moodle quiz question;
• Adding mathematical notation in a Moodle label;
• Adding mathematical notation in a Moodle book resource.

You can find out more about how to use MathJax by reading the workspace guidance for staff.

CodeRunner

CodeRunner is a Moodle question type that allows teachers to run a program in order to grade a student’s answer. By far the most common use of CodeRunner is in programming courses where students are asked to write program code to some specification and that code is then graded by running it in a series of tests. CodeRunner questions have also been used in other areas of computer science, engineering  and maths to grade questions in which many different correct answers are possible and a program must be used to assess correctness.

You can add CodeRunner questions to your Moodle quiz, giving students the ability to enter code or equations directly into the answer box which can then be marked alongside all other question types used in the quiz. This approach  greatly expands the scope of Moodle quiz within many of the STEM disciplines.

You can find out more about CodeRunner and how it works on their website.

Accessible HTML Notebooks

In recent months the School of Mathematical Sciences in the Faculty of Science have been undertaking work to develop a new approach to sharing mathematical notation in accessible HTML notebooks. This work builds on the use of RBookdown in the school and Jupiter notebooks. Both formats have been used in the past and have now been developed further with a new template that is fully accessible and various options for users to change the size and layout of pages. The resources have a responsive design meaning they work across a variety of screen sizes and devices and come with built in navigational menus. If you have previous knowledge of RBookdown you can easily utilise these new HTML templates.

Further guidance can be found in this blog posts from the team behind the HTML notebooks.

This project will also be featured in a presentation at the upcoming Digital Accessibility Conference hosted by UoN and taking place at the end of June 2024. Find out more about the conference on Xerte.

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Google+
• Share on LinkedIn