Dr Konstantina Zerva
I completed my undergraduate degree in Physics in 2006 at University of Ioannina, Greece and I received a PhD in Experimental Nuclear Physics in 2013 from the same University. After that, I worked as a Teaching Assistant at the School of Physics and Astronomy and at the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh.
Since 2017 I have been working as Facilitator in Technology Enhanced Mathematical Education at the School of Mathematics ath the University of Edingburgh. My leading role is to design and develop online assessments for the undergraduate Mathematics courses using the STACK system and give practical support to colleagues about the best use of e-assessment in their courses. I oversaw the development of the existing online HELM workbooks and trained multiple interns of how to use STACK. I am also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Sessions
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the University of Edinburgh and Loughborough University collaborated to develop online workbooks for the mathematics education of STEM students. These materials have been in use and evolved over the last two years, in which we have seen a significant amount of online teaching and students have engaged significantly better with the interactive online workbooks than in the other elements of the courses over this time. These materials have been released as an Open Educational Resource under Creative Commons licence.
Our approach to the online workbooks was to use the STACK online assessment system and combine our experience gained with running the fully online course “Fundamentals of Algebra and Calculus” (FAC) with materials from the HELM (Helping Engineers Learn Mathematics) project workbooks. Each interactive workbook is a Moodle quiz with textbook-style written content, worked examples, simple tasks and practice questions. Almost all questions are randomised so each student will have a collection of questions which use different values. When we started translating HELM into STACK we didn’t have any interactive element because it required extra effort.
JSXGraph is a cross-browser library for displaying interactive geometry, function plotting, graphs, and data visualization in a web browser. Mathematical and physical phenomena can be better understood and explored via visualization. In this talk, various uses of JSXGraph will be demonstrated. The resulting design decisions will be explained using concrete examples.