NSF Award
1625223
The UTMOST 2.0 project will design, develop and study innovative approaches to the teaching and learning of undergraduate mathematics using open software and electronic textbooks. This project will study students' use of electronic textbooks when these are made freely available in a variety of formats and on a variety of devices. These textbooks will support interactive computation through a seamless integration of Sage, the leading open-source computing system for mathematics. The main vehicles for this integration will be SageMathCloud, a rich online environment for computation and collaboration between students and their course instructor, and Sage cells, self-contained interactive calculation modules that can be embedded in any web page while requiring no software installation or prior knowledge of Sage, because the commands are pre-loaded. Additionally, UTMOST 2.0 will support the further adoption of MathBook XML, an authoring platform that enables the creation of highly functional, open-source textbooks--in particular, textbooks which can exist both in print and in an online format that contains Sage cells. The project includes technical improvements to Sage cells which will make it easier for instructors to create their own Sage cells for their particular course needs. A catalog of Sage cells will be curated, which will further lower the barrier to widespread adoption. <br/><br/>Online dynamic textbooks provide a unique opportunity to directly measure all aspects of how they are used. UTMOST 2.0 is designed to leverage technology to enhance the quality and breadth of the mathematical education research into how students and teachers use electronic textbooks and modern online tools for communication about technical subjects in real classrooms. UTMOST 2.0 will work with instructors at multiple institutions, all of whom will use MathBook XML textbooks, some in the online version and some in the printed version. The online version will be hosted in the cloud, on a server that will be configured to record all user activity at an extremely fine-grained level. The automatic online data collection will be combined with classroom data collection methods, providing a means to validate the information collected that can later be correlated with student gains in course content knowledge. UTMOST 2.0 will also assist authors of undergraduate mathematics textbooks that have already converted to the Mathbook XML format in the next steps of incorporating interactive features such as Sage cells and WeBWorK exercises. This will greatly increase the number of books with those advanced features and simultaneously expand the areas in which the UTMOST project can perform its research investigations.
