Keuzegids Universiteiten 2020 ranked Radboud University among the best traditional universities in the Netherlands for general bachelor’s programmes, and in the 2019 Times Higher Education Europe Teaching Ranking it placed 24th out of 258 universities. Many of its students take mathematics without having chosen it as their subject. Two teaching teams use Sowiso for exactly that.
Dr Fleur Zeldenrust is an assistant professor at the Department of Neurophysiology of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. Alongside her research as a computational neuroscientist, she teaches Mathematics for Biologists to 140 first-year biology students a year, on Sowiso since 2019. In Economics and Business Economics, Dr Jana Vyrastekova and Dr Rutger Schilpzand, both economics teachers and researchers, teach mathematics to 120 to 200 students a year. They started with Sowiso in 2018 and build much of their course material in it themselves.
The challenge: mathematics for students who came for biology or economics
For most students in Fleur’s course, mathematics was never the main concern at secondary school. Their focus was biology, and where they came from varied widely.
“The students have a very diverse background. For those coming from Dutch high schools, some have done mathematics A and some have done mathematics B. We also have quite a large number of incoming international students and these students also come from a multitude of different schooling backgrounds.”
When Fleur started designing the course in April 2019, the question was how to make one course work for all of them.
“You don’t want to make it too hard for the ones who don’t have a lot of mathematics background but you do want to keep it interesting for the ones that do.”
Jana and Rutger met the same problem from another side: engagement. Many economics students see mathematics as difficult, boring or both, and getting them to interact is tough. The online tools the team used before Sowiso did not help enough. Students had to buy a textbook, creating their own learning content was very difficult, and the teachers wanted to move their examinations online. They set out to create their own digital mathematics resources and to run their exams online.
In 2020, lockdowns and social distancing made all of this harder. Fleur’s first concern was contact.
“My first worry at the beginning of this period was, if there are no lectures or tutorials, how do I keep contact with my students and how do I keep track of them.”
She wanted to keep following each student’s progress and step in when someone hit a hurdle, without any contact hours on campus. Formative and summative assessment also had to move online, and it had to stay secure. Remote proctoring was the obvious answer, but Fleur and her team found it invasive for students’ privacy and counterproductive for their learning and performance.
“There are real privacy issues when it comes to proctoring. Students have to install software that is able to get access to all of the files on your computer, which tracks who knows what, and then stores them in databases that are not in Europe. So European law doesn’t apply. Some students also said they felt very uncomfortable and stressed out if they had the feeling that someone was watching them the whole time.”
There was a practical problem too. In most of her tests, Fleur allows formula sheets and calculators, while most proctoring tools rely on eye-tracking that is triggered by “suspicious” eye movement.
“Problem with that is that my students are not always watching the screen, they are looking at their formula sheet or their calculator. So because of this, remote proctoring software gets way too many false alarms.”
The solution: their own course, randomised exercises and online exams in Sowiso
A course the teachers design themselves
What drew Jana and Rutger to Sowiso most was the chance to create their own course. Sowiso offers material written by its own mathematicians, but teachers can also design their own content, and the economics team wanted to be closely involved in the course design. Their attitude when they discovered Sowiso:
“The sky is the limit.”
It was not all smooth. Authoring has a learning curve that can be steep at first, and it took more programming and more time than they had expected. They also started writing their economics content before Sowiso had its own course for the social sciences. In 2018 Jana was awarded a Comenius Teaching Fellowship, which let her work on a personalised learning project, and she chose Sowiso for it. Her aim was to build a backbone of mathematics into the social sciences programme. Two assistants helped with the programming, and the university supported the project from the start.
Practice that fits every starting level
Fleur dealt with the mixed backgrounds before her course had even begun, with preliminary material and tests.
“Basically before the course started, we said this is the level we expect you to have. We gave them two tests and we said you can do these tests as much as you like but I expect you to understand this and if you don’t then here is the material you can practise with. This typically included topics like exponents and fractions and other similar topics.”
Because Sowiso randomises its questions, a student who retook a test got new questions every time. Nobody could raise a score by memorising answers, so a score showed what a student actually understood. The practice material came with automated, personalised feedback, so students could strengthen the basics without a teacher looking over their shoulder.
In economics, Jana and Rutger noticed that students often do not pick up the course straight away, especially in their first course. They need to build a habit, so the teachers built a weekly exercise into the course. They see interaction within the working groups as crucial and fold the Sowiso tasks into the group work. Students can submit an assignment as many times as they like, which gives them plenty of chances to improve their skills and earn a satisfactory grade.
Teaching remotely without losing track of students
When COVID-19 reached the Netherlands, both courses were already running in Sowiso.
“When corona hit in the Netherlands, my mathematics course was already completely on Sowiso. I was comforted by knowing that, even if students had to get used to working online, they had good support.”
For Fleur, half the job was done. The theory and practice material were in Sowiso, and she had recorded her lectures the year before. The harder part was keeping an overview of how her students were doing.
“It’s really strange when students are no longer on campus and you don’t see them anymore. So it becomes very easy to miss any problems that your students might run into.”
So she introduced a weekly diagnostic test on that week’s topics. Every student had three attempts to pass, with a pass mark of 75%.
“But if they would have any trouble, they could just contact me to get extra attempts or an extension. This was just a way to keep track of them. So if they didn’t take the test before the deadline or would fail a test, then they wouldn’t contact me but rather I would contact them.”
The weekly tests took little extra effort to set up. Fleur built them from Sowiso’s existing database of randomised exercises, and Sowiso checked and graded the answers automatically.
Online examinations
Moving examinations online had been one of the economics team’s goals from the start. During the pandemic it became a necessity.
“Sowiso has been a real life-saver, especially during corona when we had to do all the online examinations.”
Fleur kept her remote summative tests fair without proctoring software. Students enter their answers in Sowiso and upload the handwritten notes behind each one.
“Of course, they give their answers in the electronic program but they still normally do their derivations by hand. So now we asked them to upload them, so for every question, I want to see some notes. It can just be a small comment or something but just something to help me see your reasoning.”
She also used randomisation. Each student got the questions in a different order, and while every question had the same structure for everyone, the variables in it differed per student.
The result: practice at every level, a weekly point of contact and a teaching award
The self-paced set-up lets Fleur handle the different levels in her group.
“Students with a lot of background knowledge can quickly go through the material and show by means of tests that they have mastery of the material, while students with less basic knowledge have the opportunity to practise almost endlessly because the assignments keep randomising.”
The weekly diagnostic tests turned out to be the most dependable way to keep a conversation going with every student.
“This way, I was able to actually get into conversations with students and ask them what was going on and sometimes problems surfaced that I didn’t even think about. One student turned out not to have a laptop. Another student had a hard time focusing. Some of the international students went back home, so they were just settling in. We were able to discuss all of this and more. It might sound weird but the weekly tests became a point of contact. So that went really well.”
The uploaded notes made the exams a learning moment as well.
“I made them check their own exams. So basically after they do their exam and after I go over it, I just give them their results and also what was wrong and what was correct, so they could see the correct worked out solution and compare that with their own notes. This means that they really learn from their exams. They see what they did wrong and more importantly at what step they went wrong.”
Fleur received the Junior Teaching Award of the Teaching Institute of Biosciences at Radboud University for her work on the course and the success of her students.
In economics, students first have to get used to working in Sowiso. Once they know how it works, Jana and Rutger find the benefits justify that initial discomfort, and the students agree.
“When you specifically ask the students about the costs and benefits, on a scale from one to five, they rate it around 4.7, 4.8 to say the benefits are higher than the costs.”
Examination is the teachers’ favourite part of Sowiso. It goes well beyond checking assignments or questions, and the tasks are very clear. They also see students grow more proficient in their technical skills, and when they review student satisfaction with the course, they always find positive comments about Sowiso.
Their advice to other teachers is to manage expectations from the start. Despite the early struggle, several years in they have become advocates, and they single out the personal attention from Sowiso’s customer success colleagues and how quickly teachers’ suggestions are put into practice.
“You really listen to what we desire.”
Jana and Rutger keep developing their course in Sowiso, and they are now also using it for research into how students learn.
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