eJMT Abstract

For a number of years, Loughborough’s Mathematics Education Centre, recently awarded national Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning status, has worked with others to provide innovative learning resources to enhance the teaching and learning of mathematics. This paper describes some of the uses we are making of technology to help and support our engineering undergraduates learning of mathematics; most are taught mathematics using the HELM (Helping Engineers Learn Mathematics) resources, which we briefly describe. HELM was a major curriculum development project involving a consortium of five UK universities led by Loughborough that uses interactive technology for teaching and assessment. Its success is evidenced by their considerable uptake at other institutions. E-learning is part of our overall learning and teaching strategy and a key component of our work is to develop the use of emerging modern technology in the delivery of mathematics at all levels, whilst pursuing the relevant pedagogic research. Consequently we describe some recent developments in our teaching with engineers; these include the use of Tablet PCs and electronic voting systems. We make significant use of our university’s VLE to deliver the material, and ongoing developments include the use of podcasts and Moodle quizzes for formative assessment, which we outline. Finally, we comment on some of the issues involved.