If you’re a higher education teacher or lecturer, you probably struggled with the following questions: “how do I save time” and “how do I give students the attention they need and deserve?” Finding a solution is hard. It doesn’t help that both questions seem to contradict each other; the more personal guidance each student gets, the more time you spend as a teacher. So how can you tackle these issues?
For mathematics teachers in higher education, SOWISO has tried to solve both these problems by creating an online learning and practice environment for students and teachers, and optional courseware to go along with it.
The platform we developed gives students personalized hints and feedback on their steps and attempts as they work on math exercises. This is a great way to bring personalized learning into such an important part of the learning experience: practicing and doing homework. The platform identifies mathematical equivalency and mistakes, which allows it to offer tailored hints to the students regardless of their step in the solving process. Step-by-step, it will guide students to the correct answer. The student decides the pace, as they can input anything at any time in order to try and solve the math problem. Our exercises have randomized variables too, which means that every time a question is loaded, it will look slightly different. This allows students to practice as much as they require.
So students get help wherever they are, but how does it help the teachers? John Roberts, Chief Executive of Edapt, authored an interesting report on the role of technology in reducing workload, and found that the main contributors to an unnecessarily high workload are “recording, inputting and monitoring data,” “excessive marking” and “lesson planning”. You might have experienced many late-night homework checking sessions yourself. This is especially tiresome when dealing with large basic mathematics classes, which can sometimes have up to a thousand students.
When students practice using SOWISO, their homework is automatically checked and graded. And teachers using SOWISO can have our software check and grade tests as well. Of course, any time they want to, teachers can double-check test scores to see if they feel comfortable with the grading and adjust if needed.
We like to help teachers with lesson planning as well. Easy to understand reports give breakdowns on student progress, skill or activity, which can be used to make important teaching decisions on what to spend some extra time on. Teachers receive insights in how students are performing on chapter level, but they can also zoom in and see how individual students have tackled an individual exercise, including each individual attempt.
Are you a mathematics teacher in higher education, and are you interested in learning more or trying it out yourself, go to www.sowiso.com
Zestee 