Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Math

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Math

Overview of this book

Moodle is a popular e-learning platform that is making inroads into all areas of the curriculum. Using moodle helps you to develop exciting, interactive, and engaging online math courses. But teaching math requires use of graphs, equations, special notation, and other features that are not built into Moodle. Using Moodle to teach Mathematics presents its own challenges. The book will show you how to set-up a Moodle course to support the teaching of mathematics. It will also help you to carefully explore the Moodle plugins that allow the handling of equations and enable other frequently used mathematical activities. Taking a practical approach, this book will introduce you to the concepts of converting mathematics teaching over to Moodle. It provides you with everything you need to include mathematical notation, graphs, images, video, audio, and more in your Moodle courses. By following the practical examples in this book, you can create feature-rich quizzes that are automatically marked, use tools to monitor student progress, employ modules and plugins allowing students to explore mathematical concepts. You'll also learn the integration of presentations, interactive math elements, SCORM, and Flash objects into Moodle. It will take you through these elements in detail and help you learn how to create, edit, and integrate them into Moodle. Soon you will develop your own exciting, interactive, and engaging online math courses with ease.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 Math
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
Preface

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Recall that to include a simple fraction in a Moodle course using the TeX filter, I was required to type in $$\frac{1}{2}$$. The Algebra Filter simplifies things a little, using a more natural notation: @@1/2@@. However, while great for simple notation, we soon reach the limit of the capabilities of the Algebra Filter. There is yet another problem with both filters: the math notation they produce is rendered in an image, and it's actually a little picture of the math that's included in our courses. That means if you've a visually impaired student in your course who uses a screenreader for access then, unless he/she knows LaTeX, your math is going to be almost totally inaccessible. That's where MathML comes in. MathML is a standard from the W3C to enable fully accessible mathematical notation to be included in web pages (full details are found at http://www.w3.org/Math/). As far as how the notation looks on the screen is concerned, you probably wouldn't notice the difference between...