 Rwy'n dechnais gwybod ar gyfer y projektyn. Rydyn ni wedi gyntaf i Cymru Cymru Cymru Cymru, ac mae ein ddodol Cymru, gyda'r CIT yng Nghymru. Mae'r ddodol Maen yn rhan o'r hyn yn Robert Toomey, ac mae'n argymwyno'n ddodol i'r CIT yng Nghymru Cymru, y gallwn falch gyda unigon yma i chi wrth gwrs ymlaen. A mae hyn yn ystriwch oherwydd ymlaen i'r proiectol yr oedd yng ngondol i'r byddurol yn y Ffwrdd Cyfaintau Cyfaintol Cymru, ac mae'r gyfer ymlaen i'r cyfr�au Cymru. Mae'r gyfaint yn adnodd y gyrdd. Mae'r cyfr�au'r parodym yn y gall gyrdd yma'r cyfr�au yn y gyrddol yn y gyrddol. iawn i'w ceffedol yw eu bod chi eto'i gwneud yn ddaeth ar agor, a daeth y gwerth yn gynlluniael. Mae'r dynod wedi'i ddweud yn meddwlad ddisgwrs yn hynny Aeneidol mathosegu ar gyfer y fförwyr. Yr dynod yn gwneud yw'r pÙl wyliol, ac mae'r pÙl wylch yn unrhywbethau felly ymddangos e-assesfynt ychydig neu'i gyflwyno'n unedig yr unedig ac yn ddaleig fy adnod a oedd ni ddiddor i eithafantau. Numbus has a repository of questions which are available and which we can use, we can also develop our own content, in fact we are developing our own content, that's a key aspect of the project, content development, and through that then we have feedback from the lecturer to Numbus, see how students are going etc etc. Little bit about the project aims, so we want to make content on the Numbus platform that is suitable for the courses that we teach in Cork, in the two institutions there. We want to incorporate the assessment in our courses, yes, and also e-learning through doing, maybe that's the only way of learning. We want to improve student education and engagement with mathematics, which is problematic especially for courses where students are not studying mathematics per se but doing biology or whatever it might be. We want to improve their basic mathematical skills, particular in the context of, in Ireland here the local context is project maths which is a revised secondary school mathematics programme which has its supporters and its critics. And we want to improve of course student outcomes and we want to also make a more efficient use of lecturers time. So as part of all a project we have to evaluate whether we are achieving these aims, we have to figure out what the context is in terms of international practice and we have to disseminate our findings to the mathematics community particularly in Ireland. Just a few words about feedback for the international panel, we had some feedback from the panel let's say from last June. So in that we have strengthened our links with Numbus in Newcastle because the long term viability of this is important so Numbus knows about us, we know about Numbus and there's an ongoing dialogue now at this stage. We have developed quite a bit of further content as you will see. We have sought feedback through questionnaires from staff and from students and again you will see some evidence of this. And now as we are kind of moving out of the content development phase we have quite a lot of stuff there. We are able to move into kind of an evaluation which allows us to improve further evaluation etc that more I suppose higher level phase of the project. We have also reached out nationally to other groups who are working and to some of whom we have also presented here today who are working in this area. And we have begun to turn our attention to kind of the principles of what is going on and trying to understand what the key lessons and the outcomes are. So I'll hand you over to Ciaran now to speak about some, give you some further details. Thank you. Hi, so I'm Ciaran Mulcon and I'm also from UCC and it's going to talk a little bit first of all about what we've actually done so far. So one of the big things that we've done so far is we've developed content both in for CIT and UCC courses. And we've basically I suppose compiled a repository of questions which can be combined in different ways to form different assessments or tests in different contexts. And this has involved developing completely new content and also modifying existing content that forms part of the Numbus community. So the content that we develop also contributes I suppose to that community across Ireland and the UK. I'm not too sure if it goes beyond that. We have implemented Numbus for a large course in UCC which is to do with mathematical methods for science. It is a large first year course with over 500 students participating. The approach we took there was that the students would take an assessment out of class in a self-directed manner. And in addition to the assessments we also provide practice test sets that they can use themselves and of course they will get immediate feedback from those assessments to see how well they're doing. We've also implemented Numbus at seven courses in CIT including Maths and Stats for Business, Maths and Stats for Marketing, Automative Maths. And the approach taken there is in contrast where it has been part of an in-tutorial assessment, in-classed assessment. There are also I suppose encouraged to do some self-directed practice and get feedback from that. And it's also found to be useful to fill in the gaps in the knowledge of mature students possibly returning back into education after a significant gap. Sorry I should have been pressing the button there and I didn't press the button but that's because I'm a bit of an amateur at this kind of thing. But we haven't made too much of a mess yet. I also want to say that Numbus has also, we've also been able to integrate it with the virtual learning environments both in UCC and CIT. So it's a fairly seamless integration even though it's probably has caused us some difficulties which I think will be discussed later. So we also have an Mres student Robert Toomey who is full-time dedicated to this project and he's looking at I suppose the theoretical underpinnings of this project and also will be evaluating the impact that the project is having upon students learning experiences and whether this is having any effect on the outcomes of their learning. And we've also surveyed students and staff already. So what I'm going to do now in the next section is I'm going to talk about some issues related to the impact on students. There's going to be some quotes coming up on the screen that we have taken from these student surveys. What I'm talking about, there is no link between what's on the screen and what I'm talking about. If you find a link, tell me and we might use it in a future presentation. So many of the students that we have I'd say it would be fair to say that they got through mathematics to get at second level to get into third level. They've come to college to study something different, biology, business for example. And they possibly taught that their maths career was over and they find that actually after your leaving certificate success you're now back studying mathematics again. You possibly didn't expect that. The transition to third level is very fast. You get your results, your offer of a place in August and this is in the aftermath of one of the key exams in your life, the leaving certificate. It's life changing and before you know it you're registered in a third level college. You're rapidly immersed in it, you're facing academic challenges, you're facing social challenges and 12 weeks later you're sitting in your first exam in mathematics. We are interacting with and listening to students as we try to collect an evidence base of data as to how best to use numbers to give a positive impact to these students. Our study is firmly entrenched within the discipline of mathematics. However there may be lessons that can transfer to other disciplines. We're not excluding that possibility and our study embraces the use of digital technologies to facilitate transition. That's very much an underlying precept of what we're doing. However we do acknowledge that these students may not be all part of the Google generation, they may not all be digital natives and that's something that we've got to take into consideration and probably something that we didn't think of ahead of time. There was a conference before Christmas organised by the National Forum and I thought there was an interesting quote in that from Professor Moore and Dr Ryan. They were having a conversation about transitions and one was that students work best when they feel cared for. The personal touch, feeling part of something is very important for engaging students and bringing on their learning. I guess there are comparisons and contrasts that we can make between the approach taken in UCC, the large class, the online engagement and CIT where it's small classes and kind of more directed approach to this assessment. Although Numbus helps manages resources and provides instant feedback to students, it also leads students into the isolation of online assessment. These are key issues that we hope to tease out as well as we go on with our evaluation. Numbus doesn't try to dumb down what can be a difficult journey for these students. It attempts to make the difficult journey easier, not easier but more navigable for students and it gives students a means to practice with feedback and enables them to check on their progress and empower them to take control of their own learning. I think I have to press a button now, which will play a video. This is a video showing some of the reactions of staff in CIT to Numbus. I don't certainly get the tenon itself, but what's that? Tenons with the Numbus tutorials was a great deal from the non-Numbus tutorials. I think I had three numbers of three non-Numbus tutorials and I had almost 100% of the tenons for everything that I'm about Numbus and I had around 60% of the tenons for classes that didn't involve Numbus. I find that students are more willing to engage with questions when they're presented electronically than they are if they're presented on pen and paper. I think they were quite motivated by getting the great tick that when told them when they couldn't work it out and they got the right answer they got the tick to say that it was right and when they didn't get the right answer then I found they were probably more forward about asking me for help. I also find myself busier during the class when it's a Numbus class because the students are working through the questions and they raise their hand as soon as they don't get an answer right because they have the instant feedback. I'll see useful that when they were doing certain mathematical expressions or interstating that Numbus kind of as they typed it in Numbus gave them the format of their answer. I find the students a lot more engaging in the Numbus tutorials otherwise I feel like I'm pulling you trying things out of them whereas this way they would actually sit there and work and participate which is nice. So being able to work with a pressure break was certainly what comes from our experience that's still not actually what sounds like there, it's fantastic. Okay so in keeping with recent elections in Ireland I'm here to tick the gender quarterbacks so I'm supposed to talk about 30% of the time. So just very briefly I want to give just a small personal motivation I suppose of my involvement in the project a number of years ago I had the opportunity to teach just for about four weeks a particular group that I'd heard an awful lot about a group of about 600 students who I was in the staff room it wasn't all positive there was a lot of like, there were difficulties, difficult to engage attendance at tutorials might be two or three students those who probably least needed to attend the tutorials. So I remember I was teaching them for four weeks just covering so many in return even I said I'm going to put all my energy into this now they're not going to break me in four weeks and I remember bringing in coloured dice and I didn't sing and dance for them but almost and I still didn't quite feel that I was getting to them so when O'Neill Hayham, our head of the department approached me about using numbers in their classes I thought it was a very, very good opportunity so some of the positives of our project so first of all improves attendance some of the lecturers mentioned that and it significantly improved it in regard to that cohort I just mentioned it improved engagement and a key indicator for me of that was that the lecturers and tutors said they were busier in the class they were asked more questions the students were more likely to try the questions improved enjoyment an important one as well I think and not only did it seem to improve enjoyment for the lecturers but also for the students and this came through in both the surveys and the interviews we did with the lecturers improved results which is always a nice one it eliminated correcting and I suppose as was mentioned earlier like the literature says you should have feedback to students you should have it regularly and you should have a really quick back to them as much as possible but if you're lecturing 20 hours a week say but one hour for preparing each of those lecturing hours it's very difficult to actually implement that so Numbus really was able to help that also I suppose what we expected to be one of the issues with the project was the students inputting the mathematics into the computers traditionally that's the problem particularly for students who aren't math students they just might have one or two maths modules over there throughout their degree but it didn't seem to an issue for any of the students of the lecturers inputting the mathematics the likes of x squareds etc all very positive but there was it wasn't perfect and I suppose a big difference was we looked at the situation in CIT where they did the online assessments in a classroom or a tutor or a lecture and in UCC where they did them in their own time at home or wherever they wished and there was an issue with results some communication between Numbus and Blackboard the results going through so I think in CIT it was about 1% of results did not go through but in UCC it seemed to be much higher about 20% and it's quite difficult to I think students use of the software seemed to be a bit of an issue when it was unsupervised to the situation really briefly because I'm looking at the clock here just on the national impact I hope it's clear that we've done something useful here for me I think the project one of its biggest contributions is just the last point there that we've tried this we've done a trial and we've learned a lot from it and I really hope that that benefits the wider community just one more slide I suppose we've done a lot of work on this project we've worked really hard but I suppose there's still certain things we'd like to do when they come under three categories implementation, evaluation and dissemination implementation I think the focus is on the latter two implementation we continue developing content and trialling with courses but for evaluation we have our student Robert Toomey who's going to hopefully produce a thesis by September and he's doing a lot of work on that evaluation some of it done more to do with dissemination we might need to get one of those buses that the politicians have and we plan to go on tour so there's the Irish Maths Learning Support Network Conference in Galway which has a tutor team which I think is very suitable for this project and the Adults Learning Maths Conference in Manwith, we've also been invited to Newcastle it is an E-assessments and Mathematical Sciences Conference there and we've been invited to submit a paper at that also last but not least we've created a website there mathematics.cat.ie now sorry for talking so fast but I'm looking at the top thank you very much ok