Posted in October 2016

Last week I attended Maplesofts MapleTA and Mobius User Summit 2016 in Vienna. Those were two and a half days well spend. This was already the third one after Amsterdam (2014) and New York (2015). And is good to meet the same people from the other summits, but also good to see new faces as MapleTA becomes more popular in Europe.

For me the summit started by attending two training sessions, or should I say: demo sessions. The first one was about Advanced Question Creation in MapleTA. Jonathan zoomed in on maple graded questions. Since I recently set my first steps in maple graded (see my blog post doing cool stuff..) I welcomed it very much. He addressed some differences between coding in Maple and MapleTA. Providing us with useful tips how to get around them (involving the general solution using the ‘convert’- procedure).
I got quite jealous as he said that at Birmingham they  created grading scripts they can call upon in the ‘grading code field’ so creating a maple graded question is a lot easier. Unfortunately these scripts cannot easily be transferred to other installations of MapleTA. The good news: He said he is talking to Maplesoft about integrating them in the software. Let’s hope it gets picked up. Jonathan also referred to the MapleTA Community were any user can pose questions or respond to others problems. It is active though still in beta.

The second demo was on creating lessons and a slide show Mobius by Aaron. Although we at Delft had done some pilot projects at the beginning of the year, I was pleasantly surprised by the improvements of some features. The software is not officially released just yet and the first version will not have all of the features Jim sketched us during the Mobius Roadshow in September. It holds quite a promise. At TU Delft will continue piloting the software.

The conference on thursday and friday contained several user presentations covering the themes of the conference:

1. Shaping Curriculum
2. Content Creation (with Mobius)
3. User Experience Mobius
4. Integrating with your Technology
5. The future of Online Education

Eight different institutions presented their implementation, course examples, their success stories and troubles. Most interesting though, were the moments between the different themes, when there was plenty of time to talk with the other participants: elaborating on their presentation or just getting to know each other. But also the opportunity to talk to Maplesoft people addressing some issues and near future developments was very valuable.

On friday Steve Furino (University of Waterloo) had an interactive session on what the participants top 3 of future developments should be. This resulted in a list of about 30 items (that did contain multiple entries on the same topic. Usability, regrading and universal coding across Maple and MapleTA were top 3.

Especially Mobius initiated a lot of request from fellow participants to work together creating materials and exchanging them. We saw some lovely examples from Waterloo: chemistry for engineers, precalculus and computer science. Feel free to click those links and check out the courses. Waterloo is thinking of setting up a Workshop focused on developing online STEM Courses (using Mobius). The idea is that participants will leave with a completed online STEM course that they can implement immediately. This workshop should last somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks on site (Waterloo, Canada). If you would like to participate in their viability evaluation follow the link. To sounds like a great idea to me, but wonder wether being away for 4 weeks would be a problem for most people that are interested.

I left the conference full of ideas and a personal action list. Already looking forward to the next User Summit (probably in London – no date set yet). I hope to have made a lot of progress on my plans by then. So I’ll have interesting experiences to share.