Grant program: Open Educational Resources Grant Program

Grant recipient: John Stockie, Department of Mathematics

Project team: Petra Menz, Department of Mathematics, Mohammad Alamgir Hossian, research assistant

Timeframe: September 2018 to May 2020

Funding: $5,275

Course addressed: MACM 316 – Numerical Analysis I

Description: This project involves the creation of a databank of clicker questions that will supplement the instruction of an upper-level undergraduate mathematics course at SFU. These questions can be posed to students throughout lectures, facilitating student engagement and helping to identify gaps in knowledge and proficiency. This project fills a need for upper-level undergraduate mathematics clicker question at SFU, and after they are trialed with MACM 316 students, the questions will be made publicly available.

Measuring effectiveness:

• An informal student questionnaire distributed in mid-semester, plus a selection of customized questions included in the end-of-semester SETC evaluations will be used to gauge students' perceptions of the benefits of the clicker questions to their own learning experience. 
• A separate instructor questionnaire will solicit feedback and suggestions on the clicker databank at the end of the first testing period in Summer semester 2019 (in addition to informal consultations with the instructor throughout the semester).
• We will compile responses from students and instructors to decide what (if any) adjustments or additions need to be made to the MACM 316 question bank.

Knowledge sharing: Both the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) hold annual meetings with sessions focused on education. These are two meetings that would provide an excellent opportunity for the co-applicants and/or the graduate student RA to disseminate the OER resources developed in this project more widely to other university-level instructors teaching Numerical Analysis.

Keywords: applied mathematics; open educational resources; numerical analysis; i-clicker; question databank; student engagement; undergraduate mathematics