MathML has been successful in improving the accessibility of mathematical notation on the web. All major screen readers support MathML to generate speech, allow navigation of the math, and generate braille. A troublesome area remains: handling ambiguous notations such as | x|. While it is possible to speak this syntactically, anecdotal evidence indicates most people prefer semantic speech such as “absolute value of x” or “determinant of x” instead of “vertical bar x vertical bar” when first hearing an expression. Several heuristics to infer semantics have improved speech, but ultimately, the author is the one who definitively knows how an expression is meant to be spoken. The W3C Math Working Group is in the process of allowing authors to convey their intent in MathML markup via an intent attribute. This paper describes that work.

The German national educational standards state explicitly that students should be enabled to successfully interact with dynamic geometry software. In a feasibility study on providing a standardized assessment instrument by digital means, in order to assess students' mathematical competencies, the implementation of a task with such a dynamic geometry software was investigated. The sample consisted of 101 8th graders and was used to evaluate how students actually interact with the embedded dynamic geometry software. We focused especially on investigating relationships between successfully solving such tasks (evaluated automatically or categorized qualitatively by a human rater) and process data collected during the testing. A multiple linear regression analysis was conducted to identify relevant predictors for success within one dynamic geometry task. On this basis, possible adjustments are discussed so as to enhance the standardization and accessibility of tasks within dynamic geometry systems.

Text-classifiers are among the important services required of contemporary AI systems. Based on a trained classifier, one can perform relevant tasks such as highlighting relevant passages of a text, analyzing what is talked about or encouraging students to write texts which cover important concepts. This form of analysis is at the core of the AISOP project, AI-supported Observation of e-portfolios: Through the development of classifiers and the visualization of their results, the project aims at supporting e-Portfolio assessment in the university context. We report our investigations on the creation process of classifiers, on how their quality can be evaluated and enhanced, and on the domain specificities we have met.

Massive open online courses and other online study opportunities are providing easier access to education for more and more people around the world. To cope with the large number of exams to be assessed in these courses, AI-driven automatic short answer grading can recommend teaching staff to assign points when evaluating free text answers, leading to faster and fairer grading. But what would be the best way to work with the AI? In this paper, we investigate and evaluate different methods for explainability in automatic short answer grading. Our survey of over 70 professors, lecturers and teachers with grading experience showed that displaying the predicted points together with matches between student answer and model answer is rated better than the other tested explainable AI (XAI) methods in the aspects trust, informative content, speed, consistency and fairness, fun, comprehensibility, applicability, use in exam preparation, and in general.

Botte, Alexander [Hrsg.]; Libbrecht, Paul [Hrsg.]; Rittberger, Marc [Hrsg.]: Learning Information Literacy across the Globe. Frankfurt am Main, May 10th 2019. Frankfurt am Main : DIPF 2021, S. 114-128 Padagogische Teildisziplin: Medienpadagogik;

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the rationale, technical framework, content creation workflow and evaluation for a multilingual massive open online course (MOOC) to facilitate information literacy (IL) considering cultural aspects.Design/methodology/approachA good practice analysis built the basis for the technical and content framework. The evaluation approach consisted of three phases: first, the students were asked to fill out a short self-assessment questionnaire and a shortened adapted version of a standardized IL test. Second, they completed the full version of the IL MOOC. Third, they were asked to fill out the full version of a standardized IL test and a user experience questionnaire.FindingsThe results show that first the designed workflow was suitable in practice and led to the implementation of a full-grown MOOC. Second, the implementation itself provides implications for future projects developing multilingual educational resources. Third, the evaluation results show that participants achieved significantly higher results in a standardized IL test after attending the MOOC as mandatory coursework. Variations between the different student groups in the participating countries were observed. Fourth, self-motivation to complete the MOOC showed to be a challenge for students asked to attend the MOOC as nonmandatory out-of-classroom task. It seems that multilingual facilitation alone is not sufficient to increase active MOOC participation.Originality/valueThis paper presents an innovative approach of developing multilingual IL teaching resources and is one of the first works to evaluate the impact of an IL MOOC on learners' experience and learning outcomes in an international evaluation study.

We present the concept of an intelligent tutoring system which combines web search for learning purposes and state-of-theart natural language processing techniques. Our concept is described for the case of teaching information literacy, but has the potential to be applied to other courses or for independent acquisition of knowledge through web search. The concept supports both, students and teachers. Furthermore, the approach integrates issues like AI explainability, privacy of student information, assessment of the quality of retrieved information and automatic grading of student performance.

Document editing has migrated in the last decade from a mostly individual activity to a shared activity among multiple persons. The World Wide Web and other communication means have contributed to this evolution. However, collaboration via the web has shown a tendency to centralize information, making it accessible to subsequent uses and abuses, such as surveillance, marketing, and data theft. Traditionally, access control policies have been enforced by a central authority, usually the server hosting the content, a single point of failure. We describe a novel scheme for collaborative editing in which clients enforce access control through the use of strong encryption. Encryption keys are distributed as the portion of a URI which is not shared with the server, enabling users to adopt a variety of document security workflows. This system separates access to the information ("the key") from the responsibility of hosting the content ("the carrier of the vault"), allowing privacy-conscious editors to enjoy a modern collaborative editing experience without relaxing their requirements. The paper presents CryptPad, an open-source reference implementation which features a variety of editors which employ the described access control methodology. We will detail approaches for implementing a variety of features required for user productivity in a manner that satisfies user-defined privacy concerns.

Mathematical formulae are information objects that can be entered in a computer, visualized, and evaluated.Thus, by the majority of (mostly occasional) users it is also expected that they are transferable through the simple copy-paste procedure.This transfer is particularly interesting when users are involved in tasks that span different mathematical activities or domains.For example, when performing computations and writing a report about them, or when performing algebraic computations from geometric constructions.Essentially, using copy-paste also allows users to use a particular mathematical software for the tasks that it does best.To uncover the possible difficulties within this process, we approached students who are beginning to learn the use of mathematical tools.Through analysing their home-work where they report on the usage of various tools we observed their use of the copy-paste transfer procedure, both from their reports and from the dialogue they had with the teachers.Their attempts show a multitude of issues which we try to explain.It appears that the copy-paste procedure is often useless, especially for inexperienced users.

The concept of e-portfolio is finding an ever-growing uptake in secondary and post-secondary education as a tool to measure holistically the effects of learning. Learners document their development process in form of a collection of documents. In this research, we propose an automated method to support teachers in their assessment of e-portfolios by evaluating e-portfolios using automated analysis tools, which operate descriptively and semantically. A first formative evaluation of the system has been performed, to assess how much the quality portfolios are detected by descriptive indicators, which have proven to be already partially expressive. Delivered insights on e-portfolios were considered valuable by lecturers.

When an object, of any nature, is displayed and selectable on a computer screen, users expect it to be copy-and-paste-able: one can invoke the copy function and insert (paste) it at other places, within the same programme or beyond. This holds for many different kinds of objects: texts and images, at least. Unfortunately, for mathematical objects, this is rarely so. Most operating systems offer multiple channels to carry exchanged content but most mathematical systems do not take advantage of it: they transfer the content in plain text, expecting it to have the right syntax or, if necessary, expecting the user to use a different copy function so that the right syntax is exchanged. While ways to circumvent these issues are available, they are mostly not used by mathematical software. We explore potential justifications and describe for which type of users, these justifications do not apply. To support this, we report briefly on the experiment students about their expectations and observations on the above mentioned process. 1 Intro: Transferring naturally between Competent Softwares Copy and pasting mathematical formulæ between different systems is a desirable and common action. It is widely known that most mathematical systems have areas where they are very effective and while they only provide an approximate service in other areas. For example, dynamic geometry systems are good at constructive geometric figures and letting them be manipulated but also offer other functions in which they are rather less good: for example, most of them support some part of the TEX language to display formulæ and some offer computer algebra features; each of these extra features are very limited. Most computer algebra systems (Maple, Mathematica, Macsyma, MuPad, Reduce) themselves have their own user-input parser and use TeX for display purposes mostly [Zha03] Instead of relying on such limited extra features, users have the possibility to transfer the mathematical object between a system and another so that the receiving system offers its high quality features to solve the translated problem. To perform the transfer of mathematical objects, the natural procedure of copy and pasting is often expected by users but, in the mathematical world, this procedure is decorated with special methods of many sorts, to Copyright c © by the paper’s authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. In: A. Editor, B. Coeditor (eds.): Proceedings of the XYZ Workshop, Location, Country, DD-MMM-YYYY, published at http://ceur-ws.org work somewhat properly. Switching between different systems, transferring relevant data, worrying about things getting “out of sync”,differences in command sets and capabilities between different applications, soon becomes overwhelming[Lie00]. A simple sequence select, copy, switch, insert, paste is mostly expected by users. However, it is not rare a more complex procedure is needed such as the invocation of a special copy or adjusting the pasted content before it is further processed. For example[Kin02], the Stanford Interactive Workspaces’smart clipboard can copy and paste data between incompatible applications on different platforms[Kic00]. The smart clipboard must transparently invoke the machinery whenever the user performs a copy and paste operation. A more sophisticated but less general approach, semantic snarfing, as implemented in Carnegie Mellon’s Pebbles project, captures content from a large display onto a small display and attempts to emulate the content’s underlying behaviors [Mey01]. In the middle of this process lies the exchanged content. Most operating systems offer multiple channels to carry this exchanged content but most mathematical systems do not take advantage of it: they transfer the content in plain text, expecting it to have the right syntax or, if necessary, expecting the user to use a different copy function so that the right syntax is exchanged. Why is this a problem? There are ranges of issues which are encountered by users and are all due to this choice of plain text. They range from syntax mismatch to unmasterable expressions, from the failure of apparent syntax compatibility to the somewhat arbitrary text-linearization of the text appearing within the formula. While ways to circumvent these issues are available since long in a standardized form (clipboard flavours or alternative representations in MathML), they are not used by mathematical software. We propose potential justifications and describe for which type of users, these justifications do not apply. 2 Observation Methods for Copy and Paste of Formulæ To be able to evaluate what are the expectations of users when transferring between systems, the authors employ their usage and teaching experience. These includes courses dedicated to the introduction of various systems (e.g. introduction to LaTeX, to computer algebra systems, or to dynamic geometry) in undergraduate teacher education classes. While this class of users is clearly not representative of the complete population of users of mathematical systems, it represents the important share of moderately technical users and also precludes those that will educate broad masses of citizens. With this class of users, a practical experiment has been done at the University of Ljubljana for about 30 students in the first cycle professional study program Practical Mathematics: a mathematical task was given, explicitly requiring the exchange of mathematical expressions between various systems, of which comments and reports were expected. In the first weeks of the subject called Computer tools in mathematics they get used to typical examples of mathematical software they are likely to apply in their career. They obtain mostly the basic knowledge, so they know only the most common functions and functionality of the applications. After a few weeks they received the experiment’s task as follows (one of the weekly assignments): They should solve a certain mathematical task (and report in detail the process of obtaining the solution). In all the tasks given we foreseen the usage of different tools. Most often the combination of computer algebra system, dynamic geometry system and numerically oriented matrix software was needed. So even when certain tasks could be solved within one software, their their limited familiarity with the software lead them to use multiple softwares. For reporting they mostly used the most common word processing software. We were interested how they will cope with the process of exchanging the mathematical object between programs and how they will report on that where transfer of various mathematical objects has been expet. The subjects were instructed beforehand to report on all difficulties and obstacles. To be able to evaluate what the mathematical systems are able to import, clipboard inspectors are used: On Windows the ClipSpy utility which shows the bytes allocated for each flavour within the clipboard. The application seems to show most of the information accessible by API as documented on [MSCl]. On MacOSX, ClipboardViewer (an example application of the Apple Developer Tools) has been used. It shows, similarly, an association between the “Uniform Type Identifiers” (the name of the clipboard flavour types defined by Apple, see [ApUTI]) and the byte-values. Both the Uniform Type Identifiers (on MacOSX) and the Windows flavour names are a flexible mechanism to encode the type of content-flavours: the strings define, in a kind of cooperative agreement way, which data-type is put in the clipboard. Platform makers define basic types (e.g. basic images and texts) while applications are free to define new formats. In the case of UTI, a mechansim of inheritance is provided. 3 Issues when employing plain text in copy and pasting formulæ The first family of issues that we have met is that default copy mechanisms are rarely universally applicable and are, very commonly, restricted to only copy and paste internally, for which the system clipboard is not used (as copying from the system to itself is much safer). This same default copy function tends to copy a representation that is close to a source format within the text flavours. While this representation may be readable by users, it is not effective to input in most other mathematical systems as the input syntax is specific to each system. Mismatches of syntaxes then need to be manually fixed by the user who has to understand both syntaxes; something that is cognitively demanding when the mathematics thinking also demands cognitive resources. Examples of such incompatibilities include an incomplete LaTeX compatibility of a dynamic geometry system: the user is left to explore bits by bits what works and what does not and, contrary to LaTeX, the documentation for the supported features is far smaller. The second family of issues lies in the apparent compatibility of syntaxes between mathematical systems: While some expressions seem naturally exchangeable, e.g. simple polynomials written with the “∧” as exponent, this compatibility breaks very quickly (e.g. these polynomials might be usable in a JavaScript source but not in a Python source because the exponent there is “**”). Much more delicate is the exchange of formulæ between Mathematica and Geogebra as is displayed in the picture below, produced by one of the experiment subjects: it shows that the Sum operator between the two computer algebra systems does not follow a completely similar syntax even if it shares quite some similarity as is the case for elementary formulæ between these systems. Figure 1: The same expression in Mathematica and GeoGebra... A third issue lies in the need to use dedicated copy functions. It forces the user to navigate through sequential menu choices to decide which format to copy (at worst she needs to use a dedicated command before). Among the particularly invasive ones lies the frequent function “Copy as MathML” which puts the (ge

We present the design of an online environment providing mechanisms for the exploitation of school ICT infrastructure by empowering teachers to discover and comment on educational activities (patterns, scenarios, experience reports) that can be implemented in their schools. To this end, our design approach will make explicit the linking between the patterns, the learning scenarios and other contextual information. The online environment will not only serve as a repository of educational activities but will help schools to analyze their infrastructure, to select proper scenarios that effectively exploit it and, potentially, to enrich these scenarios by commenting on them.

We present the design of an online environment that provides mechanisms for the exploitation of school ICT infrastructure by empowering teachers to discover and comment on educational activities that can be implemented in their schools.

In this chapter, we describe challenges and opportunities that second language learners face in undergraduate mathematics programs. The presence of such students is nowadays common in many undergraduate courses due to migration, student mobility, and other factors. We provide examples of various multilingual contexts at the university level, summarize insights from international research on this topic, and present emergent proposals for helping students to overcome these challenges. This chapter highlights the importance of continuing research on the topic of second language learners in undergraduate mathematics courses so that we can offer research-based approaches to improve undergraduate mathematics teaching in multilingual contexts. This chapter will support the mathematics education research community involved in advanced mathematics, as well as instructors and policy makers, to develop awareness of the issues involved in undergraduate mathematics learning and teaching for second language learners.