Christina says: I list my work on the wiki under either "Relevant Experience" or "Other Educational Experience" (depending on the context), with a little blurb that reads something like:
Mathematics Wiki Manager
Co-managing an online, open educational resource wiki aimed at first-year students in math courses at the University of British Columbia.
Developing resource architecture, appearance, and documentation to improve usability.
Designing surveys and coordinating a study to measure resource effectiveness.
Successfully authored a grant application for evaluation and development funding.
Carmen says: Though I've never used my CV - I have listed this under professional service. My CV is available on my webpage for those interested to see it.
Bernhard says: I list MER under "Side Projects" and mention the skills MediaWiki, JavaScript, CSS, and my tasks as Founding member, Head of organizing committee, Project manager, Web developer. My short summary is
Reaches >80% of the several thousand first year UBC students that take math courses.
Over a million pageviews and students cummulatively spent 4.5 years on the resource in the first 2 years after inception.
Crashed the UBC server during the April 2014 exam period because too many users tried to access the MER webpage.
Other ideas for citation may be the number of solutions you've written (if you know!) or other ways you've contributed to the wiki. Please add ideas/what you currently use!
History of the MER wiki
Jan - Aug 2015 (Winter Term 2, 2014-2015 school year, summer 2015)
On 2014-09-25 we put a more modern design on our front page. Mainly developed by Christina Koch. Later Will Thompson gave the layout further refining touches.
Isabell Graf refined the Python Script and developed an algorithm to extract only the final answer from the full solution. This feature was requested by several of the FL-TLEF interviewees. The resulting pdfs are available for download here, and were downloaded more than 8500 times during the exam period!
Several waves of email to undergraduates were sent to advertise for MER and to recruit students to take our online survey and be interviewed. Thanks to Jiao Ji, Warren Code and the Math Secretaries.
Building on previous work, Bernhard Konrad started to organize the tags into a natural hierarchy.
Sadly, Christina Koch is leaving the MER committee for her new job in the US. Good luck Christina, and thank you for your tremendous work and commitment to pushing this project forward!
We successfully interview several candidates for the MER FL-TLEF RA research position and decide to hire Jiao Ji! Congratulations and let the studies begin! We are very proud of our first employee.
No more guessing on which topics you need to master: Course pages now display all the topics of the questions in that course. This idea was brought up by Carmen Bruni and implemented using dpl and JavaScript by Bernhard Konrad.
The new version of the Android App automatically recognizes newly solved questions and exams by connecting with an online SQL database, implemented by Bernhard Konrad and Isabell Graf.
Will Thompson made the results of our April 2014 Satisfaction Evaluation available.
To help students prepare for their midterm exams, the syllabus for Math101, Math103, Math105, and Math110 were added. Each syllabus includes links to the category pages of the given topics. Thanks to Carmen Bruni, Bernhard Konrad, Iain Moyles, Christina Koch and Pam Sargent.
Will Thompson and David M. Thompson made a great banner to celebrate our 2 year anniversary on Feb 20th 2014 Celebrating two years of MER.
Using the Variables extension, Bernhard Konrad refined some of the architecture so that general information about courses, exams, and layout, can be stored in one place only. With Carmen Bruni this was used to great effect on the course pages, with Will Thompson this was exploited to make changing the colour scheme easier and more convenient.
An additional feedback option using google forms was included by Christina Koch to inspire more feedback. Will Thompson created a suitable home for the form at the bottom of each solution box.
Will Thompson moved the rating bar out of the navigation bar to a better home at the bottom of the question page.
After a redesign of the navigation bar the question pages have a more modern and slick look. They also display the Easiness of each question. Thank you Bernhard Konrad. Will Thompson further refined the design.
Apparently, voting on the easiness of a question is very popular among Math 103 students. This Math 103 question is the first question to receive more than 10 easiness votes.
A slick Google analytics script records the time that students spend on a question page before opening the solution box. We hope to use this insight to better understand how our resource is used. Thanks to Iain Moyles and Bernhard Konrad for this idea and its technical implementation.
Our FL-TLEF grant application is successful! With these funds from flexible learning we will hire a RA to study the effectiveness of our resource!
On Wednesday 24th 2014, the day before the Math 103, 105, and 110 exams, MER creates so much traffic that the UBC wiki server crashes. This is the first time since the inception of the UBC wiki that it crashed due to overuse. After an hour of hectic email exchanges with system admins, as well as forum posts, emails, and phone calls from panicking students, the service is finally restored when UBC adds additional cores to its wiki servers.
Students used the rating bar feature almost 3000 times to rate the easiness of previous exam questions.
During the exam period, our team answered 75 typo or question reports on existing solutions. Several typos were removed and solutions were clarified. Thank you to Bernhard Konrad, Iain Moyles, Carmen Bruni, and Christina Koch for responding so quickly.
The private tutor matching brought together several students and private tutors (not necessarily MER contributors). This new feature was brought up and realized by Bernhard Konrad and Iain Moyles.
In the Solution writing contest students were invited to contribute their own solutions to the wiki. We received 22 good submissions which were reviewed and are now fully integrated in the MER. Three lucky winners were drawn at random to receive $20 UBC food gift cards. Sponsored and initiated by Iain Moyles.
Anne Lim (Right)
Nghi Huynh (Middle)
Toan Le (Right)
The following 7 exams were completed
MATH101 - April 2013
MATH103 - April 2013
MATH105 - April 2013
MATH110 - April 2013
MATH152 - April 2012 & April 2013
MATH215 - December 2013
Sep - Dec 2013 (Winter Term 1, 2013-2014 school year)
Math 110 pilot student project: Instructor Tom Wong agreed to make his final exam review session for MATH 110, section 1, into a "solution-writing" session. We posted hints, but refrained from posting solutions to last year's Math 110 December exam on the wiki. Students (in groups) were then given 3-4 problems from the Math 110 December 2012 exam and asked to write full and complete solutions. These solutions later served as reference for the solutions that were put on the wiki. Thanks to Thomas Wong and Christina Koch.
The tagging system was revisited. Several new tags were added, many questions were tagged, additional content and videos were added to some tag main pages. Thanks to Carmen Bruni and Bernhard Konrad.
Various advertisement emails and posters were sent to instructors and undergrads and distributed in the MLC.
The exam progress counter was redone to more accurately reflect how much work is already completed. Thanks to Carmen Bruni, Iain Moyles and Bernhard Konrad.
We created a github account for any non-wiki code.
The following 7 exams were completed
MATH100 - December 2010 & December 2012
MATH102 - December 2012
MATH104 - December 2012
MATH110 - December 2012
MATH215 - December 2011
MATH221 - April 2013
Summer 2013
Discussions with CTLT wiki staff as to new possibilities
Formation of a leadership/governing committee
Jan - Apr 2013 (Winter Term 2, 2012-2013 school year)
The following 6 exams were completed
MATH101 - April 2012
MATH103 - April 2012
MATH105 - April 2012
MATH110 - April 2011 & April 2012
MATH152 - April 2010
Sep - Dec 2012 (Winter Term 1, 2012-2013 school year)
The following 9 exams were completed
MATH100 - December 2011
MATH102 - December 2011
MATH104 - December 2010 & December 2011
MATH110 - December 2010 & December 2011
MATH220 - December 2011
MATH221 - December 2011
MATH257 - December 2011
Jan-Apr 2012 (Winter Term 2, 2011-2012 school year)
Wiki created.
Dynamic Page Lists (dpl) are heavily used to organize content and for peer-review quality control.
Content focuses on Term 2 courses: MATH 101, 103, 105.
Within a few weeks the main page gets almost 10000 clicks, 1500 of which are in the 12 hours before big final exam (one click every 30 seconds). Top x refers to Special:PopularPages.
To be listed as a participant, simply add your userpage to the category MER Participant by adding [[Category:MER Participant]] at the end of your userpage.
