Online Mathematics Education Outreach: Designing for Global, Open Access

摘要

In support of the mission to ‘increase interest, enjoyment, confidence, and ability in mathematics and computer science among learners and educators in Canada and internationally’, the University of Waterloo’s Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing (CEMC), working in collaboration with local education technology provider DigitalEd, made its mathematics content globally accessible to serve as an online complement to mathematics educators, in addition to providing a source of online resources for independent study and upskilling of non-registered learnersIn September 2019, the full library of resources was launched and promoted globally, grouped into courses based on the topics covered in the Canadian curriculum for grades 7 to 12, along with special topics in financial literacy. As of April 2020, the resources had been accessed by over 250,000 users across 213 countries, with over 1.7M exercises attempted. Peak usage saw over 300,000 pageviews in a day, reaching over 40,000 unique users across 86 countries, with over 99.9% uptime, utilizing dynamically scaled cloud instances to handle unexpected loads. Continuous system monitoring was employed as a supplement to automated alerts and reliability engineering tools in order to maintain system performance and uptimeThis paper provides an overview of the considerations and principles followed in the planning and design of mathematics learning resources, structured as year-long courses in secondary school mathematics, and provides a summary of the requirements for the infrastructure put in place to enable continuous, scalable, global open access. It concludes with an overview of recommendations for localization as a means to increase adoption in regions where English is not the primary educational language.