The Project

In most European countries there is a high demand for tailored remedial teaching materials for mathematics enabling the transition of students from schools to higher education, in particular engineering students. As a rule, existing content for remedial mathematics is available in a single language only, rarely online and badly accessible. Moreover, it is represented in multiple formats, in various notations, and cannot be tailored to the learners' needs.

Math-Bridge aims at changing this situation to the better and helps to bridge the gap between schools and higher education in Europe. It will provide multi-lingual and multi-cultural semantic access (e.g. search and course generation) to remedial mathematics content which adapts to the requirements of a learner and his/her subject of study. It will bring together content from different European sources and offer it in a unified way. This access will be provided through a sustainable Pan-European learning service for remedial mathematics, which will be built by collecting appropriate learning resources, extending them in terms of structure and multi-linguality and making them useful and easy-to-find. The extended formats of the content will make a wider use of standards and, hence, will make this content re-usable and “transferable” between different learning environments. In order to achieve its goals Math-Bridge will study the (target) competencies required for target subjects of study, adapt existing semantic and multi-lingual search software, tailor assessment tools and methodologies, and adjust the cutting-edge ActiveMath learning environment to the remedy-scenario which includes specific diagnostic means and decisions for the transition from school to higher education. The service will be able to adapt to the level of learner competences and interests.

Moreover, Math-Bridge will enable collaborative authoring of the content on the basis of Creative Commons’ licenses and improve instrumental support to collaborative authoring. This will stimulate collaborative production and assembly of educational content, which, we believe, is a future must. The results will be usable way beyond mathematics.

Kassels and Paderborns role in the project

The Team of Kassel and Paderborner has the role as a pedagogical expert, use the Math-Bridge service, is content-provider, plan and manage the evaluation and is responsible for the content enhancement.

We benefit from our extensive experiences with blended learning bridging courses. We perform these bridging courses since 2004 with more than 900 students a year in Kassel and since 2009 also in Paderborn. We will reuse our developed content about more than 700 pages in this project.

Duration: Mai 2009 - January 2012

Overall project volume: 3,6 Mio Euro

Project Coordination: DFKI: Dr. Erica Melis, Dr. Andrey Girenko