ActiveMath-EU

Objectives of the ActiveMath EU project

Mathematics is integral in many parts of life-long learning. ActiveMath-EU develops essential services, a community, and relations to networks to widely disseminate and exploit results of the highly successful FP6 project LeActiveMath. Since the analysis of LeActiveMath’ exploitation potential by Klett-Verlag has shown that an opensource distribution is a key exploitation measure, the services to be developed by ActiveMath-EU include: user mailing list, uploading facilities, integration into open-source LMS, integration into portals, manual for users, web-site with wiki, etc. Services for installation and documentation will be developed that can be refined by the spin-off e-Tell to serve schools, universities and independent users after the project has concluded

The exploitation analysis determined additional content as a second key exploitation measure. Therefore, content is translated to more languages (Czech, Hungarian, Dutch, French), new types of exercises will be produced and content from another project (Combien, komma) will be integrated.

The European dimension will be strengthened by making ActiveMath available in more languages and for a larger geographical coverage, by disseminating to European networks, and by including representatives of new countries in the user community and in the consortium.The open-source community does not stop at country-boarders anyway. The project will disseminate to and influence decisions of the standardisation bodies IMS-QTI and W3C-maths.

Approach

A number of partners and countries outside the original consortium is involved. The project uses the community channels of several maths education networks for the open-source exploitation as well as on user group forum, workshops, etc. We cooperate with other maths projects (ReMath, WebALT, Matheführerschein, komma, Cambridge Thesaurus, mathe online).

Target groups will be addressed by directly involving high schools, teacher training, several universities, users (external too). Internally, progress will be monitored continuously through qualitative feedback and numerical measures such as number of requests, web site hits, users, links, portals, participants, publications. The dissemination activities of the WHYactivemath sister project will be complementary and help to achieve an even wider European coverage.

Expected results

dissemination and exploitation to a wide audience including teachers, pre-service teachers and higher education, (life-long) learners; essential services for open-source distribution and support for ActiveMath usage; development of general services for and customization of ActiveMath; availability of ActiveMath and related content in many European languages; user community organisation and maintenance; exchange and transfer of good practices with maths networks and projects.