Abstract:

Every year the Institute of Accounting and Administration of Oporto – ISCAP receives many students with an insufficient preparation in elementary mathematics.
Having conscience of their handicap’s to the success in the course, we decided to build up and implement a new and ambitious project called MatActiva.
The MatActiva is a Mathematics project, developed on the Moodle platform which main goal is to motivate students, encourage them to overcome theirs difficulties through an auto-study, giving them more confidence and making students keen on Mathematics. We also want to improve the communication between students and teachers, creating an environment of learning consistent with real needs of all the students.
The adequacy of the courses to the Bologna process has created new challenges, such as the management of hours per class, and also the methods and types of activities proposed.
MatActiva helps the students providing a variety of materials which includes theoretical notes, multiple choice tests that can be done online and automatically provides quantitative results and the feedback for each question when the student misses, forum of doubts moderated by the teachers that are responsible for the project, challenges, etc.
As ISCAP receives many students through the ERASMUS program, the MatActiva also includes a range of materials in English language.
We present a brief statistical analysis of a data set from an inquiry that we made to the students to evaluate the impact of the project.

Keywords:

higher education, mathematics, moodle.