Abstract:

The blackboard is still an important tool to teach mathematics to students. The blackboard as a medium ensures that a teacher maintains a pace that allows students to follow the course material. Furthermore, mathematical drawings are built step by step which is often important as a finalized mathematical drawing can be quite complicated to understand without context. Finally, many teachers use all the available drawing area on a blackboard, which enables students to ask a for clarifications about a previous part.

In that sense, the switch to distance learning poses a challenge to many teachers. Some universities opted to setup a continuous video stream in aulas to keep the benefits of the blackboard. Other professors and teachers transitioned to an online whiteboard combined with presentations. It is clear that all teachers aim for a minimal disruption to the learning environment meaning both students and themselves, and with the constraint that a distance learning system had to be setup with very short notice.

There are however problems that are associated with streaming auditorium that are hard to solve. The first problem is that teachers and professors lose the connection with the online audience. Another consideration is the quality of the video stream is very important to ensure that the blackboard remains readable.

An online whiteboard poses challenges in other domains. Teachers can be unfamiliar with writing with a tablet and the structure of the theory session can become difficult to follow for some students.Combining the online whiteboard with other media such as powerpoint presentations also runs the risk of confusing students further if the teacher switches too often between different applications.

At the bachelor of Digital Arts and Entertainment we decided to invest time into making our own online application for teaching mathematics online. This application was already used in a previous academic year as supporting material. The application included a mathematical renderer which allows the teacher to quickly create slides with mathematical formulas and derivations. Another major component of the application is the rendering of mathematical figures which can be precisely animated and controlled to explain the steps of for example a geometric concept. Finally, this application is also available for students at home with exercises that provide immediate feedback and figures that can be manipulated to improve the understanding of the students.
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The application was further developed this academic year with an integrated whiteboard, table of contents and scientific calculator to enable teaching mathematics online. This development made it possible to stream the mathematics course to students online and minimize the disruption to the teaching environment. A further advantage is that the course contents is now unified in a single application, in the sense that both the presentations, recordings, exercises and course material that are available to students are generated from the application.

An example of the tool in action can be seen in the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBUgU5iln5Q&list=PLXNFA1EysfYlWvOyU1HC357-cpE4sSr5m&index=10

Keywords:

Mathematics, distance learning, interactive, multimedia.