Keynote Address: From 5 to 50 to Free

Different learning styles. Individualized support in large classes. The need for better student preparation before university and remedial support while at university. The desire for enrichment material. Study opportunities while offcampus. Outreach.

All of these were prominent factors in 2010 when the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo began a large, informal experiment in online education in mathematics. The result of some of that work is now available at http://courseware.cemc.uwaterloo.ca. This marks the beginning of the release of free and publicly available courseware which embeds narrated exposition, self-assessment with immediate and automated evaluation, experiments with STEM objects, exercises and enrichment opportunities. Over the next two years, courseware in linear algebra, probability and statistics, computer science and optimization will be available.

Maple T.A. underlies both the deployment and the self-assessment opportunities. The presentation will describe the successes and the lessons learned. It will also preview the Möbius Project, a new technology developed in collaboration with Maplesoft that, we hope, makes authoring and sharing STEM courseware dramatically easier.