IMPROVING MOODLE WITH WIRIS AND M-QIT ´ Angel Mora, Enrique M´ erida and Domingo L ´ opez E.T.S.I. Inform´ atica, M´ alaga University, Spain Keywords: Blended Learning, Moodle, Mathematics, Quizzes, Web-tools. Abstract: Moodle is one of the most extended LMS. Moodle allows the collaborative learning where students and teach- ers collaborate on the daily work. But problems with Moodle arise in our scientific context. Although Moodle can preview LaTeX code, not all the possibilities of LaTeX are available and it is very good for scientific teachers but hard for students, so, the mathematical formulas are usually replaced by non-standard versions of them written in ASCII. Another problem with Moodle is the difficulty of reusing quizzes. We present two tools that improve Moodle in three aspects: representation of math formulas, mathematical computation, and improving the learning units for the students. WIRIS is a powerful editor and allows interacting by using mathematic formulas in an easy way and developing new learning units with mathematical computation via web; M-QIT is a new tool able to manage and reutilize quizzes and questions available in previous courses in Moodle. 1 OUR CONTEXT: MOODLE In order to establish a meeting point for the students of the subject Numerical Methods of the Engineer- ing Computer Science School in the University of M´ alaga, we developed MetNum (Mora, 2006) in the 2003-2004 academic year by using the former plat- form, existent in our University. The basic tools we worked with in MetNum were distribution lists and forums, as a means to encourage and guide students daily work. In 2004-05 the Uni- versity of M´ alaga choosed Moodle as LMS (Learning Management System), so MetNum was changed to Moodle (Dougiamas and Taylor, 2003) and the new tools provided by this platform have been exhaus- tively applied. See (Huertas, 2008) for similar experi- encies. Moodle (Brandl, 2005) is a free worldwide used LMS (http://moodle.org), so, since the first version of Moodle, born in August of 2002, until July of 2008, there existed more than 21 millions of regis- tered users, spread over 46000 places and it is trans- lated to more than 75 languages. Some interesting characteristics are available: it allows managing the identification of students and ob- serving their work, forums, quizzes, questions, glos- saries, lessons, etc. We present two tools that improve some problems found with Moodle: representation of math formulas, and improving the learning units for the students. For the first aspect we present how to work with WIRIS and for the second aspect we show M-QIT. 1.1 Representing Mathematical Knowledge Problems with Moodle, in this point, arise when we try to obtain most from it in our mathematical and scientific context and specifically when the teachers and students want to transmit math knowledge. Im- proving the process of learning in our framework (a difficult subject for the students) is essential. Caprotti et al. remark in (Caprotti, 2008) “math- emathical instruction is a recognized key asset in our society and embracing technology in mathematics ed- ucation is not only economically advantageous but also promotes better learning and understanding”. In (Cohen, 2008), Cohen et al. discuss their efforts to bring mathematics to the Web. For this purpose, their group “has developed an ensemble of software tools, MathDox, which is now using within various (international) projects to produce webbased mathe- matical material with the potential of having a high impact in the world of math education”. Also the authors cite several international projects which study how to represent mathematical expres- sions and propose the MathDox player and a set of 75 Mora Á., Mérida E. and López D. (2010). IMPROVING MOODLE WITH WIRIS AND M-QIT. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Software Agents and Internet Computing, pages 75-80 DOI: 10.5220/0002894500750080 Copyright c  SciTePress