The recent run of the Mathematics Education Centre's MOOC, Getting a Grip on Mathematical Symbolism, recently closed having served 1500 registrants.
This course is aimed at those who aspire to study science or engineering foundation courses at university level. Over a total of seven runs, the MOOC has now served over 36,000 learners. The feedback for the course has been extremely positive, as exemplified by the two following comments from recent students.
"The way this course has been taught is just outstanding. It was easy to understand from the beginning, just some practice with the quizzes and that's it! I'd love to take another Maths course from Loughborough but one after this level so that the challenge increase until I have enough knowledge to get into the Electric and Electronic Engineering course. Also, I wanted to say that I'm very thankful to Loughborough University for giving so much knowledge for free and showing us that Maths is very interesting and fun!"
"I have very much enjoyed the course - although I am still working through week 3 and have not yet taken the course test. I'm probably a slow learner - particularly at maths/numeracy - as the tasks have taken me longer than I expected, so I am very glad that the course materials will remain available beyond the official end of the course. I find I work better if I undertake a section at a time and then have a break, so the pacing and structure of the course suits me well. I was quite anxious about undertaking the course as my numeracy skills were rusty to the point of seizing up altogether. I'm still sometimes not too sure about fractions/percentages but the videos and articles were very well explained so it is easy to remind myself what to do. Thank you Janette and all the staff at Loughborough University for a very helpful and informative course - and thank you for boosting my numeracy confidence quite a bit."
The ongoing success of the course is down to the excellent work done by the Mathematics Education Centre's Professor Tony Croft and Dr Janette Matthews.