View as Slides Download as PDF

Numbas Update

Chris Graham - Digital Assessment Group

School of Mathematics, Statistics & Physics Digital Learning Unit

In this update

I'm focussing on Numbas for exams / summative assessment

I'm not covering the core of what Numbas can do, only updates on how we're using Numbas at Newcastle. See numbas.org.uk for full details and a demo.

Numbas was used for 50,000 assessment attempts (formative + summative) across 45 modules in semester 1.

The New Numbas application integrates closely with Canvas to launch automatically if installed (like Zoom).

We strongly recommend using this for summative assessment.

Last year we used Inspera to launch Numbas assessments: complicated, unfamiliar to students and with too many login steps before the exam start.

In semester 1, we moved to Safe Exam Browser, which is a much slicker start to exams.

We have tested and run exams using whitelisting in semester 1: SPSS and OneNote used so far.

One use case is that Numbas can generate files to work with in e.g. SPSS, R, MATLAB, Python and mark student's subsequent answers.

For maths and other subject, assessing handwritten mathematics is important and a barrier for digital assessments.

Hybrid formats offer a solution to focus marking time where it is needed.

In Maths, Stats & Physics, we're also using hybrid formats, with parts of questions where students upload their work to Canvas for manual marking.

Programming is a good example, allowing auto-marking of code, but e.g. plots marked manually.

For semester 2:

More guidance for colleagues preparing Numbas exams, in terms of settings to use and backup papers.

Challenges:

Safe Exam Browser will require ongoing support to run Numbas exams, if Inspera exams move to IEP.
Instructions for hybrid need to be clear.