Student and tutor module reviews

This was a very useful, interesting and challenging module that completed my Graduate Diploma in Mathematics Education. The earlier modules were useful preparation.

It provided knowledge of teaching strategies, insight into how people learn, the use of ICT and interesting tasks which increased my subject knowledge. The book is well-written.

The book contains a lot of tasks and asks you to be selective. I did almost all of them so I did a lot more than the stated 12 hours per week. This improved my knowledge of teaching algebra and gave me a bank of tasks to try out with my learners.

The main idea behind this module is to use tasks that require expressing generality in order to solve problems and how ICT helps this process. This is much better than teaching abstract algebraic techniques which learners find pointless and boring.

Tutor support is good and the forums were lively. Discussion of ideas is welcome, but giving mathematical answers to tasks is not, as they are required for assignments.

Enough guidance is given to do very well in the assignments. They are still difficult, because you need to draw together a lot of ideas and synthesise them in a limited word count.

I would recommend the course if you teach, or plan to.

Savo Balac

Course starting: April 2012

Review posted: December 2012

Loved the course!!! It helped so much with the new initiative of rich tasks in the classroom and has provided me with lots of resources whereby learners have to use mathematical processes.

Jacqueline Fordham

Course starting: April 2008

Review posted: November 2009

The stratagies that I learned from the course opened my mind to how dynamic mathematical learning can be. I did find the structure to be a bit repetitive in that in tackled the different constructs in the same manner, but that aside, a great eye opener. The work load was fine - I studied 60 points together (ME625 & 626).

Richard Jordan

Course starting: April 2008

Review posted: October 2009