Online STEM courseware environment materials now available

With Möbius, instructors and educational institutions can provide an online learning experience that keeps students actively engaged with the material and provides them with constant feedback that solidifies their understanding. 

Throughout the entire lesson, Möbius enables students to explore important concepts using engaging, interactive applications, visualise problems and solutions, and test their understanding by answering questions that are graded instantly.

During its pilot phase, Möbius was used successfully by multiple institutions around the world, for a variety of projects, such as preparing students in advance for their first year mathematics and engineering courses, and for the development of complete online courses. Over one hundred thousand students have already used Möbius, and the experiences of these students and their instructors has fed back into the development process, resulting in this public release.

“Möbius is an online courseware environment where students can learn quickly,” said Dr. Tim Jackson, University of Birmingham. “We are happy with the way students are able to discover basic subject concepts and develop a deeper understanding of the material.”

Dr. Kelly Foyle of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, said: “Unlike other online education tools, Möbius supports math content very strongly. It allows me to expand on the mathematics topics we cover, and deliver them in a wider variety of question types. This provides the students with a much more interactive and dynamic experience, making it easier and fun to learn new concepts.”

Course materials developed by the University of Waterloo will soon be available optionally through the Möbius platform, with a growing range of courses from the late high school level to the graduate level.

“The University of Waterloo has always been passionate about STEM education,” said Stephen Watt, Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo. “The learn-by-doing approach is crucial to success in STEM courses, and we are delighted to offer Möbius-based course content to our own students, and to see our course materials made available to others.”

Möbius also includes a rich authoring environment for creating lessons that include interactive explorations, illuminating visualisations, meaningful assessment questions, and guided Active Slideshows, which incorporate narration, exploration and self-assessment elements. 

“Online education is increasingly viewed as a necessity, but it is difficult to do well in STEM subjects because of the specialised needs of mathematics-based courses. Moreover, for students to succeed in these subjects, they need to actively interact with the concepts they want to master,” commented Jim Cooper, President and CEO of Maplesoft.

He added: “Möbius offers a hands-on learning environment that supports the needs of STEM education and even extends far beyond what can be done in a classroom. As our pilot sites have already discovered, with Möbius, instructors and institutions can bring their online vision to life through the blending of a highly effective technology infrastructure with quality content.”

Möbius can display content written in any language, and is available in English, with language packs for a variety of languages include French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese.