Releases

Numbas v6.0

It’s finally Summer, so it’s time for a new major version of Numbas. This year I’ve been working on diagnostic testing, and other adaptive assessments. There are also some new question-level features, improved accessibility, and some new features in the LTI tool.

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Development update: March 2021

Here’s another update on Numbas development, covering February and March, 2021.

I’ve mainly been spending time on developing new features for Numbas v6 lately, so the published versions have mainly just had bugfixes, but there are a couple of new things.

Notable changes include the ability for students to choose their own colours in the default theme, and some new marking methods for “choose several from a list” and “match choices with answers” parts.

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Development update: November 2020

You might notice this update was published in December: November was a busy month!

The Numbas runtime and editor mainly got bug fixes this month. There’s a big new feature in the LTI provider: the ability to automatically remark a resource after you update the exam package. This has already become invaluable for us, with more lecturers than ever setting Numbas assessments and misconfigured marking becoming more common. The remarking feature should be considered experimental: we’ve used it on a few assessments, but I expect to uncover bugs and limitations as we use it more often.

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Development update: October 2020

I went from paternity leave in September straight into the mêlée of our first entirely online semester. Here’s an update of development work on Numbas during the month of October.

The vast majority of changes are bug fixes, now that so many more people are using Numbas and discovering edge cases. (And I made a couple of mistakes when introducing Numbas v5, sorry!)

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Development update: August 2020

We’re continually working on Numbas, fixing bugs and adding new features. I thought that it would be a good idea to post more regularly about updates to the Numbas software, rather than waiting until each year’s major version release to list everything that’s changed.

I’m going to go into a bit more detail on changes than I normally would in major-release posts, to give an idea of what day-to-day development on Numbas looks like.

I’d like these posts to be monthly, but I’m about to embark on a month of paternity leave, so don’t expect another one until the end of October.

So, here’s what’s changed since Numbas v5.0 was released in June.

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Numbas LTI provider v2.7

We’ve just released a minor new version of the Numbas LTI tool provider.

Changes in this version include:

  • A global dashboard view, showing resources which are active today.
  • An option to only show completed attempts when viewing the statistics for a resource.
  • When the student ends their attempt, they’re shown an encoded receipt which they can use as evidence of their score, even if no receipt email is sent.
  • Bug fixes around time zone handling, sending email receipts on attempt completion, cross-site security and text formatting.

We recommend updating any servers running the LTI provider as soon as possible, by following the upgrade instructions.

The installation instructions for Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Heroku have all been updated.

Numbas v5.0

Montage of screenshots of Numbas v5

It’s time for another major version of Numbas. This release includes a radically new way of presenting questions, as well as a few other helpful new features.

We’ve made a short video to demonstrate the new features:

We’ve also made a demo exam so you can try it out yourself.

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