Christian Lawson-Perfect

We’ve decided to start running weekly “open office” hours each Thursday. You can make an appointment to talk with the lead developer of Numbas, Christian Lawson-Perfect, about anything to do with Numbas.

Meetings will normally take place over Zoom, unless you specify a different method.

You could get help writing questions, integrating Numbas with your VLE, or have a more wide-ranging chat about using Numbas.

To make an appointment, use the booking form.

This week marks ten years since we first released Numbas as open-source software.

Here’s what it looked like back then:

Development on Numbas began in September 2009, and once it was ready to use I made it a priority to make sure it was released under an open-source licence so it wouldn’t languish in obscurity at Newcastle.

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.

Time got the better of me again, so here’s a big development update covering December, January, and some of February.

We’re planning on running some more Numbas training sessions.

The first session, aimed at beginners, is scheduled for 14:00 BST on Tuesday 2nd February. It’ll run over Zoom and last about two hours. No previous knowledge of Numbas will be assumed.

The second session, aimed at more advanced users of Numbas, is scheduled for 10:00 BST on Thursday 4th February. Again, it’ll run over Zoom and last about two hours. Christian will demonstrate a few things, then there’ll be time to work through question-authoring problems from attendees.

If you can’t attend these sessions, you might like to watch the recordings of the previous sessions.

Register for a training session:

• The introductory training session on 2021-02-02.
• The advanced training session on 2021-02-04.

Both these sessions will be recorded. If you’d like to attend but would prefer not to appear in the recording, please let us know by email.

If you’re looking to start using Numbas in a hurry because of the CoViD-19 crisis, have a look at our blog post about how Numbas can help.

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.

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!)

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.

The E-Learning Unit in the School of Mathematics, Statistics & Physics at Newcastle University has received the Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE). These awards recognise collaborative work that has had a demonstrable impact on teaching and learning, highlights the key role of teamwork in higher education.  

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.