Articles

How Numbas can help during the COVID-19 crisis

Now that face-to-face teaching in many institutions has been cancelled in response to the coronavirus crisis, many lecturers are looking for ways to move their teaching and assessment online. 

We’ve put this page together as a reference to describe how Numbas could be used to help your students and to replace paper-based assessments. 

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Why we invented Numbas

Bill Foster was director of the e-learning unit at Newcastle University until his retirement in 2016. In this post he tells the story of how Numbas came to be developed under his guidance.

Numbas is the latest in a long line of assessments systems: it is the spiritual successor at Newcastle to the i-assess assessment system which itself was based on the CALM system developed in the late 1980s.

In the following I will cover the implementation of CALM at Brunel University (1991/2), and at Newcastle University the implementation of i-assess (2006) followed by the development and implementation of Numbas (2012).  Read the rest