The first Numbas user meeting was a big success: over 50 Numbas users from around the world gathered to share their experiences and work together on plans for the future.
The recordings of the talks are now available to view on the Numbas user meeting Spring 2022 programme page. My intention was to record every session, but I had some technical problems which meant that the training sessions and a couple of the talks weren’t recorded properly. There’s still plenty of good stuff to watch, though!
We’re going to run a mini-conference for Numbas users this April, offering an opportunity to find out what’s new in Numbas and to share what you’re doing with other Numbas users around the world.
The Numbas User Meeting 2022 will bring together the Numbas community of academics and practitioners to exchange ideas and best practice through a week-long schedule of talks and workshops. The meeting will offer the chance to collaborate on shared goals and to contribute to a compendium of case studies on the use of Numbas.
The meeting will run from 25th to 29th April. Throughout the week, live talks will take place at 09:00-10:00 and 15:00-16:00 BST (UTC +1) each day in gather.town, a web-based virtual environment. Recordings of all talks will be available later, along with pre-recorded material and case studies hosted on the Numbas website.
The call for talk proposals is currently open. If you have a use case, research or experience using Numbas that you would like to share, then please consider submitting a talk. The format of talks is flexible; talks can be live or pre-recorded. We are also encouraging speakers to submit the content of the talk in the format of a case study to be published on the Numbas website.
The main aims of the meeting are to:
Share ideas and best practice.
Offer training for beginners and advanced users.
Bring together case studies for a brochure / Numbas website.
Collaborate on documentation – no technical experience necessary.
Develop interest in the new Numbas Open Resource Library.
There’s more information about the meeting, and links to register to attend or propose a talk, on a dedicated page for the meeting. The deadline for talk proposals is March 31st.
Just before Christmas I gave a talk over Zoom to a meeting of the First Year in Maths network, titled “Some adventurous things you can do with Numbas”.
There were a few experienced Numbas users in attendance, so I wanted to show off some things you can do with Numbas that I don’t normally have the chance to talk about in my standard “Introduction to Numbas” talk.
We’re running another of our semi-regular training sessions, aimed at beginners. It’ll run over Zoom and last about two hours. No previous knowledge of Numbas will be assumed. The session will be recorded.
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.
Here are the recordings of our recent training sessions held over Zoom.
First, there was a beginners’ session on the 15th of July, covering the Numbas editing interface, how to deliver exams to students, and writing a first question:
And an advanced session on the 22nd, covering explore mode, custom marking algorithms, and custom part types: