Sakai LMS is great. It was designed by educators for educators. It’s intended for use within higher education but as educators know, no LMS is perfect. It is designed as an administrative tool within education. But, when the University of Notre Dame set out to provide their STEM students with a robust assessment tool, they discovered a third-party solution that connected seamlessly with Sakai.
“Möbius was the first successful LTI connection with Sakai for Notre Dame and was a very smooth setup.The connection has been flawless.”
Arthur Lim, Professor of Mathematics, Notre Dame University
Another area of concern for Sakai users – as any STEM educator will tell you – is the assessment capabilities that are offered to the discipline. Question types are limited to multiple-choice, true or false, and sorting, which we all know is not a great representation of the student’s knowledge. You may even think it’s currently impossible to ask a student an open-ended math question in a virtual environment. However, with Möbius it’s not.
We know what students today want. They want unlimited, immediate feedback. With pencil and paper tests, this is impossible. With all of this in mind, Notre Dame, an avid Sakai user and community member, decided to adopt Möbius. Dr. Arthur Lim, Professor of Mathematics at Notre Dame University, has been using Möbius for years and in regards to Möbius’ math engine, Dr. Lim said:
“Creativity in writing questions is almost infinite with this kind of computational power incorporated directly.”
Another area of concern for Notre Dame was scalability. With Möbius’ cloud technology, Notre Dame was able to scale their usage of Möbius to their Math, Engineering and Psychology classes equaling over 1,500 students yearly. Möbius gives these professors the opportunity to modify existing content or the ability to write out their own questions and assignments. In discussing question creation, Dr. Lim said “Making the equation within Möbius is only a few seconds compared to many, many hours.”
When Sakai community members consider third party tools for STEM education they must consider that it provides:
- Dynamic feedback
- Robust and algorithmic open-ended math questions
- Flexibility to create their own assignments and modify any existing content
- Autonomy over the content
- Seamless integration with Sakai
- Is affordable and scalable.
In this regard, Möbius checks all the boxes.