Maple T.A.

What’s New in Maple T.A. 9.0

Easy Content Sharing

• Content sharing between users world-wide is built directly into Maple T.A., so using a publicly shared question is as easy as using one you wrote yourself.
• You can choose to share individual questions, a group of questions, or even a fully organised, multi-layered collection of questions to support a full course. The full organisational hierarchy is preserved so others can navigate and understand your content in the same way you do.
• Any dependencies on local class resources, such as images and Maple repositories, are automatically bundled in so the question works immediately on any system.
• You can search the Maple T.A. Cloud in the same ways you search your own question repository, including searching the text of the shared question, so you can find exactly what you need.
• Thousands of questions are already available, ready to be used.

Expanding on the adaptive question type introduced in Maple T.A. 8, Maple T.A. 9 now offers fully flexible adaptive testing at the assignment level. In adaptive assignments, the selection of the next question in an assignment depends on how the student has done on the previous questions. With adaptive assignments, you can sort students into different streams, provide extra reinforcement only when it is needed, allow more advanced students to truly show what they are capable of without discouraging less advanced students, and more. And with the power of Maple behind it, adaptive testing in Maple T.A. is more flexible than any other system.

• Organise assignment questions into separate branches or difficulty levels. When a student takes an adaptive test, each new question is selected from the appropriate branch, depending on their earlier responses.
• Easily specify common conditions for moving between branches, such as moving to a harder branch after five consecutive correct responses or moving to an easier branch after the third mistake occurs.
• Fully customise the branching conditions using the Maple language. The conditions can be based on variety of factors, such as the number of correct and incorrect responses, the number of correct responses in a row, the start branch, the current branch, branch weight, and the number of branches in the assignment.
• Easily set the stopping conditions for the assignment based on the number of correct responses, incorrect responses, or total number of questions seen by the student, or further customise stopping conditions using an algorithm written in the Maple language.
• View full grading information for both the entire assignment and for each branch.
• Include any type of Maple T.A. question, including adaptive questions and the new Math App questions.
• Use adaptive assignments for practice, graded tests and homework, and proctored tests.

Scalability

Maple T.A.9 is now capable of handling an order of magnitude more students than ever before.

• Distributed load balancing across multiple servers supports services scalable to over 1,000,000 users per installation.
• A single login seamlessly directs a student or instructor to one of multiple back-ends.

Questions and Assignments

With a wide variety of enhancements related to assignments and question types, Maple T.A. 9 provides more customisation options and a streamlined user experience for both instructors and students.

• A significantly enhanced question repository offers more flexible ways to organise content and provides a streamlined experience when searching, organising, and selecting questions.
• See all the details of a question immediately in a single view, including a preview of the question itself.
• Organise questions, question groups, and subjects by dragging-and-dropping.
• Search for questions, groups, subjects, and assignments, and see the results as you type.
• Choose to search the public collection, across your whole institution, across all the classes you teach, or just your current class.
• View question statistics, such as how often a question has been attempted, the student success and failure rates, and the p- and d-values, from inside the repository.
• Categorise questions with subjects for easier organisation.
• Specify difficulty and language for questions.
• Attribute authorship of question to a school and instructor or just the school.
• Set privacy options at the question group level, so you can easily share all subgroups and individual questions with a single setting.


• Hint deductions let you apply a penalty each time a student uses a hint. Instructors can choose whether students see one hint at a time or all hints at once for a given question, control the amount of the deduction for each hint, and see which hints the student has viewed.
• New options for reworking assignments give more flexibility over what the student sees. When a student reworks an assignment, you can specify if you want the correct answers from the previous attempt to be filled in automatically, and for incorrect algorithmic questions, you can give the student the same question or new variation of that question.
• A new equation editor is easier for students and instructors to use and produces better-looking results.
• Expression palettes in the equation editor are now more accessible using new toolbar buttons instead of right-click menus.
• The display of mathematical notation in questions uses MathJax to produce sharper, easier to read expressions that are properly resized on zooming.
• When authoring questions, you can use the equation editor, MathML code, or LaTeX to create the mathematics.
• When editing expressions in MathML or LaTeX, a live preview of the math is displayed as you type.


• Students can now start more than one assignment in a class.
• Assignments can remain hidden from students until eligibility conditions are met.
• Quick Start Guides help instructors and students become comfortable with the system quickly.
• You can now specify the tolerance in a numeric question as a percentage as well as a fixed amount.
• Enhanced multiple choice questions allow you to use algorithmic variables in the "Correct Answer" field for more precise feedback.
• The full-featured question editor is now available to instructors from more browsers, including Safari® and Chrome™.

• New customisable interface options include the ability to display your institution’s name on the login page and your institution’s logo on every page, thus reassuring students that they are in the correct place.
• Maple T.A. is now fully compatible with Java 7 and Apache Tomcat 7.
• Administrators can easily update Maple T.A. system settings without having to restart Apache Tomcat.
• Users can now be permanently deleted from the system.
• Administrators can now easily assign multiple instructors for a single class from within Maple T.A.
• Increased support for course management systems, which includes connectors to Blackboard® and Moodle™, has been expanded to support Moodle 2.3. In addition, the API that allows you to integrate Maple T.A. into any other course management system has been improved.

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