Why choose Numbas?

Numbas is a freely available e-assessment tool for Mathematics which has been developed at the University of Newcastle. It allows students to input mathematical formulae easily and creates a similar but different question for each student. It gives students instant feedback and also interacts with Learning Management Systems like Blackboard and Moodle. Numbas, being an open source tool, with a global community of users, means that expertise and experience can be shared nationally and internationally. It is actively maintained and easy for students to work with straight away.

Numbas can:

  • supply immediate and quality feedback on students’ work
  • provide hints on how to solve the problem to the students including video
  • guide students to further reading or resources if they are having difficulty
  • present questions in a predetermined order or shuffle questions
  • increase student engagement
  • increase students’ digital literacy, in particular in relation to standard forms of mathematical input
  • allow lecturer to set the number of attempts a student can make on a question and if they lose marks for incorrect attempts
  • be used as a diagnostic tool
  • be used for formative or summative assessment
  • manage lecturer workload and corrections

The potential for feedback on student performance to dynamically influence lecture content and online content can be exploited by the lecturer to tailor the lectures to the needs of students.

Numbas allows the integration of innovative and interactive content including geogebra and video.

Recommendation 2 from the Digital Roadmap states that higher education institutions should be able to work collaboratively. Numbas is an ideal tool to facilitate collaboration as resources are open source and free to use. It is even possible to create collaborative projects where members can work together on creating shared content. Recommendation 3 foresees that institutions will work together on such open educational resources in the future to develop shared repositories of resources.

The Numbas system has a proven track record and a strong reputation. It has been used in CIT and UCC as well as in Newcastle University, University of Leicester, and Kingston University, London among others.