WME: Web-based Mathematics Education
What is WME?
WME is a modern distributed system on the Web for mathematics education.
- WME connects mathematics education content by expert groups (in higher education) to K-12 teachers and students.
- WME delivers classroom ready, dynamic, and hands-on lessons and modules to teachers and students.
- WME provides assessment services, teacher guides, education research materials to teachers.
The WME system conforms to open standards, works with regular browsers, delivers integrated and complete lessons, enables easy customization, provides systematic access to client-side and server-side support, and allows these independently developed components to interoperate seamlessly. In short WME seeks to create a Web for Mathematics Education to foster a new paradigm for supporting and delivering mathematics education, and to help mathematics curricula improve exponentially.
Middle School Pilot Project
The pilot project conducts classroom trials of the Web-based Mathematics Education (WME) system to measure the feasibility, practicality, effectiveness, and usability of this approach of delivering mathematics education to the classroom as a supplement for teachers and students. The pilot project aims to lay the groundwork for further WME R&D.
To put the WME framework to trial for conducting actual mathematics education in schools, we are constructing experimental WME sites for a number of middle and elementary schools in Northeast Ohio to test the deployment of the WME technology and to collect valuable feedback from teachers and students.
WME is Different
This diagram illustrates the WME concept.
Compared to existing approaches, WME is different in many ways and can provide several significant advantages.
Generally, a stand-alone applet, virtual manipulative, or server-side program supports a narrow set of topics or operations. They are hard to use by teachers in the classroom. Building lesson pages to incorporate such tools requires non-trivial amounts of time, effort, and programming expertise. Further, these tools are unrelated and do not interoperate to mutually reinforce. WME offers classroom-ready lessons and modules that are complete and interoperable among all WME sites, therefore maximizing convenience and usability.
Topic and lesson resources help teachers retrieve useful teaching information from the Web. But these are not a substitute for complete Web-based curricula, built by experts and conforming to standards, for entire semesters and grade levels. WME can deliver such curricula in lesson pages and modules that teachers can customize, modify, and enhance. With WME, teachers have an easy and effective way to deliver ready-made lessons in a tailored form to their classes.
WME is not a general e-learning infrastructure. It focuses on mathematics education and integrates lessons, manipulatives, assessment tools, and teacher-student interaction for effective teaching and learning of mathematics. WME can be used independently or within a general e-education infrastructure.
Top-ten Advantages of WME
- Classroom readiness and accessibility
- Adaptable and customizable
- Teacher support, convenience, and control
- Open, portable and interoperable
- Integrated, dynamic, and interactive
- Instant assessment and feedback
- Concepts not steps
- Sharing of expertise and educational methods
- Aiding parents and at-home students
- Hands-on and self-paced
To see WME in action, visit our school sites. For a more detailed introduction, please refer to this overview in PDF.
Feedback
Your comments, questions, and suggestions are most welcome. Please contact us by email: wme@cs.kent.edu.
Acknowledgements
This project has been supported in part by the Ohio Board of Regents (OBR) and by the National Science Foundation under Grant CCR-0201772