University of Waterloo developing Möbius course materials for adoption

Waterloo, Canada; 19 April 2017 Maplesoft™ today announced the public release of Möbius, the online courseware environment that focuses on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. After months of extensive pilot testing at select leading academic institutions around the world, Möbius is now available to all institutions for their online learning needs. Customers will also soon have the option of adopting Möbius-based course materials developed by the University of Waterloo, a leading institution in STEM education.

With Möbius, instructors and educational institutions can provide an online learning experience that keeps students actively engaged with the material and provides them with constant feedback that solidifies their understanding. Throughout the entire lesson, Möbius enables students to explore important concepts using engaging, interactive applications, visualize problems and solutions, and test their understanding by answering questions that are graded instantly.
During its pilot phase, Möbius was used successfully by multiple institutions around the world, for a variety of projects, such as preparing students in advance for their first year mathematics and engineering courses, and for the development of complete online courses. Over one hundred thousand students have already used Möbius, and the experiences of these students and their instructors has fed back into the development process, resulting in this public release.
"Möbius is an online courseware environment where students can learn quickly," says Dr. Tim Jackson, University of Birmingham. "We are happy with the way students are able to discover basic subject concepts and develop a deeper understanding of the material."
"Unlike other online education tools, Möbius supports math content very strongly," says Dr. Kelly Foyle of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. "It allows me to expand on the mathematics topics we cover, and deliver them in a wider variety of question types. This provides the students with a much more interactive and dynamic experience, making it easier and fun to learn new concepts."
Course materials developed by the University of Waterloo will soon be available optionally through the Möbius platform, with a growing range of courses from the late high school level to the graduate level. "The University of Waterloo has always been passionate about STEM education," says Stephen Watt, Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo. "The learn-by-doing approach is crucial to success in STEM courses, and we are delighted to offer Möbius-based course content to our own students, and to see our course materials made available to others."
Möbius also includes a rich authoring environment for creating lessons that include interactive explorations, illuminating visualizations, meaningful assessment questions, and guided Active Slideshows, which incorporate narration, exploration and self-assessment elements. By using Möbius to develop and deliver their online offerings, instructors and institutions remain in control of their content and the learning experience. In addition, Möbius supplies everything needed to deploy content to students, including the collection of outcome data for tracking student success, a Live Chat tool that supports the use of mathematical notation, and integration with course management systems such as Blackboard®, Canvas, Brightspace™, and Moodle™.
"Online education is increasingly viewed as a necessity, but it is difficult to do well in STEM subjects because of the specialized needs of mathematics-based courses. Moreover, for students to succeed in these subjects, they need to actively interact with the concepts they want to master," says Jim Cooper, President and CEO of Maplesoft. "Möbius offers a hands-on learning environment that supports the needs of STEM education and even extends far beyond what can be done in a classroom. As our pilot sites have already discovered, with Möbius, instructors and institutions can bring their online vision to life through the blending of a highly effective technology infrastructure with quality content."
Möbius can display content written in any language. Möbius is available in English, with language packs for a variety of languages include French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese.
To learn more about Möbius and its many features, please view this whitepaper.
About Maplesoft
Maplesoft has provided mathematics-based software solutions to educators and researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields for over 25 years. Maplesofts flagship product, Maple, combines the world's most powerful mathematics engine with an interface that makes it extremely easy to analyze, explore, visualize, and solve mathematical problems. Building on this technology, Maplesoft also provides STEM-focused solutions for online assessment, modeling and simulation, and online courseware, offering modern solutions to meet the particular needs of STEM education and research. Maplesoft products and services are used by more than 8000 educational institutions, research labs, and companies, in over 90 countries.
Maplesoft is a subsidiary of Cybernet Systems Group. For further details, please visit www.maplesoft.com.