Innovation project for higher education 2001: Towards a competence driven and flexible education for mathematics.

The goal of this project is to tackle in innovative manner current problems when teaching mathematics in human sciences. Often the education in this field has to cope with heterogeneous groups of students with a lack of mathematical background and skills regarding the use of graphs, symbols and concepts. Furthermore one is confronted with a kind of education where traditional learning environments offer insufficient possibilities for differentiation. These traditional environments tend to stimulate a rather receptive or even passive attitude and therefore do not offer an incentive for students to take responsibility for their own learning process.
Another problem is the very nature of the content itself: the degree of abstraction is too high for many students. And last but not least there is the specific situation of working students, where you need an education that requires a right balance between face-to-face and distance education. Therefore one needs optimal support resources.
A flexible, activating and multimedia learning environment can contribute towards finding solutions for these problems.

Using the experience built up in the bridging education, the student monitoring, the innovating projects ILO (Interactive Learning Environments for statistics and mathematics, 1997-1999) en EPO (Electronic Problem driven Education, 1999-2001) and recently the VUB-project 'Interactive knowledge in the portable class' we want to continue improving the quality and attractiveness of our education.

This project tends to realise two main goals: one is an in-depth transformation of the existing approach on the level of the development of both the learning materials and the didactical work forms, the other is to start new initiatives on the level of flexibility and competencies.

Concretely we want to obtain the following goals:
* Further development and in-depth exploration of the electronic learning environment (Weboef) towards other subjects and also towards the second year of university.
* Activation of the students
* Motivation of students to take responsibility for their own learning process (e.g. by self evaluating tests)
* Stimulation of collaborative learning
* Embedding of other didactical work forms
* Development of competence driven learning by means of an integration in other subjects