Communities of Practice in Mathematical E-Learning

Abstract

With the globalization in education, bridging cultural differences by making course material more accessible and adaptable to individual user needs becomes an important goal. In this paper we attack this goal for the field of mathematics where knowledge is abstract, highly structured, and extraordinary interlinked. Modern representation formats like our OMDOC format allow us to capture, model, relate, and represent mathematical learning objects and thus make them context-aware and machine-adaptable to the respective learning contexts. But to make mathematical knowledge accessible to learners of diverse cultural backgrounds we also need to model mathematical practice. In this paper, we show that many practices of mathematical communities can already be modeled in OMDOC and outline extensions to support further ones. We have implemented a collection of services that allow applications to interpret and manage OMDOC and its practice representations as well as to adapt OMDOC for users and communities. These services have been integrated into our prototype E-Learning platform panta rhei to demonstrate how systems can improve the accessibility of mathematical E-Learning materials.