Citizen Maths: free, open mathematical literacy for everyone / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2016/06/06/citizen-maths-free-open-math.html
Citizen Maths is a free open online Level 2 maths course for people who want to improve their grasp of maths. We’ve been developing Citizen Maths over the last two years, with funding from the Ufi Charitable Trust, working with the UCL Institute of Education, and OCR (part of Cambridge Assessment), and with advice from the Google Course Builder team. The overwhelming bulk of Citizen Maths is CC-BY licensed, meaning that others can reuse the content with ease.
We have designed Citizen Maths using the OECD’s PISA 2015 Mathematics Framework, which defines the mathematical literacy assessed in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
We chose the PISA framework partly because of its international reach, and partly because it has been based on the view that a “growing proportion of problems and situations encountered in daily life, including in professional contexts, require some level of understanding of mathematics, mathematical reasoning and mathematical tools, before they can be fully understood and addressed”. We therefore believe that someone who has learned maths through Citizen Maths will have gained economically and socially valuable skills in mathematics.
We have just launched the final two parts of the course. These parts, which cover pattern and measurement, are added to existing parts on proportion, representation and uncertainty.
Each part of the course covers one powerful idea in maths. Each has been designed to take between 5 and 10 hours to complete. Each shows the idea in action in several different contexts. For example, uncertainty involves the following situations:
making decisions - value of insurance, risk comparisons;
judging - the meaning of cancer screening results;
gaming - appreciating odds in roulette, dice, horse-racing;
modelling - the uncertain prediction of the weather.