The Details
Linköping University Upgraded Their Preparatory Engineering Course with Möbius
Initially, Linköping University used a generalized engineering preparatory course that was developed by a collection of universities across Scandinavia, but Professors Malý and Svensson both felt they needed a more tailored solution that better targeted the needs of their students and curricula.
“We talked to [Chalmers University, who is a current Möbius customer] to get their feedback, and we looked at a few other options but we found that Möbius was the solution that could do what we wanted. It was more advanced. We can do things with Möbius for our courses on-campus as well.” -Professor Olof Svensson, Associate Professor, Linköping University, Engineering
The Linköping University Engineering department adopted Möbius in 2017 as their go-to tool for delivering their customized Engineering Preparatory Course, consisting of both exploratory lessons and formative assessments. The course content is fully online and authored in Swedish, and is routinely reviewed and edited, with new material always being added.
This course is offered over the summer as an optional opportunity for entry-level engineering students to complete for credit to ensure they’re aligned with the upcoming requirements of their Engineering program come the fall. Students appreciate this asynchronous, remote-first delivery method because they aren’t usually on campus during the summer anyways. However, if they did require some additional support while taking this preparatory course, they have unlimited access via email and Zoom to instructors and other math professionals in the university’s network.
“Students very often feel quite positively that they have this opportunity in Möbius to get some extra training in mathematics and to have some extra hands-on experience with doing mathematics.” -Professor Lukás Malý, Associate Professor, Linköping University, Engineering
While this course is designed for Engineering students, it’s also optionally taken by anyone in Sweden, such as students who are current university students from different programs and institutions, graduates, students who are studying to be teachers—really anyone who wants to brush up their math skills.
Professors Malý and Svensson both acknowledge the positive correlation between the students who participate in the preparatory course and a higher success rate in their Engineering program.
Linköping’s Engineering Program and Möbius
Professors Malý and Svensson also deliver the core of their Engineering program on-campus and offer Möbius material as supplementary material that students can use to secure their understanding in topics like single variable calculus, linear algebra, and statistics and probability.
“The students, when they come [to Linköping University for engineering], they are 17 or 18 years old and some of them are a little afraid of mathematics, so the combination of Möbius and in-person instruction definitely helps with their confidence.” -Professor Lukás Malý, Associate Professor, Linköping University, Engineering
This supplementary Möbius material is practice assignments and additional lesson material that contains interactive and engaging graphical elements to make sophisticated math and engineering concepts more approachable, and they’re portrayed in different ways to accommodate different learning styles.
“When it comes to single variable calculus and series and integrals with respect to one variable over infinite intervals, this is a topic that usually scares our students. They avoided it as much as possible, so we created some material to support these concepts—both lessons and assessments—and that fear doesn’t happen anymore. The students are actually comfortable working with series and integrals over unbound intervals, and I see their improvement.” -Professor Lukás Malý, Associate Professor, Linköping University, Engineering
The professors are always building on the content they’ve created, and they really see the time-savings of Möbius when making these improvements over time while delivering their courses. Professors Malý and Svensson can build their material and then deliver that material to their students year after year while having the ability to easily tweak and revise the content as needed to ensure it’s up-to-date and relevant to their teaching goals.
What’s Next for Linköping’s Engineering Program
With the professors of Linköping’s Engineering Department continuously enhancing their supplementary Möbius content with updates and new material, they have big plans for implementing Möbius as a more vital component to their assessment methods:
“We have been using Möbius also for assessments where the students were actually on campus, they brought their own devices, and completed the exam on the premises. So that’s also something that we have tried out. So we’ve done assessments when the students are off campus, and recently, we have been working also with Möbius assessments on campus.” -Professor Lukás Malý, Associate Professor, Linköping University, Engineering