STEM Education

Möbius vs. STACK: Why “Free” Falls Short in Math & Science Education

Jonny Zivku
Jonny Zivku
Director, Product Marketing

STACK alternative

STEM courses demand powerful and sophisticated digital tools to ensure students achieve the best-quality course materials possible, while having the best opportunities for learning. While investigating possible solutions, a free solution sounds appealing. 

STACK is one of these solutions. Berthed out of the University of Edinburgh, STACK allows educators to create complex, automatically graded questions for mathematics. STACK also has no cost to access and develop materials, making it attractive to many potential adopters. However, many will find after adopting the solution, the downfall of choosing a free option, is an out-of-touch user experience, nobody to email or call if you get stuck, and a complex programming language required to create any question.

Möbius is determined to allow any educator, regardless of technical ability, to deliver the most engaging STEM materials possible to students. With a modern approach to development, a high-growth company with support, experience, and client management staff to converse with, and a point-and-click authoring experience, creating and delivering expert-level STEM content has never been more readily available than today.

5 reasons why Möbius is the superior solution to STACK:

1. Ease of Use

STACK has a steep learning curve for all users. Students themselves need to use the correct syntax for entering in their responses to questions. Any misstep causes errors in the grading process. Furthermore, creating questions in STACK requires understanding of its difficult syntax and logic. On top of an outdated visual interface and required programming knowledge, don’t expect to jump into STACK and be able to produce your content quickly.

Möbius allows instructors to author content without coding. With a point-and-click user experience, you have full access to all the computational power of Möbius without needing any programming knowledge. On top of that, Möbius has a modern approach to its interface, import and conversion tools to bring in your existing content, and a comprehensive equation editor that allows you to create powerful visuals in seconds.

2. Moodle Dependency

STACK has been long assumed to be a plugin for Moodle. If you use another Learning Management System (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), having STACK integrate is a big hassle. With a still-required Moodle site, limited LTI support, and complex IT requirements, it’s extremely difficult integrating STACK into any non-Moodle environment. 

Fortunately, Möbius is LTI 1.3 certified. It plugs in seamlessly into any LMS or VLE with ease. With single sign-on support, grade syncing, deep linking, and more – Möbius supercharges your existing LMS or VLE to truly support any STEM course you offer.

3. Maintenance and Support

With community-driven solutions, you often have a very friendly space to ask questions and understand other community members’ use-cases. However, you also lack dedicated support staff, training and onboarding resources, as well as a customer success team to advocate on your behalf. Third-party companies have capitalized on this problem and will charge you a premium to train your team and maintain what you thought was an open solution. STACK falls into this category – an open-source solution without built-in backing teams to support you.

Möbius has a full team to support, educate, and champion you and your students. With Möbius, you have dedicated technical support members, a variety of resources for training, onboarding and continued assistance, and a personal customer success manager who advocates on your behalf to ensure you succeed in delivering the best STEM course possible.

Hosting by Möbius is also a key pillar of its success. Möbius runs in a reliable, standards-compliant, cloud-hosted environment with 24/7 infrastructure support and monitoring. It offers 99.9% uptime to ensure it’s always available when needed and delivers consistently strong performance.

4. Feedback 

Feedback is key in the Active Learning experience and is what students need to succeed in mastering complex STEM subjects. Having to spend hours programming the feedback for a single question is simply not feasible for any educator. STACK is not intelligent in this regard.

Fortunately, Möbius offers readily available tools to author stepwise solutions through adaptive questions, which include partial credit for students who didn’t quite get the correct answer, and guided feedback. Additionally, you can also provide hints for students – short prompts that provide insight into getting your students on the right path toward the solution.

A Holistic Solution

In today’s digital climate; simply having a single component in your adopted solution lacks the holistic approach to delivering your course materials online. Students are digital learners. Having bits and pieces scattered throughout their digital landscape makes for a messy and difficult approach. STACK offers questions that can be automatically graded. But, what about the entire assessment, lesson materials, or interactive components that STEM courses deserve?

Möbius is the complete package. It allows you to create and deliver the most sophisticated and interactive STEM course materials to your students. There’s no need to maintain multiple platforms, maintenance schedules, or different user interfaces. 

Discover for yourself why Möbius outpaces STACK in regards to your digital course materials for your STEM course.

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