The course aims to equip students with timely, targeted feedback on their mathematics readiness, ensuring a solid mathematical foundation for tertiary education, while offering teachers valuable insights to optimize instructional support.
The Bridging Course, developed by our team, is a fully online transition program developed at the University of Twente to address the gap between secondary and tertiary education. Aimed at incoming university students and their instructors, it reinforces key secondary-level math concepts relevant to first-year calculus, excluding topics like limits, continuity, derivatives, and integration, as these are thoroughly addressed at university.
The course is structured by the team, including mathematicians, mathematics instructors, and engineers all with teaching certification. The key topics are subdivided into subtopics, each with its own learning objective. Each learning objective follows a cycle of a pre-question, a video explanation a video explanation carefully created or selected by the team, and a post-question. These closed-answer questions (e.g., multiple-choice, drag-and-drop) are carefully designed to address common misconceptions and typical student errors from literature and teachers’ experience; the pre- and post-questions are not identical but equivalent. The modular setup supports personal learning paths and aligns with future-proof education.
Personalized, real-time feedback is provided through a star-based system that reflects student performance per learning objective. Additionally, instructors receive classroom-wide analytics via heatmap visualizations, enabling efficient identification of collective learning challenges. While delivered fully online, classroom sessions are also provided to emphasize course importance and support student engagement.
