The Moodle Basic Mathematics Course: an open and flexible teaching-learning tool for the transition to university

The project aims to support students in mathematics during the delicate transition from high school to university, also considering the post-pandemic situation. To deal with students’ cognitive, metacognitive, and socio-cultural difficulties, and considering the institutional needs of our university, we designed the Moodle Basic Mathematics (MBM) course. The MBM course turns out to be a teaching-learning tool shared by different subject areas of our university, allowing customization for the needs of each area. The course aims to strengthen the mathematical knowledge that students should have already acquired at secondary school, presenting it in a form useful for the university setting. The course is organized into thematic sections, providing an organic, longstanding, and self-consistent space containing slides, videos, quizzes, e-books, glossaries, and interactive GeoGebra applets. For engineering students, the MBM course is used in different ways: during the bridging courses, as a support of totally assisted learning; within tutoring activities, as a support of partially assisted learning; by the teachers of the first-year mathematics courses, who indicate the resource to students with difficulties in specific topics, as a support of unassisted learning.