Seb writes, "Citizen Maths is a new CC-BY licensed open online maths course produced in the UK for adults and college students who want to improve their grasp of maths at what in the UK is known as Level 2 (the level that 16 year old school leavers are expected to reach, though many do not)."
The thinking behind Citizen Maths comes from a group of maths-education researchers at the Institute of Education in London. The content being released with the first run of Citizen Maths focuses on one powerful idea in mathematics, that of proportion which sits behind so many aspects of every-day maths, for example sharing out costs, or altering a mixture, comparing amounts, or scaling something up or down.
Citizen Maths includes a series of short instructional videos by two experienced â€œto-cameraâ€ maths teachers, aiming to give learners the feeling that they are in a one-to-one tutorial with a skilled teacher.
The course makes extensive use of applets that offer an on-screen manifestation of the mathematical concepts involved, intended to help learners see the mathematical idea in a concrete way, prior to working in more detail on the computational aspects of the idea.