Application Note

Authoring ScribeStudio™ Assessments With MathType Equations

ScribeStudio allows an instructor to develop and deploy a complete course in a distance learning environment. This course can be organized into blocks, lessons, and pages. You can upload Word documents or web pages to your course, or can link to existing documents on a different web server. You can also build assessments such as quizzes into your lesson, or add questions onto an instructional page. This AppNote describes how to include MathType equations into your ScribeStudio assessments or review questions.

This article will assume you have basic familiarity with ScribeStudio and MathType, so this will not be a tutorial on how to use these products. You must also be familiar with basic operating system features. Since the ScribeStudio authoring environment must be done on Windows, with Internet Explorer 5.0 or later, we will only consider the Windows version of MathType in this article.

This AppNote addresses these topics:

1. MathML and ScribeStudio
2. A basic method for inserting inline equations into ScribeStudio assessments
3. Using existing web pages and Word documents in ScribeStudio

MathML and ScribeStudio

Although ScribeStudio allows you to use HTML markup in your course documents, it doesn't allow you to add declarations or processing instructions to the head of the page. In order to use MathML in Internet Explorer, you need to declare the MathPlayer CLASSID. Since ScribeStudio doesn't allow you to do this, you can't use MathML in your ScribeStudio course documents. Your options are to create GIFs for your equations or link to a separate web page that's located on a different server.

Inserting equations into ScribeStudio assessments

Since we will be saving our equations as GIFs, and since ScribeStudio doesn't provide space to save images separately from the document they're in, this creates a dilemma. This means that we will need a location outside the ScribeStudio environment where we can save our equation images. This discussion assumes you already have a place to save the images.

To insert an equation:

1. If you haven't created a scorable page yet, create one up to the point where you're ready to add a question with an equation. Our sample quiz already has 2 questions in it:
   
2. Since ScribeStudio allows HTML tags inside questions and question responses, sometimes it's better to use these tags rather than create an image. For example, in question 1 above, response b) uses only these tags, and does not use an image. To create this response, this is what we entered in the Option 2 block:
   
   (For the superscript 2, hold down the Alt key and press 0178 on the numeric keypad.)
3. Click the Add Questions button. You have 16 different types of questions to choose from, but we'll be using only the Multiple Choice/True False and Multiple Choice/Drop Down List question types. For this example we'll use Drop Down List, so click Create next to that question type.
4. For the question, type Solve the equation.
5. Create this equation in MathType: –3x² + 1 = 7. Before you save it, go to the Preferences menu and select Web and GIF Preferences.
6. We recommend for now keeping the Bitmap resolution at 96 dpi, Color at its default setting, and Smooth edges (anti-aliasing) and Transparent unchecked. (See the MathType User Manual for further discussion on these settings.)
7. The section of this dialog that is most important to us at this point is the bottom section. Click the checkbox next to Copy HTML/text to clipboard on GIF file save.
8. You will be saving your equations to a separate server. (i.e., a company besides ScribeStudio that provides web hosting. You will need to arrange for this on your own; ScribeStudio does not provide a place to host your equation images or other graphics.) For the purposes of this article, we'll assume the path to your equations is http://www.myserver.com/equations. With that in mind, change the Text to copy: to read thus (changed item in red):

   <img src="http://www.myserver.com/equations/
   $(URLFileName)" height="$(Height_PX)"
   width="$(Width_PX)" align="absmiddle">

   Warning: It's important that you maintain the correct path to your equations in the <img> tag, otherwise your equations won't display in your assessment. Be sure to replace http://www.myserver.com/equations/ with the correct URL for the folder containing your equations.
    

9. Your Web and GIF Preferences dialog now looks like this:
   
10. As you recall, back in Step 5 we created this equation in MathType: –3x² + 1 = 7. In the MathType File menu, save your equation, making sure to save it as a GIF. When you save the equation, the block of text in your Text to copy box (above) is on the clipboard, ready to be pasted into your assessment.
11. Switch back to your ScribeStudio question window and paste this into the question after the colon so that your question now reads
    
    Solve the equation –3x² + 1 = 7.
     
12. Create the multiple choice responses and after saving each one of them as a GIF, paste the <img> tag into the Option block as you did for the question in step 11 above.

Using existing web pages and Word documents in ScribeStudio

ScribeStudio allows course authors to paste HTML and Microsoft Word content into a page, but there are a couple of considerations when doing this. First, if you have an existing web page with MathType graphics saved as GIFs, saved on another server, you can copy everything from the source of that page between the <body> and </body> tags, and paste it into a ScribeStudio page. Be aware that when you do this, nothing in the <head> of the web page will transfer, so if you have scripts, styles, or anything else in the header, it won't be included in your ScribeStudio page. You will also have to adjust the path of each of the equation images in the document so ScribeStudio will know where to find them.

Second, if it's a Word document you're pasting, the ScribeStudio environment handles this very well, unless you have equations in your document. If this is the case, the text of the document will appear in your new page after you paste it in, but the equations will not appear at all (not even as a red X). If this is your situation, you may be better off using the Export to MathPage command to convert the Word document to a web page, and saving your new web page on a server outside the ScribeStudio environment. You can then link to this document from ScribeStudio. (The Export to MathPage command is located on Word's MathType toolbar and MathType menu for Word 2000, 2002 (Office XP), and 2003. For Word 2007, the Publish to MathPage command is located in the Publish section of the MathType tab on Word's Ribbon.)

We hope this AppNote has been useful to you. If you would like to see similar Application Notes in the future, or have suggestions for improving this AppNote, please e-mail our Director of Training,
Bob Mathews.