What’s New in Maple T.A.™ 5.0
Maple T.A.™ 5.0 includes numerous additions and enhancements:
Flexible Question Management Tools Greatly Enhance Content Organization
Maple T.A. 5.0 includes a completely new question management model which provides increased flexibility when organizing questions. This new model also provides greatly improved performance when loading and saving questions, and an extremely simple process for sharing content with colleagues. With improved organization, searching, performance, and question sharing, instructors can assemble assignments more quickly and reuse questions more effectively.
 With Maple T.A. 5.0, instructors can:
- Make individual questions public with the click of a button so they can be shared by all instructors using the system. Public questions can be used by any instructor in any class.
- Create question groups and subgroups to organize related content.
- Tag individual questions as belonging to multiple groups and subgroups.
- Search for questions by group, question type, and information field.
- Search for questions containing specified keywords in the question text.
- Limit searches to private collections of questions or include all public (shared) content on the system in the search.
- View summary information for each question and sort questions based on question type, creation date, and date last modified.
- Quickly load and save individual questions instead of entire question banks.
- Make a copy of a question and modify the copy. Both private and public questions can be copied. In this way, instructors can create modified versions of shared content.
- Access earlier versions of a question, so that if a question is changed after it is used in an assignment, the instructor can go back and look at the assignment’s version. As well, if the instructor wishes to return to an earlier version of a question, he or she can restore it by making a copy of the older question.
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New Interface Simplifies System Administration
A new system administration interface makes it easier to set up and monitor Maple T.A. Starting from this single screen in Maple T.A., system administrators can:
- Adjust settings for email, authentication, Maple, and more without having to edit Apache™ Tomcat™ configuration files or change fields in the underlying database.
- See who is currently logged in and log users off if necessary.
- View reports on usage activity, grouped by hourly, daily, monthly, or yearly time periods.
- Easily collect system log files for advanced troubleshooting.
Expanded Connectivity Supports Blackboard® Vista
With Maple T.A. 5.0, connectivity to Blackboard software has been expanded to include support for Blackboard Vista/CE (formerly WebCT). Using the Blackboard Connector for Maple T.A., which is available as a separate add-on, you can use Maple T.A. directly from within your Blackboard classes.
 Users can easily access Maple T.A. from their Blackboard section.- Authentication and login of users into the Maple T.A. system is automatic when you access Maple T.A. from Blackboard.
- Questions and assignments can be created by accessing Maple T.A. from within Blackboard classes.
- Student results are automatically posted to both the Blackboard and Maple T.A. grade books.
- Instructors can also make further updates to the Blackboard grade book through Maple T.A. For example, an instructor can use Maple T.A. to create a report of the best, most recent, or average grades for the assignment, and then export the results to Blackboard.
- Instructors can choose to keep either the best or the most recent result in the Blackboard grade book when multiple attempts are made.
And More…
Maple T.A. 5.0 includes numerous other enhancements and improvements, including:
- Access to the full computational power of Maple 13, the latest version of Maple.
- A new User Guide for Course Instructors that includes expanded information on algorithmic variables and question creation.
- Improved handling of question groups within the Assignment Editor, allowing instructors to give names to groupings of assignment questions and to ungroup questions chosen for an assignment so that individual questions can be removed.
- The ability to provide students with a direct link to their class home page, eliminating the need to navigate through the system home page.
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