It is the UK MSOR community's bid addressing the Open Educational Resources (OER) call from HEFCE/JISC. This project takes place in the pilot phase to encourage and enable the open sharing of educational resources. The FETLAR project addresses the challenge associated with students’ mathematical skills and competencies on transition into higher education and the need to raise the retention rate of first-year students on science and engineering courses.

FETLAR aims to make a wide range of existing on-line learning and teaching materials freely available to staff and students. This will have a positive benefit for student's experiences and course outcomes. Fundamental to this is an assessment system to provide formative assessments linked to learning resources and summative assessments linked to learning outcomes. These links will exist as metadata stored within the assessment resources; metadata within the learning resources ensure smooth learning paths for students, especially those using the materials for self study. A key objective is the assembly, from existing on-line assessment systems, of a substantial body of QTI-compliant assessment material. The recently-completed (March 2009) JISC-supported MathAssess demonstrator, can be used to deliver these in a variety of modes and circumstances. The importance of the QTI standard is the reassurance it gives that conforming material can be used on a wide variety of platforms and that changing technology will not cause materials in the QTI format to become obsolete.