Modulus

The Ohio State University's Department of Mathematics has long been a leader in open educational resources, most notably through Ximera — an open-source interactive textbook platform whose acronym stands for "Interactive, Mathematics, Education, Resources, for All." Used widely for mathematics instruction, Ximera presents content and accepts student input through interactive problems, giving learners a richer experience than a static textbook can offer.

When the Ohio State Mathematics Department partnered with Infonomic, the goal was to extend Ximera's reach into the institutional environment — specifically, to give instructors visibility into how students were actually moving through their assignments, and to integrate that information with the university's learning management system.

Challenges Faced by the Mathematics Department

Open educational resources have grown considerably over the last decade, but the tooling around them has not kept pace. Ximera was doing its core job well — presenting interactive content and accepting student input — but instructors had limited means of looking at an assignment after the fact to understand how students engaged with it. Where did learners spend time? Which problems produced repeated attempts? Which sections were skipped entirely?

At the same time, integration with institutional LMS platforms like Canvas required navigating LTI 1.3, gradebook passback, and the practical realities of running infrastructure that institutions could trust. Content authors needed a way to instrument their existing Ximera materials to communicate with a new data layer without rewriting how they authored or assigned work. And any solution had to be careful about student privacy, accessibility, and scope — it could not become yet another sprawling analytics platform competing for instructor attention.

The department needed a focused, well-engineered piece of infrastructure: something that would sit quietly alongside Ximera, capture the signals an instructor would actually want to review, and stay out of everyone's way.

Infonomic's Approach

Infonomic delivered a complete end-to-end solution for what became Modulus — an assignment-grade database purpose-built for Ximera. Our work spanned branding, system architecture, and development, and was guided by a set of principles we developed in close collaboration with the department.

At the core is a structured database that records time-series interaction data and latest page-state snapshots from Ximera assignments. It receives activity through LTI 1.3 and stores it in a form instructors can query, without introducing a separate interface for students to learn or a new workflow for instructors to adopt.

Our scope included:

• LTI 1.3 integration with Canvas LMS, including gradebook passback to Ohio State's institutional LMS, so that student work in Ximera flows into the systems instructors already use.
• Modulus 'agent' development, allowing content authors to instrument existing learning materials for communication with Modulus — preserving the authoring workflow Ximera users are accustomed to.
• System architecture and development designed for minimal-configuration deployment, with the goal of being safe to run as a public instance as well as institution-hosted.
• Branding and identity for the Modulus project as a distinct piece of infrastructure within the broader Ximera ecosystem.
• Accessibility targeting WCAG 2.1 AA standards from the outset.

Throughout, we worked to a clear set of design principles: store as little as possible, abstract student identity through LTI, stay out of the way of existing workflows, and be honest about scope. Modulus is not a learning analytics suite, a grading platform, or a student information system — it is a focused database that captures the signals an instructor would want to look at when revising a course.

Impact and Partnership for Growth

The project is open-source and available on GitHub, with institutions able to run their own instance or use a shared public deployment. By keeping the scope narrow and the integration clean, Modulus extends what Ximera can offer to instructors without competing with it or redirecting the community around it.

For the Ohio State Mathematics Department, the result is a piece of infrastructure that fills a real gap in the open educational resources ecosystem — giving instructors the ability to look back at an assignment and understand how students engaged with it, while preserving the openness, accessibility, and respect for student privacy that define the Ximera project.

The codebase is available now, with documentation and deployment guides in progress. Modulus is early in its lifecycle, and we are continuing to support the project as it grows within the Ximera community.