Concepts of Calculus I and II - A Review

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1 The Online Calculus Initiative at the University of Florida Miklós Bóna Department of Mathematics University of Florida Gainesville FL February 8, 2012

2 The Beginnings The project was started by the provost of the University in February In March, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed by the provost, the University Press of Florida, and the Department of Mathematics at the University of Florida.

3 Goals The goal of the project is to provide an affordable, bare-bones Calculus text for our students that is easy to edit according to their needs. The goal is NOT to turn Calculus into an online course. Calculus, especially Calculus II and Calculus III is simply too difficult for that. We have been teaching Basic College Algebra Online.

4 Funding The provost provided funding for the initial phase, that is, for the writing of the textbook Concepts of Calculus I, by the authors Miklós Bóna and Sergei Shabanov. The Department of Mathematics had a small grant from Lockheed-Martin to improve the mathematical skills of future engineers. A part of that grant was used to fund the addition of more exercises to the test during the summer of 2011.

5 Class Testing The beta-version of the textbook that we just created, Concepts of Calculus I, was class-tested in Fall 2010 by our department chair, Prof. James Keesling. At the same time, the University Press of Florida provided funding for Concept of Calculus II.

6 Going Live In January 2011, all students taking Calculus I at UF used our textbook. The students can freely access the text online, or can by a paper version for a modest amount. They are charged a 15 dollar maintenance and service fee.

7 At the same time, in Spring of 2011, the second volume of the book was written. Additional Exercise were added to Concepts of Calculus I. Concepts of Calculus II was class tested in Fall of 2011, and published by UPF in December of 2011.

8 Concepts of Calculus II was is used by all students at UF taking Calculus II starting January of By this time, the maintenance and service fees generated enough money to fund the third volume of the project. The third volume is almost ready and is currently being class tested.

9 Challenges If your online text gets criticized, make sure you separate criticism directed at its online nature from criticism directed at its core concepts as a text.

10 Our concept was not too have too many examples. This means not more than three or four pages per section, and not more than three examples per method. The idea behind this is that we want the student to understand the concept that is being thought, as opposed to just look for the right worked-out example and then change the numbers in it. This is why we called the book Concepts of Calculus.

11 Reasonable people can debate this idea, but the point is that it is independent from the online nature of our project. Any decent book, online or not, will have a concept, and students may or may not like that concept.

12 Other Issues Some students complained that there were not enough exercises. We kept adding them. WebAssign is a very serious component of our project, and at least a teaching assistant always works exclusively on that aspect of it.

13 Some students pointed out that the book was too formal. This may be a price you have to pay if you write a book whose number of pages is one-fourth of existing commercial textbooks.

14 Our data shows that more than half of our Calculus I students does not use any book at all (our online text or the commercially available books). This is probably because Calculus I is still relatively easy, and you can get by solving many different problems without really thinking about Concepts. We expect the ratio of these students to significantly decrease as we get data on Calculus II and Calculus III. The University Press of Florida helps us with publishing tasks. This has many advantages (professional copy editing, software help), and one drawback. We cannot adjust the text as often as some of us thought we could.

15 Rewards We can still change the text more often than in the old days when we worked with a commercial publisher. In doing so, we do not have to consider any factors other than our faculty and our students.

16 Suggestion If you consider establishing a problem like ours, do it gradually. We have 1500 students taking Calculus in the Fall, and 1000 taking Calculus in the Spring. Perhaps, for a project of this size, reaching full speed in three semesters is better than in two semesters.