Domain: aleks.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to aleks.com.
Comments · 7
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Khan Acadamy != Teaching
For what it's worth, IAAMT who has worked with ALEKS and Khan Academy.
The Khan Academy videos aren't bad, but they're really just textbooks that move and talk.
The Khan Academy mastery exercises aren't bad, but they're really just worksheets of arbitrary length. The instant feedback is pretty cool, but it's just a faster way of doing a worksheet and then checking against the teacher's key.
The instant feedback for a teacher isn't bad, and it makes monitoring student progress more efficient, and making tasks more efficient is the bailiwick of software engineering. That said, throwing Khan Academy (or ALEKS or other similar program) at students will get you pretty much the same result as tossing them a textbook and some worksheets.
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ALEKS.com
I had the same issue when I went back to the University. When in high school, I took math courses, and was pretty good at it, I was in the highest math courses my high school offered, which was Calculus at the time. When I got out of high school, I went to the Marine Corps for four years, and I felt like I had lost a lot of what I had learned.
When I went back, I went to University of Wisconsin - Marathon County, and they offered the ALEKS program, which is excellent for someone who already learned the material, but learned it years ago. I became a Math tutor, and recommended it to everyone who was a returning student to college.
ALEKS is a Math Learning Program that is done completely online, and you take an assessment of what you know and don't know. The website for the ALEKS program is found here at aleks.com. The stuff that you know becomes part of your "Pie", and the sections you need work on still you can take by clicking on a link. It gives you reading materials online, and then a sample problem, and then 5 problems on the material. Once you pass the 5 problems you can continue onto the next part of your pie, and you continue until your "Pie" is completed, and you are done with the course.
Seeing the rules again refreshed my memory, and working on the problems was quick enough, yet long enough to teach my brain once again how to do Algebra problems. I finished the course a month and a half early, and don't regret it.
Go to Aleks.com, they have a trial offer for 24 hours where you can try it out for free. If you like it, then you need to purchase a subscription.
I thought it was worth it, and many people that I recommended it to also enjoy it.
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A technology solution
Some of the posters suggested avoiding technology but I disagree. Two of my kids are home schooled, and even though my wife and I are both math majors we use a web site for our kids. It's essentially a K-12 math education via instruction and testing. Lots of practice exercises, complete information on what you know and what you don't, and easy increments of subjects to make it easy to pick up for a few minutes and make progress. It's for fee. (I have no affiliation except a happy user). http://www.aleks.com/
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online tutor - ALEKS
I'm taking a stat course for a doctoral program, and part of the course is an online tutorial called ALEKS. I get more out of doing the work in ALEKS than doing just regular problems out of a book because on the tough stuff the program can tell me that I've gotten it wrong and give me another chance. There's also a lot of explanation and easy access to formulas relevant to the problem at hand.
The ed psych department I'm taking this class in has an institutional license, but you can apparently buy a personal subscription to ALEKS without having any affiliation with a school or university. Looks like they've got a thorough set of offerings from elementary to pre-calc and statistics. Also looks like there's a free trial so you can try it out.
I'm not crazy about the implementation - Java plugin that's got a somewhat clunky UI. All the same, I'd recommend trying it. -
online tutor - ALEKS
I'm taking a stat course for a doctoral program, and part of the course is an online tutorial called ALEKS. I get more out of doing the work in ALEKS than doing just regular problems out of a book because on the tough stuff the program can tell me that I've gotten it wrong and give me another chance. There's also a lot of explanation and easy access to formulas relevant to the problem at hand.
The ed psych department I'm taking this class in has an institutional license, but you can apparently buy a personal subscription to ALEKS without having any affiliation with a school or university. Looks like they've got a thorough set of offerings from elementary to pre-calc and statistics. Also looks like there's a free trial so you can try it out.
I'm not crazy about the implementation - Java plugin that's got a somewhat clunky UI. All the same, I'd recommend trying it. -
online tutor - ALEKS
I'm taking a stat course for a doctoral program, and part of the course is an online tutorial called ALEKS. I get more out of doing the work in ALEKS than doing just regular problems out of a book because on the tough stuff the program can tell me that I've gotten it wrong and give me another chance. There's also a lot of explanation and easy access to formulas relevant to the problem at hand.
The ed psych department I'm taking this class in has an institutional license, but you can apparently buy a personal subscription to ALEKS without having any affiliation with a school or university. Looks like they've got a thorough set of offerings from elementary to pre-calc and statistics. Also looks like there's a free trial so you can try it out.
I'm not crazy about the implementation - Java plugin that's got a somewhat clunky UI. All the same, I'd recommend trying it. -
No shortage of Open-Source solutions
On SourceForge, look up Webwork, Moodle, AIM (Assessment In Mathematics), and LON-CAPA, or look at STACK here. Webwork, AIM and STACK are primarily geared towards delivering math homework and I know that Webwork in particular can deliver fairly sophisticated problems. Webwork is entirely free and has several large free problem libraries, AIM is costly in that it uses Maple as one of its components, but STACK is similar and replaces Maple with Maxima or Octave (I think).
Moodle and LON-CAPA are more general. Moodle looks mangageable, but LON-CAPA looks huge and bulky to me and is probably very much a group project.
In the proprietary realm, I like the ALEKS online system for teaching basic mathematics, and their statistics looks good, too. No, I don't work for them or own their stock. I don't care at all for any of the other proprietary systems I've come into contact with, and I've seen many of them.