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Ohio State Introduces Massive Open Online Calculus
An anonymous reader writes "Professors at the Ohio State University are embracing MOOCs, with a Massive Open Online Calculus Course — it is completely open source; everything is on github. There is are free videos, free online assessment system, and a free textbook!"
Is are a free English and grammar course too?
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
but does it count to credits?
WOW! Now in 1997 this is big news. Probably by 2013 or whatever there'll be hundreds of Calculus courses online and something like this won't be news at all.
These online and free courses, do any of them apply to credits earned towards a degree or are they mostly an opportunity to learn something new or relearn (refresh) something you already should know?
I can see where just knowing a little more about certain subjects can enormously help people. Even when they should already know it but forget because they haven't used it for so long. For instance, I was trying to figure out how much sand I needed to cover a base for my patio and had to actually look up a formula instead of being able to remember what was needed to figure it out on my own (sand in my area is sold by the ton, not square or cubic foot). Another time, I was attempting to figure out how large of a square pipe (tube) I would need to match the flow of volume a round pipe on an exhaust stack would have and had to once again spend time looking up the formulas. I already had square tube on hand so I was looking at saving some cash.
I imagine that people use this type of information every day in their jobs and someone fresh out of school would probably be able to figure it out on their own in a few minutes. But for someone who is 17, would any of them apply to credits for college or just be a tool to give them a leg up for when they go?
While I enjoyed the proof techniques and the clean structure of the theory, I have had almost zero use for it in 20 years of IT research and consulting. Modern algebra or set theory would have been far more useful, but I had to each that to myself...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm all for Open Courses, especially when the Universities, Professors and Research are funded by the state (I'm not talking for US only). However, IMO the issue is, what should the priorities for self-learners be?
Math is considered as the language of science, but sometimes I wonder whether open courses on human relationships, empathy, self-help and helping each other (i.e. things that our parents taught us and are seldom, if ever touched upon by today's parents), and most importantly, detoxification from technology (I'm thinking of the billions of man-hours spent on texting, sexting and the so-called "social networking") might be more important for today's youth.
Learning some calculus can give you insight into how the world works better than many other areas of mathematics.
Herman Wouk wrote a short book called The Language God Talks. The title came from a statement made to him by Richard Feynman when Wouk was interviewing him for some background on the Manhattan Project for Wouk's two books on World War II. In their first meeting Feynman asked Wouk if he knew calculus and Wouk said no. Feynman told him that he should learn it since, "It is the language God talks."
I am an engineer and while I didn't actually USE much calculus on a daily basis, it did help me understand the relationships and equations that I did use every day.
1) Do there exist easy methods to decide how good/effective/complete/accurate (add your own metric) an online course is? As the number of online courses grow, it would be nice to have some way to compare courses against each other. For example to decide which one(s) are more 'worthy' to invest ones time in.
2) Especially in public education, why isn't this type of course the norm by now? It's 2013, laptops, tablets etc are practically everywhere, so it isn't hard to have students follow an online course. Either directly over the internet, or using a local copy over a school's LAN. Using open source principles, efforts towards improving an online course can be pooled for the benefit of all its users. Yes I realize there's a big, commercial market out there for study material. And probably not all subjects lend themselves equally well to be taught (or put together) as an online course. But ultimately, all study material costs money, and schools/universities should have students in mind, not the interests of (commercial) book publishers.
Textbook companies will start crying out and complaining that Ohio State giving out free material impedes their ability to gouge students.
To you.
To engineers, physicists, astronomers and a bunch of other fields I'd say calculus is extremely useful.
The online exercises for this course are great! They change every time so one can practice until one has mastered the concept. This was the real missing component in these online math courses. Most textbooks I've looked at don't have answers to exercises which makes it difficult to check that one has truly mastered the material without a teacher to act as a gatekeeper to the right answers.
These "online courses" are mostly the same old crap repackaged for online distribution. Videos of actual blackboards, in some cases. It's not a semi-intelligent program teaching you the subject, something that's quite feasible for calculus and much of basic math.
No, you really need calculus in computing today if you're going to get above the peon level. This is recent. I went through Stanford for a MSCS in 1985, and it was all discrite math - number theory, automata, mathematical logic. You didn't even need an FPU back then. That was sort of true until the mid-1990s or so. Then it changed.
Today, it's machine learning, machine vision, deep neural nets, Bayesian statistics, adaptive control... That's all number-crunching intensive. Today, advertising requires calculus. The algorithms behind Google, Facebook, and Amazon all involve heavy number-crunching. So does most of the "big data" stuff. Then there's quantitative finance.
There's an outsourcing firm in India which starts 23,000 people on a six month course in programming twice a year. That's the competition at the low end. You need to know a lot more than they do, and that does not mean knowing Javascript quirks.
I may not need to use calculus ever in programming because I don't build anything in matlab or what have you... But I do have an ego that gets bitch slapped every day when my wife can understand higher level math while I can't without spending a lot of time figuring out the logic behind it. But even though I want to learn it just so I don't feel worthless in the field of math, I don't want to one-up her at everything. I mean, I'm better at her at cleaning AND cooking :(
It covers most of the calculus we see here in our pre-tertiary Year 12 Maths B in Queensland, Australia, and some from year 12 Maths C. For those who don't know what that means 12B is mostly calculus and trig, 12C covers some calculus - volumes and arc length - with matrices, vectors, group theory, mechanics using calculus, decaying periodic functions. I'll be referring my students to this as a top-up.
The colophon of the book states it clearly enough:
"This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. If you distribute this work or a derivative, include the history of the document."
"The source code is available at: https://github.com/ASCTech/mooculus/tree/master/public/textbook"
I guess the rush to post overwhelmed any curiosity in the material itself. Yes, the repetition "or send a or send a" exists in the textbook.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Yes, I think MOOCs are an interesting new educational paradigm. But if I'm going to spend time doing something at university level, then I'd like to get university-level trasnferable credit not just a certificate of completion. Otherwise its just another time-sucker like WoW.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Is this the site for cows to learn differential equations?
"An organized scientific approach to evaluating course materials is sorely lacking."
I agree.
Most people don't care about mathematics directly, they care about how mathematics can help them do something they want to do. But apparently the Calculus book is written by math enthusiasts. Here is an example from page 9, the 2nd page of text:
"Warning A function is a relation (such that for each input, there is exactly one output) between sets and should not be confused with either its formula or its plot."
Some people aren't interested in accomplishing anything, they just like speaking in a manner that is foreign to most people. For example, there are people who like ancient Greek and speak it to other people who like ancient Greek. They like doing something other people can't do. They see it as putting them in a class by themselves, which they think is superior. But speaking ancient Greek is a mostly useless hobby for them; it's not really helpful in a general way. If you go to such a person and ask what they have learned because of knowing ancient Greek, they often have nothing useful to say. Why? Because they aren't interested in doing anything useful, they are interested in pretending to be superior, or in living in a world by themselves.
Interesting. If calculus professors are pushing online calculus courses instead of traditional in class courses and calculus hasn't had any really new developments in about 100 years, do we even need calculus professors anymore?
It would seem odd that this group of professors feel that MOOCs do as good of a job as they do at a fraction of the cost.
While I have nothing against this laudable approach, I can't perceive it to be life-shattering.
Teaching in a university, I had to learn the nature of the large majority in front of me. They wouldn't exactly be interested in the subject matter, and neither motivated to invest any more minute than absolutely necessary. Especially so in the material advocated as 'recommended reading'.
Either it will be made easy-peasy, or the lim of the attrition rate for t towards the end of the course can be approximated by zero.
Oh yes, take the easy way out and mode me down (-1, negative teaching skills).
You are not considering the question of whether the Calculus book is helpful in learning mathematics.
Texans will start whining that Ohio State's calculus material doesn't have sufficient political indoctrination embedded in it.
I like your example because it demonstrates that the Calculus book is oversimplifying.
Quote from the calculus book: "A function is a relation (such that for each input, there is exactly one output)..."
I can understand why a mathematician might like to say that. However, in the real world there are many phenomena in which, for one input, there are several outputs. I want to use mathematics to model the world. Some mathematicians want to use mathematics as a hobby.