My son has done the Conceptual Physics course. Bottom line: You get what you pay for (Mizzou is inexpensive), and I'm not impressed.
Students are basically left on their own in that course (also in a humanities course he took). There is zero teaching and the only feedback is on lab reports (it's minimal, but to be fair, it's at least real feedback). The lab kit you have to buy isn't complete, and we ended up having to root around for or buy some oddball things like wooden and metal balls of a certain size. Some of the data they provide for doing analysis is bad. Two labs in different parts of the course deal with constant acceleration and use the same data. It shows that the object accelerates, then slows down, then has extra acceleration to catch up to where the math predicts it would be (happens more than once). In lab activity #1, the object is supposedly rolling down an incline. In activity #2, it's falling due to gravity. I wrote to the course author about the problems and he replied:
"I wrote course several years ago and I am no longer associated with it.
The data is actual data generated in a lab, not perfect data predicted mathematically."
In other words, PFO. As a scientist, I know that data isn't perfect. Like everyone else, I also know that falling objects don't suddenly slow down while falling through the air.
The tests are all multiple choice because there's no interaction with a human. I used to get pretty frustrated with some of the questions DS showed me. IMO, they split hairs and used tricky wording as a way of compensating for not having human interactions. Example: "When an apple falls to earth from a tree, what force is acting on it?" The correct answer was "gravity from every object in the universe." My son couldn't decide between this answer and "gravity from the earth." He knew that the earth wasn't the only massive object exerting a gravitational force on the apple, but he also knew that the effects of everything but the earth were negligible in making the apple fall.
If I hadn't been able to help him through that course, he would have ended up with a C or a D instead of an A.
Personally, I wouldn't let my son take another Mizzou course if I wasn't prepared to spend a lot of time teaching him.
Last edited by Val; 12/09/13 10:06 AM. Reason: Accuracy