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Posted By: ColinsMum Calculus online problem-based resources? - 08/15/11 05:30 PM
Does anyone know of a recommendable online problem-based calculus course? I don't care about the teaching material as such, but I'd really like something to save me making up my own exercise sheets, ideally online with automatic marking. Here's a brain dump of what I know about and why it still leaves me looking for something better (maybe someone else will find something ideal that I don't!)

- I like the explanation leaflets at MathCentre, which are what we've been using so far, but it's essentially paper based, it doesn't have many exercises and it doesn't mix them up (you read a leaflet on X and the questions on it require you to use X - no thought required! They really are examples not problems.)

- Khan Academy has loads of videos, but it doesn't have a coherent sent of exercises yet for this area

- If Alcumus covered calculus that would be ideal, but it doesn't.

- ALEKS is a possibility but not a great one for a combination of intellectual and technical reasons: at the higher levels it doesn't seem to do a great job of identifying prior knowledge so it gets very tedious, and more importantly for me it doesn't work properly on Linux these days (though if anyone has solved that problem I'd still like to hear about it).

What else is there that I might consider? Anyone know something wonderful?
Thank you! You're right that neither of those is a complete answer, but Visual Calculus has quite a few "drills" and "quizzes" which are automatically marked (or show the answer when you press a button) which look useful, and although I should have thought about MIT, I hadn't :-)
I am not sure if this will work for you, but maybe look at
http://www.eimacs.com/
Posted By: Val Re: Calculus online problem-based resources? - 08/15/11 07:00 PM
Hmm. The best thing I can think of, if all you want are exercises, are a couple good books:

The Humongous Book of Calculus Problems

Calculus Workbook for Dummies

Both books have lots of problems. The first one has the most problems, but the layout of the Dummies book is better. The Dummies problems are less challenging and are good for someone who's starting out. All the problems are worked out step-by-step.

You could also try to get hold of an instructor's manual for any random textbook. These manuals have solutions for all the problems.
Thanks for the EIMACS suggestion - I'd only seen their expensive logic courses, and hadn't realised that they also have a cheap calculus course. I'll look into that!

Books are not really what I'm wanting (I have some, but largely for practical reasons - he'd have to carry them around, and carrying even the rather small GCSE book last year taught us the disadvantages of that! - even good ones aren't much use to me right now). But now the thread is here and maybe someone else will find it useful in future.
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