Calculus Volumes I and II (Openstax)
OER Reviewed: Calculus Volume I & Calculus Volume II (Openstax)
Reviewer: Peter Sinclair, Instructor, Capilano University and Douglas College
OER previously used for teaching by reviewer.
Rating
Each criterion asks the reviewer to rate it on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 = very poor and 5 = excellent).
Comprehensiveness – Rating: 4
The OER covers all areas and ideas of the subject appropriately and provides an effective index and/or glossary.
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- The OER includes all of the standard topics for Calculus I and II and has a thorough index.
- There are a few chapters where the OER could benefit from a deeper exploration of applications, such as Applied Optimization Problems and Differential Equations. The content necessary for the course in these chapters is complete, but students may be left without a complete understanding of how the topic would be applied outside of a mathematics course.
Content Accuracy – Rating: 4
Content, including diagrams and other supplementary material, is accurate, error-free, and unbiased.
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- Review for this criterion is based on my general experience with using the OER in past courses and a thorough investigation of the following randomly chosen sections: 2.1 and 4.5 in OpenStax Calculus I; and 3.6 and 5.2 in OpenStax Calculus II.
- The content in the main text, including diagrams, is overall very accurate, error-free, and unbiased. There are a few small typos in the main text, but nothing that would confuse a student.
- The exercise solutions have a higher rate of errors, but exercise solutions are notoriously error-prone even in commercially available textbooks. Of the four sections I investigated closely, most had 2 or 3 mistakes in the solution set (about 5% of the solutions).
- The supplementary materials for this OER are quite sparse:
- There is a student solution manual which simply lists correct answers for odd-numbered exercises. It is word-for-word identical to the appendix in the main textbook with solutions, including mistakes.
- There is an instructor solution manual which lists correct answers for all exercises (odd and even). I did not check this as thoroughly as the main text, but it presumably has mistakes at a similar or slightly higher rate, since it has been looked at by fewer end-users.
- There are sets of lecture slides that contain diagrams from the text. They do not contain any apparent errors.
Relevance/Longevity – Rating: 5
Content is up-to-date, but not in a way that will quickly make the OER obsolete within a short period of time. The OER is written and/or arranged in such a way that necessary updates will be relatively easy and straightforward to implement.
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- The content presented in this OER has not changed in recent memory and is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.
Clarity – Rating: 4
The OER is written in lucid, accessible prose, and provides adequate context for any jargon/technical terminology used.
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- The OER is written using clear language that