Active Calculus
OER Reviewed: Active Calculus by Matthew Boelkins
Reviewer: Trefor Bazett, Assistant Teaching Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Victoria
OER has been shared as an optional resource and some activities in the OER previously used for teaching by the reviewer.
Note from the reviewer
To contextualize the rest of this review, I should briefly explain the core idea of Active Calculus. As the name suggests, this is meant to support a course in calculus taught from the perspective of active learning. Whether this is a good text or not for a course probably largely depends on whether the instructor intends to similarly engage in active learning. For instance, the text includes “Preview Activities”, intended to be done before class, and “Activities”, intended to be done during class. My review below primarily is assigning ratings ON THE ASSUMPTION that the instructor intends to use these active learning components to some degree, and I will occasionally note how the ratings might differ if one is aiming for more traditional lecture during class.
Rating
Each criterion asks the reviewer to rate it on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 = very poor and 5 = excellent).
Comprehensiveness – Rating: 3-4
The OER covers all areas and ideas of the subject appropriately and provides an effective index and/or glossary.
The OER covers all areas and ideas of the subject appropriately and provides an effective index and/or glossary. Every standard Calculus I/II topic is covered, with the exception of Complex Numbers which some courses may adopt. There is a well-functioning index and table of contents that is particularly useful in the html version of the text as students can follow the hyperlinks.
The text is not intended to be a reference text, instead it aims to facilitate active learning. Thus the comprehensiveness of many sections is quite a bit shorter than one would expect in other texts, because large portion of the development is intended to be done in Preview Activities before class or Activities after the class (the latter only has answers, not solutions, for instance). While the major topics are comprehensive in their exposition, more minor topics are often done very briefly. For instance, partial fractions (whatever one thinks about the value of this topic) is extremely brief and focuses on using computer tools to execute the algebraic manipulations.
Similarly, there is a decent sized set of questions (many use WebWork to let students input answers) that are generally appropriate, but nonetheless still less total practice problems than a traditional reference non-OER text in Calculus.
Also a note that while the text is standard calculus fare, it does not include much in the way of connecting to applied problems in the world.
Rating: 3/5 as a reference text, 4/5 as a text to support active learning in class.
Content Accuracy – Rating: 5
Content, including diagrams and other supplementary material, is accurate, error-free, and