Open Calculus is an exportable distance-learning/self-study environment for learning calculus. Embodied in this open source project is a calculus text, online homework problems, videotapes of worked examples, and more, which have been organized and linked together in a flexible fashion.

The intent is for an institution to take all of these materials, install them locally, and serve their local constituency as a center for distance learning of calculus, or as a vehicle for students to learn calculus outside of a formal course. Being open source, these materials can be reorganized or augmented to suit local needs.

User and Host system requirements

Requirements for the student/user

• A computer with a modern browser (e.g. mozilla (or mozilla-firefox)), which is capable of playing the video and rendering pdf files. At the moment the video is streamed in realplayer format, but may soon be available in mpeg format.
• Note that while the text portion and homework problems may be done over a dialup connection, the video (if streamed) would be impractical without a highspeed connection.

Requirements for the host

At Dartmouth, the various aspects of the project are hosted by different servers with the following constraints:

• Rendering the Open Calculus pages: Any (Apache) server with PHP and MySQL.
• For doing the WeBWorK homework problems: Depending on the number of people accessing the system, it is generally advisable to have a dual processor server with Apache (mod_perl), LaTeX, MySQL, Perl installed.
• At the moment with the video being streamed, we have a dedicated video server to stream the realvideo. While CPU and memory is not a critical issue, bandwidth is, though the free publix Helixserver limits the number of simultaneous connects to between 4 and 10. It is for this reason that we are investigating the conversion of the video to an alternate format which can be downloaded and played locally on the client machine.