Introduction for Teachers
Welcome to the Calculus on Demand (COD) Web site at Dartmouth College. COD is designed to be used either as a companion Web site to a traditionally taught classroom course, or as a self-paced study guide for a student learning calculus on his or her own. It includes a graphical, algebraic, numerical approach to provide the comprehensive instruction needed to establish a solid foundation in the first calculus course.
Organization COD is a Calculus I course that gives an introduction to differential and integral Calculus comparable to the material covered on the AB part of the AP exam. The course is organized as 30 lecture topics, each with links to examples, quizzes, an online textbook, videos of worked problems, and online homework using WebWorK. It is organized in four sections: Modeling Discrete Data, Modeling Rates of Change, Modeling with Differential Equations, and Modeling Accumulations. The last lecture in each section is a case study of a particular real world application of calculus.
Doing homework COD uses the WebWorK program for homework assignments. Students do not need any special software, just a Web browser. Assignments are designed to follow the lecture material, with one assignment for each lecture. Students not enrolled at Dartmouth may log in as practice users; see the WebWorK login page for instructions on how to log in as a practice user. They submit answers and receive immediate feedback on whether the answer is correct. Answers are not stored for practice users, but any user may return to any problem set to review and work on problems again.
Textbook The online textbook on COD is Principles of Calculus Modeling, An Interactive Approach by Donald Kreider and Dwight Lahr. Each lecture page has a link to a PDF document from the book on that lecture's topic. There is also a link on the COD index page to the Kreider and Lahr book Web site, which has additional material and links to the Web. However, because COD covers standard calculus topics, it can be used with any textbook, in particular with the one you may already be using in your class.
Examples, quizzes, videos, applets Each lecture page has links to in-depth solved examples on the current topic, and a set of quiz questions with answers. Videos typically show a professor or student solving a problem on the board. The applets are typically interactive, giving the student suggested ideas for exploration. For the Case Study lectures, the relevant applet is necessary to solve the homework problems. And there is even a calculator applet.
Links to Dartmouth Web pages Because COD is the online version of the Dartmouth course Math 3, each lecture page includes a number of Dartmouth links:
Comments page Also part of the Web site is a comments page, where any user of the Web site may post comments for other users to read, or read comments that those users have made. The comments page is not moderated, but may be edited for appropriateness of content.