I know some colleges (Beloit) have already announced that they're going to be doing two eight-week terms for the fall and I could see this greatly reducing student interconnectedness as well.

One example would be the Open University degrees. I looked them up a while ago because I wondered how they did science -- it looked like they did lab intensives that were onsite and a week or so long.

Ask if you can access either an entry exam for gen chem or an old final for intro to chem and see how much she knows.

I am tremendously pleased to see Dr. Fauci is hopeful.

We are mostly talking about this for lab courses and fine arts courses. We have discussed both limited access and scheduling some labs (sciences, mostly, but also classes like ceramics) that would normally meet weekly to meet every-other-week with virtual labs in between. This is of course far inferior to a weekly lab, but at least they will get some experience in procedures, and the virtual labs would be heavy on data analysis and lab report writing. It is more work for the instructor, but the same amount of grading at least -- every 2 weeks they would get 24 lab reports from the virtual lab and 24 lab reports from the in-person lab, just a bit more staggered. I could also see this for universities with large lectures -- keeping a 500 person lecture online makes perfect sense and the difference in quality between in-person and online instruction is nowhere near as large. I am proposing something similar for my college where if we can reopen SOMETHING but aren't ready to go back to fulltime, the developmental math classes run somewhat asynchronously but are hybrid classes with weekly meetings for problem-solving and groupwork and making sure they're writing out work properly. The instruction would still be online so if it flared up again it would be easy to move back to fully online, but basically I'd have 24 students enrolled, 12 of them in section 001A (meets monday) and 12 in section 001B (meets wednesday). This would probably actually be a net decrease in workload for me once the initial planning was set up.

That is really frustrating and I honestly would contact the chair if the instructor is not replying to emails. Our chair is in pretty continual contact with us and asking us to mentor faculty with no experience using the LMS. Heck, I raced through prepping my second-half course to let two other faculty copy it because they have NO experience using online homework software and I've put a hell of a lot of effort into getting good videos in.

Some classes have been switched to more of an appreciation class. Some classes have just gotten mandatory incompletes and they'll make it up when able. 😞

Sorry, I'm talking about my CC. I presume residential colleges would have a lot more to deal with as far as that goes, although they probably aren't also trying to train HVAC and welding.

Really hoping we can at least get labs and the like in-person, possibly with very small sections. Not holding my breath even for that.

The aops intermediate is all algebra; the precalc is trigonometry and an intro to linear algebra. They will match different parts of a standard precalc course.

A few colleges are still saying they're going to be back. Very few of their instructors believe them and (in my academics facebook group) we are ALL planning not only to be online for the rest of the semester but summer as well. We are still sticking our fingers in our ears and going LA LA LA LA LA with respect to the possibility of Fall ALSO being online.

I'll be incredibly surprised if we have any in-person classes this summer.

At this moment, a lot of publishers are offering free access until the end of the semester.

At this moment, a lot of publishers are offering free access until the end of the semester.

Yeah, I have some algebra classes where what we're teaching is "can you factor" "can you solve equations" things like that. There just isn't a lot of room for creative assessments that can't be gamed there. I have no real idea for you. What I can say is that I've added enough problems in the online homework system where you have to work in showing your steps and used them as prerequisites for other assignments that someone who isn't actually doing a fair amount of the work themselves can't get a decent homework score. In the first two exams, they were MUCH more highly correlated to homework (correlation coefficient around .6, and if I delete a couple of outliers who have great test scores but don't do homework because they already knew the material, it's more like .75) than they had been before. I might just put the exam through the homework system and require the homework assignments as prerequisites. Is it fair? Hell naw. But I don't think anyone will be able to earn a "C" who wouldn't have hit at least a 55% or so otherwise, and under the circumstances that's the best I can do.

A precalc course will usually teach trig from scratch unless it's an accelerated precalc + calc A course. It won't harm him to not have seen it before although some exposure is helpful. You used to be able to see the complete TOC on Pearson's website but it's not coming up in a quick search. I know I'd typed out before what I thought was essential but 😕

I agree. But I have so many students come in out of high school calc and apparently all they learned was how to take a derivative of a polynomial. Not that they know what they are ... if you ask them the slope of the tangent line at a point, they'll say "huh?" unless you say 'that means f'(a)'. But by golly they can apply the power rule.

A lot of times, "makes it harder than it needs to be" = "not cookbook", yeah. Is it possible to find a different tutor?

I really like Thomas -- he has some great questions -- but I'd definitely put it on the "more rigorous" side. The problems really make you think about WHY things are true. None of the choices you've listed are weak.

The complete book isn't enough? There's a lot more examples in the earlier part of the chapter: http://www.wallace.ccfaculty.org/book/book.html You can also download the student solutions manual and a workbook for both the beginning half and the intermediate half.

I had a similarly depressing section. One B, two C's, and the rest failed. (The homeschooled high school student got the B) My other section of the same course had several A's ... this one just had a huge amount of not. doing. any. work. Like, there were only two people with homework averages over 75% in the online system with unlimited attempts.

There are curricula that order it that way and I don't think it's *wrong* to do it. But I agree about using the book in the author's order without a compelling reason.

Hi Dicentra, I found a great book (Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks) that I'd highly recommend as a living book resource for chemistry. I'm not sure where it would fit -- maybe in the "other resources" -- but I do think there's a lot of good chemistry in it.

I haven't seen these recommended before, and I only stumbled on to them. I'm using MyOpenMath in a class this semester -- it's a free online learning system. They also have self-study courses available for pre-algebra up through pre-calculus, linked here: https://www.myopenmath.com/info/selfstudy.php There are two options for trigonometry -- the CK-12 text teaches with right triangles first, the other with unit circle first.

I never took PDE, sorry.