Partially Ordered Thoughts

(This is Part III of an ongoing series. I suggest reading Part I and Part II first.)

As I previously mentioned, a Pearson representative had set me up with an account on Course Compass so that I could check out some of their texts as well as their online homework system, MyMathLab. Before I got too far along in convincing myself that this was something that I wanted to use, I talked to a few people familiar with the system. I spoke with a fellow graduate student who’d used MyMathLab as a recitation TA for one of our math for management majors classes, and he reported that it seemed like it had been beneficial for the students. A friend from NDSU who’s now finishing graduate school in the northeast has experience using it with students, albeit on an extra credit basis, but most of them really liked it. One of our instructors is currently using MyMathLab with her finite math class and reported that it’s working well, more or less, although she’s had some issues with answers that require a decimal answer, as the system doesn’t allow her to specify a tolerance for correct answers. (Apparently the questions are supposed to be designed to specify how many digits are required, etc., but if students have the potential to round at an intermediate step, their answer might be right for five or six places and wrong in the seventh, which shouldn’t matter, but does to the software.)

By and large, I was impressed with CourseCompass/MyMathLab, and the price point is great. Read more »

(This is the second installment in my series on updating precalculus at Georgia Tech. Part I is a good starting point.)

Knowing that timely adoption would be the key to getting used texts for my students for the fall, I jumped right into the process of finding a new precalculus text. The Larson/Hostetler text from Cengage stayed on the list, since if the only way to cut price was to cut quality by an unacceptable amount, I’d stay with L/H. I asked our textbook contact to look into the possibility of a custom edition that doesn’t contain the massive amount of the text that we don’t use, as that usually manages to provide some cost savings.
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