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by ghshephard
5573 days ago
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It's been 15 years since I took Calculus I and II, but looking over:
http://www.khanacademy.org/#Calculus Is there _anything_ in Stewart that isn't covered as well by Khan? You also get advantage of the video tutorial on the topic. I'm waiting for that point in time when we reach a tipping point and Higher Education Institutions don't just delegate everything to Khan for a lot of their topics. My Calculus Course (151) at SFU took place in Images Theater at 8:30 in the morning and had 450 Students listening to a lecture on Calculus. The ratio was approximately: 1/8 of the students were bored. 1/8 of the students were lost, 1/8 of the students were attentive, 1/8 of the students were asleep, and 1/2 of the students didn't show up. (8:30 AM!) I see little need for Stewart in the Face of Khan's Video Collection on Calculus + a bit of wikipedia (Seriously - check out their section on Derivatives and compare it to Stewart) I will agree with you on the Problem Sets - and perhaps that's the missing ingredient in Khan - He needs to more fully flesh out his test bank - but http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard is moving ahead nicely. (And, in my mind, is far superior to any static test bank) |
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The issue is that you need the same problem sets as the instructor. If the instructor uses Stewart and homework is graded, you get a 0 on HW. This is why you can't even go back 1 edition of the book, and why the legacy publishers print a new edition every 2 years with minimal changes beyond tweaking the problems.
A startup idea I never pursued, but one I think has a lot of merit: build an online problem cross referencer. It provides a) free problems to any instructors who want to use them and b) crossreferences these problems with existing textbooks (that way students who don't want to buy the book don't have to).
I'm pretty sure that Int[ 1/Sqrt[3+5x^2], {x}] can't be copyrighted.