The basic calculus course at the University of Helsinki has been offered online for many years. The course was completely revised this time. We are trying to activate students by asking them to contribute to weekly forum discussions, and by giving generous extra credit for that. Next time I may make that a compulsory part of the course.

In fall 2007 the lectures were held in the virtual conference room. The course met for lectures twice a week (total 4 hours a week) and once a week for problem sessions (2 hours). This time the lectures are offered as podcasts, and are available to students at any time. Instead of lectures, we now have weekly meetings to discuss the topics on basis of the forum contributions of the students.

Podcasting lectures is the main new thing in this course. To a certain extent that was done already last year, but the quality of the podcasts has now improved a lot. Also the coverage of the podcasts has been extended. Part of the materials is available also in English, see http://web.me.com/calculus/Site/Calculus_Podcasts/Calculus_Podcasts.html.

For virtual class meetings we use the iVocalize system. It is a mature program that offers the possibility to show slideshows, take snapshots of any window on a computer and share that with others, and cast the screen of a computer to others. I find the snapshot feature most useful addition. That was not available a year ago. Students may now create the presentations of their solutions to homework problems in any way they like, i.e. using TeX, Word, Pages, PowerPoint, MathType or by scanning hand written solutions, and display them in the virtual exercise session using the Snapshot functionality. Suddenly the problem of creating and displaying mathematical text has been solved by low technology: a pen, paper, an eraser, and a scanner or a mobile phone camera. That works even in one-to-one Skype sessions: the hand written solutions can be shown in the Skype video.

More to follow….

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