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On-line Calculator

Conceptually, on-line courses should be more up to date content than textbooks. A problem arises when content for an on-line course comes directly from a textbook. One experience in the CLASS™ Project had to do with ‘print-based’ content for a PreCalculus course was written around the use of a Texas Instruments-82™ calculator. The course content included directions throughout the course. The calculator was out of date technologically at the time, but the course was scheduled for delivery, as is, a ‘print converted’ course from CLASS™. This resulted in incorporating relatively outdated graphing calculator directions into the on-line Precalculus courses. Without a teacher present to guide a student in the proper use of a graphing calculator, the CLASS™ course includes step-by-step directions so that students would have an on-line calculator guide at their fingertips.

Hence, the question of how often and how easy is it to update directions for a calculator used in an on-line course came up. Maintaining a current course would be easier if the calculator directions were left out of the course entirely. It is recommended that any course in which graphing calculators are required, students should be encouraged to study their own calculator's users manual. This issue is a very difficult one for more complicated math courses, but not near as much of one for general math courses such as algebra and geometry.

In other, non-precalculus math courses, students to purchase and use their own calculators at their own discretion. In these cases, students were forced to become familiar with the calculator's operation from the manual accompanying the calculator. Since existing non-precalculus math courses involve simpler calculators that students are more familiar with, students would not need directions for the calculators use in the course.

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