Two professors from Ohio wanted to embrace the open textbook initiatives that their state was launching. Fearing that the grand plans would take too long for their own students, the pair took a sabbatical from their colleges and embarked on creating this free online college algebra textbook. The result is a textbook that publishers have offered to pay them for, at least three times; and a living text that is being used in both of their schools. And, based on the forum comments (YES! They have a forum for students and educators.), their work has been adopted by other educators as well. Students looking for college algebra help might find their free online textbook and forum to be the perfect answer to succeeding in their course work.
Dr. Carl Stitz of Lakeland Community College and Dr. Jeff Zeager of Lorain County Community College have taken a different approach to how they present the material in their college algebra textbook. They start with functions as opposed to the somewhat standard ‘equations first’ approach taken by more traditional texts. Another thing interesting about their approach is the number of exercises or homework problems contained within the text. Rather than deploying the “drill and kill” approach that includes sometimes as many as 100 problems, they carefully construct the problems to cover the required skills and “get the students thinking more deeply about the Mathematics involved.”
Graphing calculators are used as a “tool to enhance the Mathematics, not to replace it.” (Yay, for them. It’s sad to see so many of today’s students unable to do simple math without their calculators. I worked with one high school senior who could not add 125 and 25 without his calculator – something I would have thought he could do in his head.)
Chapter Titles from College Algebra
- Relations and Functions
- Linear and Quadratic Functions
- Polynomial Functions
- Rational Functions
- Further Topics in Functions
- Exponential and Logarithmic Functions
- Hooked on Conics
- Systems of Equations and Matrices
- Sequences and the Binomial Theorem
- Foundations of Trigonometry
- Applications of Trigonometry
View this Free Online Material at the source:
College Algebra
