Open Calculus is an exportable distance-learning/self-study
environment for learning calculus. Embodied in this open source
project is a calculus text, online homework problems, videotapes of
worked examples, and more, which have been organized and linked
together in a flexible fashion.
The intent is for an institution to take all of these materials,
install them locally, and serve their local constituency as a center
for distance learning of calculus, or as a vehicle for students to
learn calculus outside of a formal course. Being open source, these
materials can be reorganized or augmented to suit local needs.
User and Host system requirements
Requirements for the student/user
- A computer with a modern browser (e.g. mozilla (or
mozilla-firefox)), which is capable of playing the video and rendering
pdf files. At the moment the video is streamed in realplayer format, but may soon be
available in mpeg format.
- Note that while the text portion and
homework problems may be done over a dialup connection, the video (if
streamed) would be impractical without a highspeed connection.
Requirements for the host
The host requires a server (at the moment Unix/Linux or MacOSX) with
the following software installed and configured: Apache, LaTeX, MySQL,
Perl, PHP, and (at the moment) Helixserver (to stream the video). The
homework problems are served via an open source project called WeBWorK,
which imposes some of the above
requirements.
At Dartmouth, the various aspects of the project are hosted by
different servers with the following constraints:
- Rendering the Open Calculus pages: Any (Apache) server with PHP
and MySQL.
- For doing the WeBWorK homework problems: Depending on the number
of people accessing the system, it is generally advisable to have a
dual processor server with Apache (mod_perl), LaTeX, MySQL, Perl
installed.
- At the moment with the video being streamed, we have a dedicated
video server to stream the realvideo. While CPU and memory is not a
critical issue, bandwidth is, though the free publix Helixserver
limits the number of simultaneous connects to between 4 and 10. It is
for this reason that we are investigating the conversion of the video
to an alternate format which can be downloaded and played locally on
the client machine.