DIGITAL LIBRARY
USE OF NEW TOOLS FOR BETTER QUALITY TEACHING OF CALCULUS AND ALGEBRA
West Bohemia University (CZECH REPUBLIC)
About this paper:
Appears in: INTED2020 Proceedings
Publication year: 2020
Pages: 1503-1510
ISBN: 978-84-09-17939-8
ISSN: 2340-1079
doi: 10.21125/inted.2020.0498
Conference name: 14th International Technology, Education and Development Conference
Dates: 2-4 March, 2020
Location: Valencia, Spain
Abstract:
One of the main challenges in adapting existing curricula to the European Higher Education Area is to reduce the number of credits allocated to each subject. This decline is counterbalanced by the fact that former credits were calculated solely taking into account the personal interaction between teacher and student, while the new credit concept in the European credit system encompasses not only this aspect but also the time a student has to spend separately to acquire competencies related to subject.

In a university environment, formative assessment becomes a necessity. It is necessary to help students by providing feedback on their work. Traditional methods usually rely on student and teacher meetings and are very time consuming. Automatic distance assessment opens up a promising field that helps educators help their students more intensively without increasing the workload. In addition, this type of evaluation can also be used as an evaluation tool.

Many higher education institutions use virtual campuses not only for distance learning students, but also to improve their learning experience in the field of contemporary education. Calculus and linear algebra are very important in the study of mathematics. They are also very difficult for students. Therefore, we gradually created groups of practical and theoretical tasks for the students to gain the correct knowledge of the ways of solving tasks and general mathematical procedures. All these tasks were created in Mathematica ©. It is a program used for symbolic calculations, but also for real mathematical calculations. It also provides a high quality environment for programming the above tasks.
The whole process is constantly evaluated based on feedback from students, but also from teachers. Based on several years of realization, it is clear that the knowledge of students is gradually improving both in quantitative and qualitative terms.
Keywords:
Interactive programs, calculus, algebra, web applications.