Florida State University and University of Helsinki Information
technology has the potential to deliver education to everybody by high quality
online courses and associated services, and to enhance traditional face-to-face
instruction by, e.g., web services offering virtually unlimited practice and step-bystep
solutions to practice problems. Regardless of this, tools of information
technology have not yet penetrated mathematics education in any meaningful way.
This is mostly due to the inertia of academia: instructors are slow to change their
working habits. This paper reports on an experiment where all the instructors
(seven instructors and six teaching assistants) of a large calculus course were
required to base their instruction on online content. The paper will analyze the
effectiveness of various solutions used, and finishes with recommendations
regarding best practices.
