Calculus II Video Lecture Playlists

For the Fall 2013 semester at Manhattan College, I decided to “flip” my section of Calculus II, where the traditional classroom setup is reversed: students now take lectures at home and do homework in class. The course’s information is as follows.

MATH 186-02 Calculus II
Student Enrollment: 24
Textbook: Briggs et al.  Calculus for Scientists and Engineers: Early Transcendentals.
Syllabus: pdf | word

This is a collaborative teaching project with Andrew Greene, who flipped his Calculus II section as well (MATH 186-01).  A goal of our project is to create a classroom in which students work together on a regular basis to solve problems and to engage in substantive conversations on calculus concepts with us (the instructors) and each other.

We give the students online lectures.  At home, they are to take notes on the lectures, just as if they were in class.  We then give the students a brief at-home assessment on what they learned.  Upon coming to class, the students should be prepared to solve problems involving the previous night’s topics.  The problems are of ranging difficulty, and we sometimes precede the problem session with a 5- to 10-minute mini-lecture, to recap major concepts.  During the problem session, we answer on-the-spot questions throughout the room, challenge students who are excelling, and intervene when students are stuck.

Andrew and I record our own lectures and post them on YouTube.  Click on the link at the top of this page to view the lectures.  We collect them into playlists for each section of the textbook.  Some of the playlists are a collage of our own recordings with those of others on the Internet, like Sal Khan’s videos on Khan Academy.  In terms of the videos, in general, our goal is to compile a versatile lecture library to be used for future semesters of Calculus II.