You bring up some good points. It is hard to know as an author what content to write and how much. Having problem answers available in books has been around for a long time and the internet has a huge number of free and paid sites to get answers. While I have no doubt many students use these sites to cheat, I also think many students use the sites to validate their answers. I actually view this as a good thing. If a student is up late finishing a homework problem and has questions about it, then the most efficient way for them to get answers is from solutions on the internet. The questions and concepts won't be quite as fresh in the morning when they talk to a prof or TA as at the point when they are thinking about. I also think that the internet is much more "approachable" for many. For example, I have known profs and TAs who have put their office hours early in the morning so students don't come! I recently heard of a Calculus class that had 600 students! It's hard to get the answers and attention you need from a TA or prof in a class that size. In other words, from class sizes to approachability to efficiency in learning, I think problem solutions on the internet serve a positive purpose beyond just trying to cheat on a homework assignment.
As for making it harder to teach a course. I think that can be a problem, but a good prof can slip in meaningful problems on a test that can distinguish the good students from the bad. I'm also curious about your "long continuation." In a perfect world, how should math education be structured, incentivized and delivered? On Thursday, March 6, 2014 12:34:11 PM UTC-5, kcrisman wrote: > > > > I'm the author of the site. >> > > Hi! Thanks for using Sage. > > > >> Just looking for some more details on "Not quite sure if I like the >> premise of the site overall." Do you not like the subscription and would >> like to see things for free or that there is too much real analysis and not >> enough traditional problems. >> > > > I think my concern was that as opposed to giving answers to calculus > problems, which pretty much zillions of software and websites do, finding > many answers to real analysis type questions makes it a little harder to > teach such a course. One might also note that anything where one pays to > learn (including where I work) can potentially exacerbate structural > inequity. But I kind of doubt that a real analysis course is a big enough > constituency to make that as much of a problem in that particular way. I > had a really long continuation of this all written, but I think I'll leave > it at that. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
