Calculus-Based Physics

Dr. David Banach of the Saint Anselm College Department of Philosophy offered to host this Moodle Server (besides the Moodle server he uses for his Philosophy Courses) on the Linux host he runs out of his home and I took him up on it in order to make some physics courseware available to folks who are either learning or teaching physics.  My main motivation for setting up the Learners courses at left has to do with the on-line quizzes.  I have created a quiz for each (except for the first "lecture" of the first semester) "lecture" for the two-semester introductory calculus-based physics course that I teach at Saint Anselm College.  In my class, prior to the classroom session, students read the chapter for that classroom session and do the corresponding on-line quiz.  I am in the process of uploading the quizzes into the Moodle courses at left where my students will be able to take the quizzes for additional practice, e.g. when preparing for examinations, and where anyone else who is learning physics will be able to take advantage of them as well.  The Learners courses also represent a place for physics teachers to see the physics quizzes to determine whether or not they want to upload them into their own Blackboard courses (they are available in Blackboard course export form at the Calculus-Based Physics site), or (when all the quizzes have been converted) into their own Moodle courses.  The Learners courses also serve as a a means for me to convert the physics quizzes that were originally created for Blackboard into a form suitable for use with Moodle.  (In principle, the quizzes can simply be imported into Moodle, but, the strength of the quizzes as a learning tool is in the feedback.  There are a lot of images in the feedback and they get lost in the import process, as do the images in the answers.)

My plan is to build up the Calculus-Based Physics II Learners site first (because I started creating these Moodle courses just prior to the start of the 2nd semester of the course).  I anticipate that the two Learners courses will be complete by August 2007.  My plan is to create a third course, entitled Calculus-Based Physics Teachers, which will contain course materials such as quizzes, tests, and answers to class questions, that will be available to teachers only.