Morehouse College has long enjoyed a national reputation. Morehouse College continues to show a strong commitment to academic excellence, particularly in the area of technology, and provides long term administrative support for teaching and research. Just this year, the Department of Mathematics upgraded one of its computer labs to a new SUN lab, with eighteen new SUN machines, supported by Morehouse College's Information Technology office and a matching program from SUN Microsystems, to promote teaching as well as faculty and student research. The Principal Investigator is supervising the administration of the SUN Unix system in the lab.
        The Department of Mathematics, in particular the Principal Investigator, have devoted extensive efforts, time and energy to research and teaching reform utilizing technology. Teaching Calculus with technology is one of the most important aspects in Calculus reform. In fact, the Principal investigator has participated in the Calculus Pilot Workshops, sponsored by ACS, at Rollins College in Florida in both 1998 and 1999. Much of the discussion during the workshops was devoted to introducing technology into Calculus teaching. In recent years, the Principal investigator has spent a great amount of time on reforming calculus teaching with technology. He has started developing an web based on-line tutorial and testing system for Calculus and College algebra courses. The feedback from students and fellow faculties has been overwhelming. The interactive, visualized user interface of the system has greatly enhanced students' comprehension of the concepts and theorems, and their performance has been improved significantly.
        In this proposal the Principal Investigator intends to continue his project in teaching Calculus with technology, the on-line learning and tutorial system.

        During the years of teaching undergraduate courses, one of the things we have heard most from students is that they wish they had constant and immediate access for instant and unlimited tutorial help. Whenever needed, some one could answer their questions and grade their homework, day or night. It has become possible with the current technology. The objective of the project is to develop an on-line learning and tutorial system which can play exactly that role for students.
        The system initially started from a script based dynamic web pages for College Algebra and Calculus I courses the PI was teaching. The schema of the project primarily has four components: initial log-in; material review; self test and on-line test. The project will be built on a database management (by ORACLE) which contains a problem bank in its database and stores all the data from users for instructor's use. The problem bank includes problems such as testing understanding of concepts, solving equations and working on word problems.
        Only students with appropriate authorization can use the system. For instance, all students who are taking certain classes in current semester will have the privilege. After log-in, they can select the chapter or section they wish to start with. In each chapter or section, one can choose to review the material and concepts, or self testing, or take an on-line test and the system will report the results to instructor as a reference of student class performance.
        In the Review component the system will provide a dynamic, interactive and graphical user interface to explain the concepts for each section. User can go back and forth to learn and understand the concepts until they feel comfortable and fully understand. For example, with the concept of limit which is one of the most difficult topics in beginning level Calculus course, system puts a function curve on the screen. When user uses mouse to approach any point along the curve, both x and y coordinates appear when the cursor moves. They can see exactly how y coordinate changes when x moves. Another example is the definition of continuity and derivative. User can see how slope of the secant line approaches to slope of the tangent line by looking at the animated display on screen..
        In the self testing component, the system will randomly take problems from its bank, selected by instructor, and an digital clock is at the corner for timing purpose. For each problem, if user gets the right answer it will move to next problem, otherwise it can ask user to re-try. After several unsuccessful attempts, the system will prompt the answer with explanation. The number of allowed re-try's will be configured by instructor. At the end of each test, the system will produce a detailed report of the results, including the correct answer for each problem and user's input, how many attempts was made, time for each problem and total time of the test. Although not officially recorded as student performance, these data will be statistically collected for instructor's teaching reference.
        In the on-line test component, problems will be selected from the same bank. The format, the number of the problems, the types of the problems will be exactly the same as in the self test component,  but user will not be given chances to re-try any problems, and the scores will be recorded to both students and instructor, as a measurement of their performance. Because of the identity issue, those tests will only be administered in computer lab or any monitored area in which students' identity can be verified.

        The project has already finished its initial phase. PI will expect to continue and finalize this project during the Spring semester, 2002. It consists of software developing, user testing and software improvement. PI will expect to have second phase finished at mid March, and put in use in classroom for further testing. Final touch will be made at the end of Spring, 2002 after the testing and feedback from instructors and students, and final report of the project will submit to ACS at mid May, 2002.

        The first phase started from a script based dynamic web page putting at Morehouse school web server, which doesn't in general support any server end programming for administrative reasons. With our newly established SUN lab with Solaris 8 and new server, the system will be put in Mathematics Department web server (URL: http://www.math.morehouse.edu). We will install ORACLE for database management. We also installed Maple on all our machines. Most of the text based user interface will still use Java script, but the system core will be written in CGI programming, and use java severlets for some graphical interface.
        One of the big challenges in developing the testing components is that how to teach student type mathematical symbols as they input their answers, such as fractions, square root or cubic root and exponential, and how to let the system correctly read in these inputs. If the correct answer is 2, the system would not mark incorrect if some one enters "square root of 4" or "4 time sine of 30 degree".
 

        The learning outcome from this project is expected to be very positive. The response from initial phase of the project has shown a great potential in this direction. Students and instructor will benefit from it tremendously. Student will be able to understand the materials much better, and have a stand-by tutor available 24 hours a day as long as they have internet access. They will have their homework graded instantly when they practice, and know how well they understand the material by self testing. Morehouse offers internet connection at library, various laboratories, as well as  students dormitory. Most of the school in ACS community offer similar service to their students. Also, with the system, instructors know the students better by analyzing those data from students. Adjustment could be made in a timely manner if needed.

        We plan to integrate the system in our curriculum as part of our teaching and testing mechanism, for most of our freshman and sophomore courses, including College Algebra, Precalculus and Calculus. Standardize and uniform tests in those courses as many universities and colleges have already began for years doing so. It is under consideration that our department will use the system to administer our placement tests for freshmen, once its final phase is completed.

        Once completed, PI would welcome distributing the system among ACS member institutions. Feedback from member institutions would actually help improvement of the system. The system will allow individualized configurations so that different school can adapt according to their own requirements, text books and curriculums. These include adding or deleting topics, selecting or inputting more problems in the problem bank, and determining the test frequency. Since PI is administering the SUN lab, if any institution or department needs, we can even host for others on our web server if some one is willing to use the system for certain classes and there is no local web server end programming support.