Dr. Margaret Sinclair completed her undergraduate degree in Mathematics at the University of Waterloo in 1988. What made this particularly unusual is that her mode of study was via distance education. This was a remarkable achievement given the few resources available to distance education students in the 1980's.

 

In 2002, Barb Forrest and I set out to develop two fully online Calculus courses that were to be designed in such a way as to take advantage of the this great tool called the INTERNET. This was an eye opening experience that occupied over two years of our lives. In 2008, I gave a talk at the Summer Meeting of the Canadian Mathematical Society titled It Really is Never too Late to Teach an Old Dog New Tricks detailing the lessons I had learned from our foray into online education. A decade later, with nearly a dozen classes and a fully online Masters degree under our belts, it is fair to say that our involvement in online course development and teaching has made me completely rethink how I approach teaching mathematics in general.

 

In this presentation I will build on my 2008 lecture by providing a short overview of our decade and a half long journey into the world of online mathematics education. I will discuss the challenges we met along the way and talk about our solutions to some of these challenges as well as our on-going quest to overcome others. However, I will concentrate on how what I have learned has profoundly impacted my approach to teaching all of my classes, online and on-campus. 

 

Bio: Brian Forrest is a Professor in the Department of Pure Mathematics at the University of Waterloo where he has been a faculty member since 1989. He is also currently the Faculty of Mathematics Teaching Fellow. An active researcher in Abstract Harmonic Analysis, teaching at all levels has always been his true passion. In 2002, together with Barb Forrest, Brian took his first foray into the world of online education with a two year project that resulted in the design of two fully online courses in Calculus. This experience eventually led to a proposal for a fully online masters degree program in Mathematics to be targeted at in-service high school mathematics teachers. After five years of development, and now six years after its launch, the Master of Mathematics for Teachers boasts an enrollment of over 200 teachers from all around the world. Not only has it been a highly rewarding experience for him to work with many of these teachers in the two courses he regularly teaches in the program, but in addition Brian credits his involvement in online education with making him completely rethink his approach to mathematics education in all forms.