Course Information

 

Course Overview:

Algebra+ is a 10 week course designed for students who have successfully completed high school algebra but who placed into pre-college level mathematics at their local college or university. This course is for refreshing their math skills with a review of pre-college level algebra. After successfully completing this course, the goal would be to retake your college’s placement exam, or take the placement exam for the first time, and place into a college level mathematics course like College Algebra or Precalculus.

The plus in Algebra+ indicates a unique aspect of this course, the inclusion of “the rest of the story” about the things you learned in algebra.  What is often not clear when one takes the standard algebra course is that most of the problems in the text have been carefully constructed to make sure they can be solved using the limited techniques taught in the course.  The problems encountered in the real world tend to be messy problems for which the textbook approaches are very tedious or simply won’t work.  During this course, in addition to the standard textbook techniques, we will show you how to leverage technology to solve the more general problems you may encounter in your application courses and how to use technology to turbocharge your learning experience.

Recommended Background:

Since this class reviews pre-college level algebra, and moves at a brisk pace, students should be somewhat familiar with mathematical concepts through second year algebra in high school.

Student Costs:

There are no required additional costs for this course. If you would like a physical textbook for reference, then just about any Beginning and Intermediate Algebra textbook should suffice.

Here is a free, online textbook you can use for reference:

• Beginning and Intermediate Algebra, 2nd Ed. Links to an external site., by Tyler Wallace. You can download the entire book or individual sections.