Open Learning Initiative

The Andes Physics course currently provides over 500 problems that are suitable for both calculus and non-calculus introductory physics courses at the college or advanced high school level.

The Open & Free Physics course provides you with access to the Andes Physics Tutor, an intelligent tutoring system developed at the University of Pittsburgh and the United States Naval Academy with funding from the Cognitive Science program of the Office of Naval Research. The course currently includes over 500 tutored exercises in physics that will supplement almost any physics textbook. We are currently developing a complete online physics course using Andes that will not require a textbook.

Your access will include portions of the course as they become available. The Open & Free Physics course does NOT include access to the end-of-module graded exams or to the course instructor. No credit is awarded for completing the Open & Free Physics course.

Academic versions of this course are offered by educational institutions which award accreditation. Students taking an Academic Course have access to the same course materials as the students taking the Open & Free Course PLUS access to graded exams. The Academic courses track student's learning of key concepts and give the student and the instructor formative feedback to improve learning outcomes.

Course Description

The current online Andes Physics course is intended to be used with most physics textbooks. It supplements the textbook by providing problems for students to solve with the aid of Andes, an intelligent tutoring system developed at the University of Pittsburgh and the United States Naval Academy with funding from the Cognitive Science program of the Office of Naval Research. Students solve typical textbook problems just as they would with pencil and paper, by entering vectors, coordinate systems, equations, variable definitions, etc. Students are free to make as many entries as they want in order to solve a problem. After they make each entry, they receive immediate feedback on its correctness. They can also ask why an entry (e.g., an equation) is wrong, and they can request hints on what to do next in order to solve the problem. Their score on a problem can be based mostly on the entries made while deriving the answer, and not just on the answer itself.

The Andes Physics course currently provides over 500 problems that are suitable for both calculus and non-calculus introductory physics courses at the college or advanced high school level. For instance, in recent sections of the introductory physics course at the US Naval Academy, 100% of the assigned homework problems during the fall Mechanics course were done on Andes, and 75% of the assigned homework problems during the spring Electricity and Magnetism course were done on Andes. More problems are being added to Andes with each release.

This course contains:

1. the Andes Physics Tutor
2. demonstration videos
3. over 500 exercises