PreCalc: Chalkdust vs Thinkwell

[Myra]

Looking ahead for grade 10 for my son at Pre-calc/trig curriculum.

I'm looking for something that he can basically work on independently with me touching base once a week or so.

It seems like a lot of people here are recommending Thinkwell and Chalkdust. Could you give me some pros and cons of each? Also what would I need to purchase for each?

Thanks,
Myra

[Sharon in MD]

I didn't purchase their precalc course because I already had the College Algebra and Trig courses which they used to build the precalc program. While we liked Ed Burger as a lecturer we felt that the exercises were not varied enough in Thinkwell. There were too many problems that were repetitious rather than increasing in depth of understanding. And we didn't care for the difficulties of the on-line testing format and the errors that we discovered in the answers. They may have solved some of those issues by now, it has been a couple years since we used it.

The thing that makes Chalkdust superior in my opinion is that you have access to the instructor. With Thinkwell, you are on your own. They have good technical support, but there isn't any instructor or tutorial support, or at least there wasn't when we did it. I also like to grade tests myself because we do occasionally give partial credit around here. I like to be able to choose problems for tests that I think are proving mastery of the material. I just didn't feel like we got that with Thinkwell.