ACS2E: additional version with new and improved previews and exercises

Posted on August 8, 2026 by Matt Boelkins

I’m delighted to announce that a new, additional version of the 2nd edition of Active Calculus Single Variable is now publicly available on Runestone: Active Calculus with Doenet. The only differences are found in the preview activities and exercises; all of the rest of the text is identical.  

For a long time, I’ve thought that the current interactive exercises in WeBWorK didn’t quite fit the text.  I’m excited to now have a full set of exercises (with better graphical interactivity and automated answer-checking and feedback) that genuinely fit the notation, tone, and style of ACS.  

This new version is the result of many contributors: initial drafts of many of the preview activities were created with a small group of participants during week-long workshops at the University of Minnesota in 2023 and 2024.  During my Fall 2025 sabbatical, I revisited these drafts and edited them extensively, plus wrote several entirely new preview activities.  In addition, I wrote or edited over 300 new exercises.

Highlights from the new version

Here are a few sample exercises to explore and see some of the great features the new version offers:

Exercise 1.8.5.2: Using a tangent line to approximate g when given a graph for g’
Exercise 3.6.4.2: Optimizing the volume of a rectangular storage container
Exercise 5.3.6.1: Practicing the structure of u-substitution with trig functions
Exercise 7.3.5.2: Applying Euler’s Method to a differential equation involving both t and y
Exercise 8.4.5.1: Finding the Taylor series of a rational function

Here are two examples of preview activities that especially leverage Doenet’s capabilities:

Preview Activity 4.3.1 (using a built-in Riemann sum calculator)
Preview Activity 7.3.1 (Euler’s Method introduction)

Using the New Version

You can read and engage with Active Calculus with Doenet by following the link.  It is also possible to create a Runestone account and a corresponding course that uses the text, and then assign and track student work on the previews and exercises, all for free. One key advantage of the Runestone platform is that students see the text and the interactive previews and exercises as fully integrated: all of the students’ work is saved in the text itself.  Both the previously-posted version (with WeBWorK) and the new version (with Doenet) of Active Calculus can be used on Runestone with student work tracked and graded.

Chrissy Safranski piloted the Doenet version on Runestone in both Calculus 1 and Calculus 2 during the spring semester of 2026.  Nearly all of the previews and exercises have thus been classroom tested with students, and Chrissy and I did extensive additional editorial work in the spring and summer of 2026 in response to student feedback and her experience as an instructor.  

Long-term plans

I expect to eventually have the new Doenet version be the source for PDF and print, but that likely won’t happen for another year or two. The current WeBWorK-based version of ACS2E will exist in perpetuity, even once the Doenet version becomes primary. For 2026-27, the Doenet version is only available in HTML.

If you want to join other instructors in using the new version on Runestone

At least 6 instructors have shared with me that they are planning to use AC with Doenet on Runestone for Calculus 1 or 2 this fall. If you are interested in doing so yourself and would like to be part of a small group with which to collaborate, please email me: boelkinm.gvsu@gmail.com, with “AC with Doenet and Runestone” in the subject line. I’ll connect the instructors accordingly, and Chrissy and I will be part of the group ourselves.

Note well: the Doenet version is still a work in progress.  There will be some bugs; hopefully they’ll be minor, but regardless we will be prompt and responsive to issues that arise.  Also, as noted above, the Doenet version is only available in HTML: the preview activities and exercises are different from the current posted PDF and print versions of the text.

Thanks

There are many people to thank for their contributions that made this new version of the text possible, including:

  • Duane Nykamp, Doenet founder
  • Virginia Mae, Doenet tech support
  • Many participants at the 2023 and 2024 Doenet workshops, and especially Hannah Burson
  • Brad Miller, Runestone founder
  • Rob Beezer, PreTeXt founder
  • Oscar Levin, PreTeXt developer
  • Chrissy Safranski, co-author
  • GVSU, for sabbatical support

I’m excited for this additional resource to be available to instructors and their students and I look forward to continued development that will make ACS an even better product.

More about Doenet 

Founded by Duane Nykamp of the University of Minnesota, Doenet (the Distributed Open Education Network) is an NSF-supported free, open-source platform that enables authors and instructors to create, share, and deliver richly interactive mathematics activities and exercises that provide extensive feedback to students. Among its many strengths, Doenet supports easy answer-checking of mathematical expressions, text, and even interactive graphics.  In addition, through drop-down menus it’s straightforward to create sentences with multiple fill-in-the blank options that help students provide structured reasons and explanations.  Authors can provide content that’s responsive to what students enter, including conditional feedback.  Doenet interactives can be embedded in any PreTeXt book, and student interactions with content can be tracked in the Runestone learning platform.

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print versions of ACS2E workbooks now available for purchase

Posted on August 4, 2026 by Matt Boelkins

Thanks to our publisher, 619 Wreath, bound print versions of each of the 2nd Edition workbooks for Active Calculus Single are now available.

See https://www.619wreath.com/store/p55/active-calculus-second-edition-workbooks.html.  The main textbook remains continues to be available in print at https://www.619wreath.com/store/p45/active-calculus-second-edition.html.

The ACS2E landing page has also been updated with links to this resource.

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print version of ACS2E is now available for purchase

Posted on January 15, 2026 by Matt Boelkins

Thanks to our friends at 619 Wreath Publishing, there’s now a bound print version of Active Calculus Single Variable 2nd Edition available for purchase, in both paperback ($38) and hardcover ($48).

Bound versions of the ACS2E activities workbooks are forthcoming and should be available sometime this spring.

As ever, I’m grateful to Mitch Keller for his work as production editor and all of his support that makes the PDF and print versions of the textbook possible, and of course to Jen Martindale, Candice Price, and Miloš Savić at 619 Wreath, as well as Jean Tashima for her beautiful cover design.

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Image descriptions (alt-text) to comply with WCAG 2.1

Posted on January 12, 2026 by Matt Boelkins

The deadline to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA standard is late April 2026.

Thanks to PreTeXt (the authoring platform in which our books are written), the text in Active Prelude, Active Calculus, and Active Multi already meet these guidelines. Recently, several of us have been working to ensure that the images in these texts also meet the guidelines. As an aside: alt-text by itself has limitations, including that screenreader users cannot pause or back up within alt-text, and alt-text cannot have math marked up properly to be read by MathJax. Thus, we are using detailed image descriptions which are accompanied behind the scenes by alt-text that directs readers using screenreader technology to the detailed image description.

The short version of compliance: all of the images other than those in WeBWorK exercises now have alt-text. Several of us are working to develop full and complete image descriptions beyond the perfunctory ones we created initially to meet compliance standards. Several people are also working on included WeBWorK exercises that have images to ensure those have image descriptions as well, and we expect those to be complete by late April.

I’m grateful to everyone involved in figuring out a plan, providing support with various technical details, and/or writing alt-text for images: Mitch Keller, Oscar Levin, Chrissy Safranski, David Austin, and Mercredi Chasman.

If you want to know more about how these appear in the text and/or to know more about the current state of progress on full and complete image descriptions and/or images in WeBWorK exercises, the rest of this post is devoted to those two issues.

You can find a small circled “i” at the bottom left of each figure, such as here:

Clicking on the circled “i”, you see

In an activated WeBWorK exercise with an image, you’ll see a small button that says “image description”, and clicking that will similarly expand the description:

Here’s a summary of work that’s completed for Active Calculus Single:

+ Chapters 5, 6,7, 8 have all images with detailed image descriptions, and the images in Chapter 1 are in progress; the rest of Chapter 1 and Chapters 2, 3, and 4 will be finished by late April
+ Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 8 have all WeBWorK images with competed alt-text, and the other chapters are in progress

Active Prelude and Active Multi now both pass the compliance tests for everything except certain WeBWorK exercises, and work is planned to have all of the needed image descriptions in place by late April.

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Printable worksheets for activities in ACS2e and APC

Posted on August 22, 2025 by Matt Boelkins

Thanks to a recent PreTeXt development, all Preview Activities and Activities in both ACS2e and APC can be printed in PDF directly from the HTML version.

For example, if you look at Activity 1.5.2 in ACS2e, you’ll see a printer icon:

If you click the printer icon, you’ll see a preview of the PDF of the activity:

And finally, if you hit the print icon once more, you’ll see a dialog box with your printer, including the option to save the file as PDF:

If you only use a small number of activities from ACS2e or APC, this is a good way to make a few handouts for class. If you regularly use the activities, I think it’s more efficient to have your students use a print copy of the full workbook, which you can download in PDF from the landing page for each course (the direct links are ACS2e WB1-4, ACS2e WB5-8, APC WB).

The big advantage of this new worksheet environment in PreTeXt is that it provides space for students to work after each prompt, space that should be commensurate with the task. I wrote a bit about this a year ago when we used this feature to update the PDF workbooks; the 2e HTML is the first time we’ve had this in the HTML version as well. If you are interested in more of the technical details in how PreTeXt generates these worksheets and what’s possible, see this recent post by Oscar Levin.

Big thanks to Oscar for all of his technical work to make these worksheets function well in the HTML, as well as to Rob Beezer for supporting them in PreTeXt and doing the coding work to include them based on feedback from others. Worksheets are primarily an outcome of the 2024 AIM workshop at Franciscan University of Steubenville on PreTeXt for Small Documents, and many of the participants there contributed ideas that led to this feature.

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Updated ancillary resources for Fall 2025

Posted on August 14, 2025 by Matt Boelkins

See the note at https://activecalculus.org/instructors/ that takes you to the instructors’ Google group for more information and links to various resources.

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Active Calculus Single – 2nd edition is available

Posted on August 7, 2025 by Matt Boelkins

I’m delighted to share that the 2nd edition of AC-Single has now been officially released in HTML and PDF: you can learn more at the landing page for this edition of the text at activecalculus.org/acs2e/, with the HTML version at activecalculus.org/single2e/.

Huge thanks go to production editor Mitch Keller whose technical expertise with PreTeXt (and much more) and understanding of the book have made a wide range of important changes possible; without his help, neither the HTML nor PDF versions would exist. Chrissy Safranski has also made major contributions to the 2nd edition, partly through extensive feedback on the text itself, as well as through providing key content and support for the WeBWorK integration in the Runestone version of the text. I’m deeply grateful to both Chrissy and Mitch, as well as to everyone else who has offered their feedback and support that have led to the changes in the 2nd edition that have certainly improved the text.

There has been some minor reorganization of the menu and web pages here at activecalculus.org to clarify the two editions. At the main menu site for Active Single (which used to point to the first edition), activecalculus.org/acs/, there’s brief discussion of the fact that there are now two editions, with links to both the second edition’s landing page (activecalculus.org/acs2e/) and the first edition’s page at activecalculus.org/acs1e/. Note that there’s a new (temporary) cover image for ACS2e that is intended to highlight when you’re looking at 2e vs 1e.

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Active Calculus – Multivariable: 2nd Edition Update

Posted on July 23, 2025 by Mitch Keller

Over the past year, we have been busy working on what we plan to release as the 2nd edition of Active Calculus – Multivariable (ACM) in time for Fall 2026 classes. This post provides an update on our progress and plans, plus an invitation to interested instructors to pilot the updated text starting this fall.

To summarize this post: The new 2nd edition of ACM has been substantially reorganized, includes some new content, has integrated SageMath graphics throughout, and will only be available in electronic HTML form for the 2025–26 academic year for anyone interested in teaching from the 2nd edition in a pilot setting.  The first edition will remain fully available for the foreseeable future.  Read on for more detail.

History and 2nd Edition Overview

The 1st edition of ACM consists of chapters 9–11, written by Steve Schlicker, and chapter 12 on vector calculus, which we wrote. Steve’s chapters were originally written in LaTeX and designed for print/PDF output. PreTeXt enabled the HTML version that most now use, but these chapters have not had a graphics update to enable interactive 3D graphics from SageMath, which we used extensively in chapter 12.

Since Steve is now retired, we have taken over responsibility for the entirety of ACM. As we considered refreshing the graphics and other feedback from instructors, we decided that a 2nd edition that makes more significant revisions was an appropriate approach. The 1st edition will remain available on activecalculus.org, so instructors who do not wish to switch to the 2nd edition will not need to do so. (You will need to update links to point to the 1st edition after the 2nd edition is released, however.) Our focus from this point forward is on the 2nd edition, so typos reported in 1st edition text will only be fixed if that text also appears in the 2nd edition. However, we are happy to accept pull requests on GitHub if folks want to send them to fix typos in the 1st edition.

We have posted a separate page detailing how the 2nd edition will differ from the 1st edition. The 2nd edition of ACM has evolved because in reality, “multivariable calculus” can mean one of three different courses: one that follows chapters 9–11 of the 1st edition and omits vector calculus entirely; one that introduces students to line integrals, the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus for Line Integrals, and Green’s Theorem; and one that proceeds through all of that material plus Stokes’s Theorem and Gauss’s Divergence Theorem. As such, the extent to which certain topics in the new chapters 9–12 are necessary varies depending on the course’s final destination.

New for the 2nd edition of ACM will be an annotated instructor’s version, which is currently available in preview form. This version will not contain any answers or solutions that are not in the student-facing version. However, the start of most sections will contain notes for instructors about where a section’s content is used later on and how to move through a section more quickly, if needed. Occasionally, a note will appear in the margin of the instructor’s version that either expands on the notes at the beginning of the section or lets instructors know that there’s information in those notes relevant to that part of the text. We are still organizing this material, but the new Section 9.7 shows the structure.

Timeline for 2nd Edition

Instructors who are curious about the 2nd edition can see a preview. Throughout July 2025 and the first half of August 2025, further edits will be made to the flow of the writing and formatting of the contents, but the table of contents and structure of discussion and activities will not see significant changes before the Fall 2025 semester starts.

Throughout the 2025–26 academic year, updates will continue to be made to the version of the 2nd edition posted at this location as typos are caught and corrected. Any significant changes will be announced on our Google Group. Instructors interested in teaching from the 2nd edition or participating in a group that reads and gives feedback on it during this academic year should join the Google Group and see the pinned post for instructions on how to contact Nick.

During the 2025–26 academic year, we will not have a PDF version of the 2nd edition available. What solutions have been written can be provided to instructors as a PDF, just as we have done with the 1st edition. However, some solutions still need to be written as the semester goes along. (This would be a great way to give back to our open-source community if you’re interested! Join the ACM Google Group to keep up-to-date on progress and to discuss how to contribute.) An activities workbook will also not be available for Fall 2025. However, PreTeXt support for worksheets that can be printed from the browser has made significant progress, and we intend to have this available for the 2nd edition as a fill-in measure. (Look for further guidance on how to use this feature in August, once we enable it on the preview version of the 2nd edition of ACM. This feature is also coming to the 2nd edition of Active Single, which Matt posted about recently.) For Fall 2026 classes, we do intend to have a PDF/print version available as well as a PDF solutions manual for instructors and a PDF/print activities workbook.

You will likely notice that the 2nd edition needs additional exercises. Our first priority is to solidify and polish the narrative and activities for the changes in the 2nd edition before doing any additional work on exercises. Many sections already have WeBWorK and pencil and paper exercises. For sections with minimal exercises, we recommend the many publicly-available open resources to select computational and conceptual exercises that fit your needs for the time being. In particular, we recommend exercises from APEX Calculus or WeBWorK’s Open Problem Library in addition to problems from other well-known textbooks. Because the depth of coverage differs across the many different versions of multivariable calculus courses, you may also consider using activities not covered in class as excellent conceptual homework problems. 

We are excited to share the finalization of the 2nd edition of ACM with the community over the coming year!

Nick Long and Mitch Keller

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Active Calculus (Single) – updates for Fall 2025

Posted on July 22, 2025 by Matt Boelkins

Several important changes are coming to Active Calculus (Single Variable) in time for the Fall 2025 semester, including a new Second Edition; at the same time, the current versions will remain fully available for the foreseeable future. If you are currently teaching with AC using the HTML at https://activecalculus.org/single/ and don’t want to make any changes, you won’t need to do anything other than update the link from which you access the HTML. The new, stable URL for the current version’s HTML (which going forward will be called the First Edition) is already available: https://activecalculus.org/single1e/. If you are using AC-alternate with the different Chapter 8, that version’s HTML will continue to be available at https://activecalculus.org/acs-8a/.

[This paragraph was updated on August 7:] The new 2nd edition of Active Calculus (Single) is now posted in HTML and PDF at activecalculus.org/acs2e/.

The second edition will only be available in electronic form (HTML and PDF) for the fall semester, with a new print version forthcoming in January 2026.  Free PDFs of the second edition workbooks will also be freely available and posted at the same time the HTML goes live. The second edition’s HTML version will soon have a stable, permanent URL at “/single2e/”, and we’ll make a formal announcement when that is live, along with a link to a single page on the site that provides all of the corresponding PDFs for the text and workbooks.

The new second edition of ACS has some significant updates to Chapters 1 and 3, and replaces the original Chapter 8 with a different chapter focused on Taylor polynomials and series. At this separate page, you can see a detailed summary of the changes between the first and second editions.

At the end of this post are several different scenarios that show how you may be impacted by these changes, depending on your plans and preferences: continue using the first edition, consider using the second edition, or use the textbook on the Runestone platform.

In upcoming posts between now and August 14, we’ll

  • share when the 2nd edition is officially live and available with a summary of updated URLs (there will also be some minor reorganization of parts of activecalculus.org);
  • share a fully updated set of new ancillary resources for ACS;
  • provide more information about the new “printable worksheets” that are available for each individual activity in the 2nd edition in the HTML format; and
  • announce more information plans for the new print version in January 2026 that corresponds to the 2nd edition.

If you have questions or concerns about anything posted here, I welcome hearing from you directly at boelkinm at gvsu dot edu or via the Google Group for instructors.

I want to continue using the first edition of AC-single

The only significant change is that the HTML for the first edition will only be available from https://activecalculus.org/single1e/. The free PDF version of the text and those of the workbooks will remain the same, as will the links to the bound copies for sale on Amazon. The main landing page for all things related to the single variable text, https://activecalculus.org/acs/, will point the reader to these options for the single1e edition.

I want to consider using the second edition of AC-single

Be sure to read the detailed summary of the differences between the first and second editions. Beyond the content and organizational differences, it’s important to note: while free PDF versions of both the textbook and workbooks for the 2nd edition will be posted, there will not be bound versions of the 2nd edition for sale on Amazon until January 2026. If the absence of a print version is problematic, you’ll likely need to wait until at least January 2026 to move to the 2nd edition.

Note that it is always fine for instructors, departments, and bookstores to print PDF copies of the text or workbook and even to sell them to students to cover the printing cost.

[August 7 update] The new stable HTML for the 2nd edition is now posted at https://activecalculus.org/single2e/.

I want to use AC-single in Runestone

The Runestone version of ACS has always used the alternate version of Chapter 8. By no later than August 8, the fully updated 2nd edition will appear at the ACS link in the Runestone library. The Runestone version of the text is the only one that has the Preview Activities rendered as interactive WeBWorK exercises.

If you are unfamiliar, Runestone is a LEAP (Learning Engineering Analytics Platform) that is an open-source platform that enables students to log into their textbook, save their work on interactives such as WeBWorK exercises, and offer instructors the opportunity to (automatically) grade those exercises. See more information in this August 2023 blog post.

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Updates on Active Calculus Multivariable

Posted on September 26, 2024 by Mitch Keller

We are excited to bring you some news about Active Calculus – Multivariable. First, Nick Long and I have taken over primary responsibility for this text, as Steve Schlicker is beginning retirement. We are grateful for the foundation that Steve laid in writing chapters 9 through 11, and his name will remain on the text as the lead author for some time. We have some exciting plans for the future of this text as a part of the Active ecosystem, which we will discuss near the end of this blog post. However, let’s begin with things that have been requested and are now available!

  • We now have a PDF of the entire text (chapters 9 through 12) available for download. Note that we have not gone through the laborious task of checking image sizes, page breaks, or formatting of WeBWorK exercises as they appear in the PDF. This is primarily a quick PDF that will get you the current content of the text in case you need to print a couple of pages or prefer to read a PDF on a tablet for annotation purposes.
  • A instructor’s solutions manual is available, thanks in large part to contributions from Beth Campbell Hetrick (Gettysburg College) and Andy Jeanson (Chandler-Gilbert Community College). You can email me to get a copy of this. As with the solutions manuals for Active Prelude and Active Single, these are designed with the solution for each activity and exercise starting at the top of a new page. We ask you to not post the full solutions manual anywhere, but you are welcome to post selected pages on your learning management system for your students to access. There are undoubtedly typos or other odd issues in the solutions manual. Please report them to us using this form (or you’re welcome to send a pull request on Github if you’re comfortable with that).
  • An activities workbook is now available for download from this site as well. Each activity starts at the top of a page. In the future, we will update to add appropriate workspace between each part of a multi-part activity, but we wanted to get a workbook into instructors’ hands rather than waiting until we were able to produce an ideal version.

In addition to the form linked above for reporting issues with solutions, we also have a form for you to give us feedback about any of the text. We are working on a project to update Steve’s original chapters 9 through 11. Part of this will to be make the graphics consistent with our vector calculus chapter 12 so that 3D graphics can be interactive. However, we are also taking a holistic look at the content. Some material from chapter 12 will migrate earlier in the text, where many have noted it would better fit. We have posted a draft table of contents for this new edition. We are on pace to have a pilot version ready for instructors to test in Fall 2025. We hope to launch the new version in Fall 2026, including having a full suite of PDFs (book, workbook, solutions manual) available and the book and workbook available for purchase in print form. Don’t worry, however, as we will maintain access to the current version for at least several more years so that you can switch to the new version on a schedule that makes sense for you.

Finally, if you’re not already, please join our Google Group. We prefer that you join from your .edu or other academic institution email address. However, we also know that not all institutional Google accounts allow joining external groups. In that case, join from your preferred email and expect an email from me asking you to email me from your institution email before being approved.

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