Calculus business applications examples

Business Calculus by Dale Hoffman, Shana Calloway, and David Lippman is a derivative work based on Dale Hoffman’s Contemporary Calculus. The course covers one semester of Business Calculus for college students and assumes students have had College Algebra. Students will learn to apply calculus in economic and business settings, like maximizing profit or minimizing average cost, finding elasticity of demand, or finding the present value of a continuous income stream.

This course package is delivered either in Lumen OHM, or can be imported into your LMS (Canvas, Blackboard, D2L, Moodle). This course also contains video examples created by James Sousa (mathispower4u.com).

Topic Overview

This course is delivered in 4 modules including a review of functions (no trig) and the following topics:

Module 1: Review

• A review of the basic toolkit of functions including transformations, and compositions

Module 2: The Derivative

• Instantaneous rates of change
• Limits and continuity
• Applications of Rates
• Formulas for differentiation
• Second derivatives
• Optimizations
• Applied Optimization
• Tangent line approximation, elasticity of demand
• Implicit differentiation, related rates

Module 3: The Integral

• Definite integrals
• The fundamental theorem of calculus
• Formulas for integration
• Substitution
• Integration by parts and using tables
• Applications of integrals – area, volume and average value
• Applications to business
• Differential equations

Module 4: Functions of Two Variables

• Calculus of functions of two variables
• Optimization

Length: One semester

Delivery: This course has been taught online and face to face

Online Content

Each section has an algorithmic problem set delivered by Lumen OHM, a set of supporting videos and text.

One section

Section 1.1 Review of Functions

Online Practice Problems

Online homework problem set.

Online Assessment Features

Many questions in the Lumen OHM libraries are randomized, algorithmic questions. Students get immediate feedback after they submit an answer. Question types include:

• Entering an integer, fraction, decimal
• Graphing
• Reading information from a graph
• Multiple choice
• Free-writing (instructor graded)

Graphing question	Immediate feedback

Because of the open license on the libraries of questions in Lumen OHM, you are also free to edit and create your own questions with the question writing tools.