I’ve completed the Math Academy course Multivariable Calculus, my seventh Math Academy course thus far. As is my wont, I’m posting another update on my Math Academy experience, along with miscellaneous comments on matters Math Academy-related. (For a list of all my Math Academy posts, along with all my certificates of completion and activity logs, see my (newly-created) Math Academy page.

This completes my Math Academy calculus education for now, with Multivariable Calculus extending the material in Calculus I and Calculus II to cover partial differentiation and integration across surfaces and volumes (among other topics).

As I usually state: Not everyone will share my opinions on Math Academy, and not everyone will want to use the Math Academy system as I do. But my comments may be useful or interesting to at least some people.

More skipping school

According to my activity log, I averaged just under 30 XP per day, with a lot of variability (standard deviation of over 21). I didn’t do any work at all on 41 days out of 166, about one day out of four. I retired from my job during this period, and you’d think that this would mean that I could do more Math Academy work. In fact I took advantage of retirement to just goof off on lots of days. I’ve recently tried to pick up the pace and do at least some Math Academy work every day.

Quizzes really kicked my butt in this course: There were a total of 32 quizzes, and I had to retake 17 of them, just over half. As a result, I ended up doing lots of reviews: 310 reviews vs. 118 lessons.

Changing my mind on flexing my progress

While I was taking Multivariable Calculus I joined the “Math Academy 25K club”; that is, I accumulated a total of 25,000 XP. I had previously posted on X about hitting 20,000 XP, and I posted about hitting 25,000 XP on the “flex-your-progress” channel of the Math Academy discord. Discord user “alewis4214” pointed out that I had previously somewhat looked down on such flexing, preferring to look instead at courses completed.

As is apparent, I’ve since changed my mind. I don’t plan to post every 1,000 XP, and I certainly won’t be posting my daily progress (as some people do in the Math Academy community on X). However, I‘ll likely flex a bit when I hit 30,000 XP, and I’m happy to see others post their progress as well.

The state of Math Academy

As has been their practice, the Math Academy staff doesn’t post product announcements on the Math Academy website, and they’ve stopped posting status updates on X regarding future courses. Thus some people in the Math Academy discord are getting frustrated that courses previously promised, most notably Machine Learning I, have not yet been released and do not have current projected release dates.

At this point it’s not productive to speculate about future Math Academy courses. As I’ve noted previously, Math Academy has a relatively informal development process, and items in progress are likely to be temporarily set aside to deal with other items of higher near-term priority.

One of those items is discussed on the recent Math Academy podcast “From Families to Schools.” Math Academy is not actively marketing their service to schools, but they’ve received a lot of interest from schools of various types (both public and private). As a result, Jason Roberts has been spending a lot of time doing one-on-one calls with and demos to those schools. He’s also been working with others at Math Academy (most notably Sandy Roberts) to develop more formal ways to onboard schools and smooth the process of getting their students enrolled. (Some school representatives have resorted to enrolling themselves as “parents” and then enrolling students as their “children.”)

Needless to say this is all very time-consuming, and further impacts other work needed to finish and release new courses. It’s just another reason not to expect Math Academy to commit to future release dates. The service is what it is, and prospective students should evaluate it based on the current course offerings and not on what’s been discussed and promised in the past.

That’s it for now. I’m doing Probability and Statistics next, and will post my next update in a few months when I complete it. As I’ve previously written, my goal is to finish that course before the end of 2026. At that point I will be close to celebrating my 2-year anniversary on Math Academy and will face a decision regarding what to do next.