Course Design and Strategy


There is a tremendous amount of material to learn in this course!  The design of the learning strategy for the course must be chosen with this fact in mind. 

This class is designed to optimize the learning experience for students who are making full use of all of the available resources.  Note that this means that if you do not make full use of the resources, then not only will you not get the benefit of those resources but furthermore the rest of the course will not be designed optimally for you. 

As the learning strategy for this course is designed, the expectation is that students will:
  1. preview the material before class on their own (through the book and the lecture notes);
  2. attend with focus during class meetings, during which the instructor will present the ideas that achieve the greatest balance of (a) importance to the course and (b) benefits from being presented live (these are tough, subjective choices for the instructor!);
  3. review the material extensively after class (through the lecture recordings, the book, and the lecture notes), in addition to working on the assigned homework exercises.
Each of these steps assumes the previous and serves as a foundation for the next, making each of these steps critical to full learning.  If you take away any of these steps then, your experience in the course will suffer disproportionately as a result. 

For example then, the lectures (2. above) are designed on the assumption that students will have done the preview (1. above), and will move at a corresponding pace.  If you have not done the preview, then you will also find the lecture correspondingly hard to follow and will have a less effective learning experience than you could have.  The lectures are also designed on the assumption that students will subsequently review extensively (3. above); if you do not review sufficiently, then you will also find the lectures to have been insufficient, as you will likely not make the expected subsequent connections after the lectures, and not achieve the expected subsequent proficiency with the ideas and methods.  Note then, all of these sorts of possible shortcomings in your approach to the course cause disproportionate resulting problems in your experience in the course. 

Importantly, note that with this design, much if not most of the learning is expected to happen outside of the class meetings, in the students' subsequent work.  This important aspect of the learning strategy of the course is necessary due to the nature of the material, being so challenging and extensive -- there is just too much to learn, and that learning takes too much time, for it to be feasible to expect all of that learning to happen in class. 

This might be a new experience for some students, whose previous math courses might have covered less material so as to allow for the expectation that all learning would take place in class, or easier material such as might have allowed the student to fill in the blanks from the lectures with relatively low effort if any.  If you think this might be the case for you, then you are urged to make a deliberate and serious effort to think through how you will change your approach to math courses, to help you form a reasonable plan for taking full advantage of all available resources, to ensure your best possible experience in this course.  Feel free to talk to your instructor about this if you feel you need help forming this plan.