Dear Students,

 

first of all I hope you are all safe and healthy at this challenging time. The extraordinary measures that the University has taken in response to this health crisis, such as dorm closures and transition to online courses, are put in place to protect our health and safety. For this reason, we have to learn to navigate through the challenges that their implementation adds to this already difficult and anxiety-inducing situation. My heart goes to all of you, in particular to those who have/had to go through a difficult and long journey home, or that have to put up with being very far away from family and friends amidst these hardships.

 

This announcement serves as a first outline of the new course policies. The vast majority of these policies are tentative and subject to your feedback, which is encouraged and appreciated even more so than in standard times.

 

Lectures: I intend to resume lecturing at our normal class schedule, MWF 10-10:50am CST, on March 23, 2020. Our class meetings will take place on the ZOOM platform, and will be accessible and advertised from Canvas webpage. I intend to have two TEST meetings on Wed March 18 and Fri March 20 at our standard class time. This will give an opportunity to set your ZOOM account up before actual classes start.

I expect participation from the students, so you should possibly have a working audio link. I appreciate if you decide to have a video stream as well as it helps me to get realtime feedback on what I teach, but it will be totally at your discretion. Please let me know if you have questions about ZOOM setup. The lecture will be very similar to our class lecture, you will have lecture notes beforehand (Chapter 6 is now ready for downloadPreview the document) and I will write on a virtual board (iPad software GoodNotes) while teaching that day’s subject. One point which will differ is that will announce beforehand which exercises I want to discuss each day, so that you are encouraged to discuss and present your approaches and solutions. This will help us make the class more interactive. In addition you are welcome to interrupt at any time and ask for clarifications - in fact it is vital as I will have a harder time gauging your understanding otherwise. More details on lectures later on.

At least initially, I plan to record the lectures, so those of you who are in inconvenient time zones can re-watch the lecture 

Office hours:  I will hold office hours in the form of ZOOM meetings as well, at the same times we have been using throughout the semester, see main page here. In particular the Thu help session will also be offered and it will be collaborative much like the traditional one. I am also available for office hours by appointment. In particular this is an option for those of you in inconvenient time zones.

Homework:  we keep the same policy of one weekly assignment at the end of each week of effective lecturing. Submission will now be online, in the canvas assignment page or as an  email to the instructor (me). Possibly send a scanned or typed pdf version of your work though I will also accept other formats. A small change is that I will be  the one grading the homework from now on (but it won’t really change much)

Exams: I still plan to have a midterm on April 2 and a takehome final. The inclass portion of the midterm exam will be turned into a “on-demand”, short turnaround type, do it at home - assigment (it will be open notes, no collaboration). More details on this later. The takehome portions will be much like the original takehome, but submission will be online instead of paper based.

More details on all items above, and possible other items I have not thought about yet at this time will be communicated later

Our class has been a highlight of my weekly schedule and has stimulated me both intellectually as a mathematician and as an instructor and mentor. The sense of purpose that comes whenever I witness each/every one of you succeed in the understanding of this beautiful and difficult subject is enormously rewarding. I will work as much as possible to make sure that the online version of our class keeps being stimulating and rewarding for all of us.

With best wishes,

Francesco