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FIX University Cultural Campus Links
Dear FIX,
With one week to go before the start of the course, we are up to 43,600 students.
There's been a fair amount of discussion about the course on my YouTube channel, where I posted three low resolution videos giving a sneak preview of the course. (You should know that Coursera streams videos at a much higher resolution than YouTube.) When we (that's me, my teaching assistants, the Stanford online teaching staff, and the staff of the course platform Coursera) started to plan this course early in the year, we faced a lot of decisions. So much about MOOCS is new -- in particular I am not aware of anyone who has given a MOOC on mathematical thinking -- that we quickly decided that for this first attempt, we'd adopt a WYSIWOSG approach: What You See Is What Our Students Get. Having given courses on this topic for several decades, that meant that I'd structure the course as much as possible as one of my regular courses, except that I'd be separated from the students by many miles of ether rather than a few feet of air. After we see how this first trial goes, we can start to iterate in future years to see how we can improve things.
For those who are interested, I've been keeping a blog about the development process: mooctalk.org. The most recent post (August 31) discusses the consequences of starting with a WYSIWOSG approach.
For the benefit of the 6,000+ students who registered since my last email a week ago, I'll repeat what I said then.
There are two videos that may interest you. In one of them, Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller of Stanford's Computer Science Department talks about the creation of the platform that supports this course.
In the other one, former Stanford Computer Science Professor Sebastian Thrun talks about the MOOC platform he launched, Udacity.
If you want to do some preliminary reading for the course, or are one of those students who likes to have a print textbook on hand, the textbook for the course is my own, newly published Introduction to Mathematical Thinking, available from Amazon as a cheap paperback for $9.99 in the US. The textbook is not required for the course.
If you want to avoid paying postage, the UK-based bookseller the Book Depository promises to deliver it anywhere in the world for free.
Incidentally, there is no e-book version. I tried using Amazon's Kindle convertor and the result was unreadable. Commercial e-book technology cannot yet handle mathematics.
If you are wondering exactly what "mathematical thinking" is, take a look at my recent article for the Mathematical Association of America.
Both my blogs have references to other articles about MOOCs and other aspects of university-level mathematics education.
There are also some course-focused Facebook groups that students have created. One I am aware of is "Coursera Mathematical Thinking". For a while, I participated in the discussion on my Youtube channel and monitored that Facebook group, both of which were fascinating and informative. But the sheer volume of activity, coupled with a lot of pressures getting the course ready to launch, meant I had to step back a bit, and just look in on both from time to time, without contributing.
The course site is scheduled to go live at midnight on September 16/17. I'l send out another email between now and then.
Keith Devlin, instructor, Introduction to Mathematical Thinking
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