Re: online relativity course

["Pamela L. Gay" <pgay@FAS.HARVARD.EDU>]

Swinburne Astronomy Online (out of the Swinburne University of
Technology) also offers a course on relativity (at
http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/ click on "Course Information",
"Units", and scroll to HET 605). This course should be suitable for
undergraduate astro and physics majors. I don't know if they have it,
but SAO was working on US accreditation.

As you develop your program, I'd strongly encourage you to get in touch
with the folks at SAO. They've been in the distance learning business
for at least 4 years, and they have built an excellent system for
dealing with students of all educational and technological backgrounds
who are spread across the entire globe. I've been one of their project
supervisors for several years, and I also instruct one of their major
projects (think 'senior lab') classes. I have been consistently
impressed with how they test software and new ideas on core groups of
"old-timers" with diverse locations, internet connections and computers
prior to springing it on the rest of us. This has allowed the program to
evolve with relatively few system melt downs.

If you have any questions the website doesn't answer, please feel free
to contact me. What I don't know, I can find out from one of the folks
down under.

Cheers,
Pamela

Fayngold, Moses wrote:
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> We are submitting a proposal to NSF for a distance learning course on "Special Relativity and How It Works".
>
> The course was inspired by the favorable response to one of the PI's recent book on special relativity.  You may view the proposal draft and information on the book at  http://farlan.org/projects.html  .  The project also includes a description of a new book on relativity that might be used as a textbook.
>
> We believe that in many colleges there can be found a few students interested in relativity who are unable to take course work because the topic is not offered. These students and departments would benefit from the opportunity to take such an online,  multimedia course such as this, which would hopefully be distributed through the NSF grant.
>
> We would like to know your opinions on whether such a project would be of interest to you, your department or college.
>
> We appreciate your responses.
>
>
> Moses Fayngold, PI, New Jersey Institute of Technology
> Ken Ronkowitz, Co-PI, NJIT

--
**********************************
Pamela L. Gay, Ph.D.
Instructional Laboratory Associate
Science Center, 303
617-495-2039, pgay@fas.harvard.edu