Re: online relativity course (Modified by Leigh Palmer)

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@SFU.CA>]

I taught HET 605 for Swinburne in 2001. The administration provided a
CDROM produced at Swinburne which was a compulsory part of the course.
It constituted the syllabus for the course. It was full of conceptual
errors (and many others) and was a major impediment to the students'
learning. I was not successful in convincing them of the seriousness of
their error, and because I corrected the errors and deprecated the
CDROM material for my students I was not asked to teach again.

The SAO concept, delivering such courses to people who would not
normally have access to them, is an excellent one, and I very much
enjoyed interacting with my online students in quite remote parts of
the world. One student from Australia gave birth to a child during the
semester.

The Swinburne course (as constrained by the CDROM) did not teach
relativity ab initio. Basing such a course on "Spacetime Physics" is a
much better idea. The Swinburne objective was to get to GR topics. A
now out of print book by Wheeler was a prescribed text, and it too was
excellent. Still, one bad source spoiled the experience for me. I can't
recommend that course.

Leigh

On 22-Sep-04, Pamela L. Gay wrote:

> 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