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Hi, I'm John Terning, I'm the professor in charge of the physics 7A lectures this
quarter.
I'm doing something a little different: I've recorded one of our highest rated
lecturers, professor David Webb,
and have edited his lectures down into short segments and put them online.
I'm hoping this is going to make it a little easier and more convenient for
you to keep up with the material and prepare for the discussion labs.
So, I'd like to go over some organizational details.
The slides will be available on the course website.
Instructors and charge of
the discussion labs will be Daniel Cebra and
Antoinette Stone. There are many different discussion lab so
from smart site you can figure out which one you're registered for.
Most of them will meet in the Earth and Physical Sciences Building,
either in room 2319 if you're an A or B
section, or in 2322 if you're a C or D
section. Extra sections, ah,
are going to be held in Roesser for people who registered late.
So most of your time, five hours a week, for this course will be spent in
discussion labs with
working in small groups, and with an instructor,
practicing doing the
physics that we're covering which is about energy and interactions.
There's no assigned textbook but you can buy the notes
and activity sheets, the workbook you need for the discussion lab at the bookstore.
You'll need those for your first discussion lab.
As you already know, we're using an edX website
to distribute the lectures and also do
online questions and quizzes. We'll also be using Piazza for the
discussions. There'll be lots of practice quizzes and
a practice final from previous years for you to
study online as well, and Hayden/McNeil will also
have extra material online for you,
that's the publisher of the notes. The breakdown
of the grades: there'll be fifty percent on the final exam
there'll be 3 quizzes, which will be like your midterms,
in the discussion labs that will count for 20 percent, there'll be
weekly online quizzes that will count for 15 percent,
and questions interspersed in the lectures
will count for five percent, and your
discussion lab iinstructor will also evaluate your
performance in discussion lab, that will be a final 10 percent.
The online quizzes are your chance
to prepare yourself for the final exam, the
style of the questions will be very similar to the final exam.
You should treat these quizzes as a real test, closed books and no discussion and
questions.
So there'll be eight online quizzes that'll be available
Monday morning at 6 AM, due
Tuesday 10:30 AM, and all the questions for the
weekly lecture will be available for a full week,
but everything is always due at 10:30 AM on Tuesdays.
The final exam is going to be on Wednesday March 21st from 3:30 to 5:30 PM.
Because this is such a big course with so many students we can't
make extra exam time schedules so
if you can't attend the final at that time you should
take the course in another quarter. Because you spend so much time in
discussion lab
that is the most important thing for you to be doing
in addition to also doing your homework and
probably meeting in groups is an efficient way to learn the material:
discuss things just like you do
work in group in discussion labs. So part of your final grade will be
based on your work in discussion lab.
Discussion labs are mandatory, so
if you miss enough discussion labs you'll just
fail the course. So
if you missed two discussion labs you can only get 50 percent of your
discussion lab grade,
if you miss three without a
valid excuse then you only get 25 [percent] of your
discussion lab grade, and if you miss four or more
without an excuse then you'll just fail the course.
You can do make-ups if you have a
valid excuse then you can get a form online and
attend another section that's doing, in the same week, that's doing the
discussion lab that you missed and have the instructor sign that form for you.
As always, cheating in any form
will be taking to student judicial affairs.
So just a few words about the course website.
Here's our edX website:
"Course Info" gives you current announcements and the
slides for the lectures. If you tab over to
"Courseware" you can get individual lectures. It'll remember
where you were last, it'll give you due dates
so you can see that questions a
are due on Tuesdays, and unfortunately the computer thinks we're
in London England, so
all the times a given in Greenwich Mean Time
or Universal Coordinated Time so 1830
UTC means 10:30 AM in Davis.
So if you get into the lecture
there'll be a series a tab see you can tap across either by clicking directly
either a question or a video or just tab across to the next item
[you can] also use the arrows on the bottom to watch
to tab across. If we click to a lecture and click "Play"
you can start watching [Video: the set of answers were ]
I'll just mute that. You can see on the side that
as the video is playing it gives you
the
text so you can read along if you prefer that.
You can turn that off, you can go to high-definition
and widescreen.
If you go to the "Progress" tab
you'll see something that shows your grades on
quizzes and questions, and the "Discussion" tab
will take you to our
Piazza discussion page. I'm not checking my email every day but I will
be checking
Piazza several times a day, so if you have a question you need answered quickly
that's the best place to go to.
Also students can answer questions on Piazza
there's a space for students. If you know the answer, if you see a question and you
know the answer, to clarify something for someone else,
please jump in an answer it, and
it's sort of like a wiki you can edit other people's answers if you can improve on
them.
My office hours are going to be Monday and Tuesday 8:30 to 9:30
AM, that's in my office in Physics room 435.
So if you have any questions you can come to office hours, or
put a question on Piazza, or talk to your instructor in discussion lab.
And I hope I'll get to see all of you at some point
during the quarter face to face. Thanks and enjoy the lectures.