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1.1.2 How to study


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Learning is fundamentally an individual process, where every student has to find out himself what is the most efficient method to understand and assimilate new concepts. Experience however shows that major steps are taken when a theory is first exposed by the teacher (in a regular classroom, a video-lecture or a syllabus), later reviewed and discussed with peers (best accross the table during coffee break, or if this is not possible, in a video-conference, during user forum discussions or even a computer quiz) and finally applied to solve practical problems.

The educational tools, which have been developed to study the course on-line reflect this pedagogical understanding. They can be combined in different manners, using technology to provide flexibility to study at the place, time, pace and level that best suits every learner. The progress made by every learner is continuously monitored with a system of bonus points: they reward original contributions from different activities, including user forum discussions and assignments that are performed with the help an corrections from a human teacher. Particularly nice solutions will be selected for reference and shared for discussions with the rest of the class.

An example showing how you can study the material during a typical day of an intensive course involves three distinct phases; those marked with an asterisk$ ^*$ require that you login to enjoy full pedagogical support.

* Passive learning (1h).
This is when new concepts are first brought to you and you only have to carefully follow the teacher's line of thought. In this phase, you may combine
* Active learning (2h).
Following the passive phase, you are meant to question the validity of the new concepts, verify the calculations and test parametric dependencies.
* Problem based learning (5h).
Having understood the principles, a new skill is finally acquired by solving practical problems. Select USER: login to open your personal account and list your problem set under WORK: assignments. Each exercise can be edited in your browser by clicking on the identification number (e.g. 1.00): below the handout, different windows invite you to edit (alt. cut-paste from an editor) and then submit your solution to different compilers: Finally, be sure to submit only one input window at any time and always compile your work before you navigate further in the syllabus or in the forum. Sometimes the Back button of your browser may restore data that has been lost... but don't count on it! As soon as your solution is ready or when you need a specific piece of advice that only the teacher can provide, click on the CheckMe button (appearing on the left of every WORK: assignment after the first compilation) and press Submit Check (at the bottom of the table) to send your solution for correction to the teacher. Take into account the corrections that will be returned after a couple of days until the solution is accepted and your exercise is signalled as passed.
The amount of work in each module is sufficiently large that it is usually not possible to complete all the course requirements within the short duration of an intensive course; rather than proceeding sequentially, it is then important that you start at least one assignment before every topic is discussed in a tutorial / video-conference. Remember that these are not lectures and tend to be useless if you are not at all familiar with the course material.
* Individual work (1 week).
In an intensive course, one extra week will be necessary to complete all the work for the assignments. Combine the e-learning tools until you meet the course requirements. Finally, please don't forget to submit your course evaluation allowing us to improve the content in the future.
* Project (1 week).
Regular students are given an opportunity to apply their newly acquired skills in a topic that could be of interest for their own research. The intention is to reward taking a risk (stricktly limited to one week), to assess whether some tools could potentially result in an useful development in the frame of their PhD thesis. A small report with no more than six A4 pages will be published under the course main web page.

SYLLABUS  Previous: 1.1.1 Motivation  Up: 1.1 About this course  Next: 1.2 Differential Equations