Students are expected to complete work to ensure that they arrive on the first day of the unit with a basic understanding of the concepts. This allows class time to be spent on more difficult problems. In line with the course goal of helping students learn how to learn by reading, most of this preparation is in the form of readings from the OpenStax College Physics textbook. To help students develop these skills, however, reading guides are provided on the course YouTube page.
Occasionally, however, other materials from other sources such as Wired Magazine or University of Maryland NEXUS Project Wikibook are used to supplement OpenStax. If no appropriate text sources can be found, we make a short video on the topic and post it to the course YouTube page. Starting in Fall 2016, we will be embedding these readings inside of Perusall to further help students get the most out of the readings.
After the readings, students are expected to complete a homework assignment on MasteringPhysics. This homework assignment is designed as an opportunity for the students to receive formative feedback on their understanding of the readings and involve simple problems, similar to those that would be labeled with “one-dot” in a standard textbook such as Knight or Cutnell and Johnson.
Keeping costs down for our students is an important aspect of our course. All of these references, except MasteringPhysics, are free-to-students. MasteringPhysics is $35/year but that license is good for one year and can thus also be used for P132 which uses the same software. The converse is that we have many resources from around the web which can be difficult for students to navigate. Currently, the preparation instructions are in a pdf document such as this guide for Unit 3 – Forces and from Spring 2016. However, we have ongoing efforts supported by the W.E.B. du Bois Library at UMass Amherst, to improve this interface. See the Resource optimization project section for more information on the efforts to improve our free resources.