The Perils of MATLAB and Online Education

As I have mentioned before, I am taking classes through extension at UCI. These are online classes and some commentary is below.

C Programming for Embedded Systems
One of the first things that comes to mind is to compare this to a class I took in the spring of 2008; there are a lot of parallels. When I started taking Cosmology and High Energy Astrophysics, I was excited. I liked the teacher's style of bringing in results from different studies, the grandness of the topic, and the anticipation I would be learning amazing things. This continued for the first three or four weeks.

In my current class, I really liked my teacher's practical approach. He extended a well known quote:

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. If [you] teach about the science or theory of fishing prior to learning to fish he will starve before he will learn.

Since I have completed one of the three weeks of instruction for this class, I can now offer some feedback.

In both of these classes my great expectations were dashed. In Astrophysics, the professor repeated himself a lot. He talked about the expanding universe and used the balloon analogy a few too many times. I remember sitting in class and not taking any notes for 40 minutes because everything was in an earlier lecture or common sense for anyone in upper division Physics. Talking about relativity can be good, but giving the same lecture multiple times to a bunch of people who already know the theory helps no one.

The teacher in C is talking about the general uses of C in embedded systems but has provided few specifics. He talked about the scope of variables, but has not broken any new ground that a basic knowledge of C would not cover. Our only assignments so far have been to introduce ourselves to each other and to list ten things around us that have embedded chips in them. While this is a nice embedded systems are everywhere activity, it is a poor substitute for actual coding.

I hope my misgivings will prove unfounded, but the class may end up being a disappointment.

MATLAB Madness
A situation came up with MATLAB. It revolves around the statement x = 7i/0. When a complex number is given to MATLAB, it will display its real and imaginary parts in the form A + Bi. In the notes, the program returned x = NaN + Infi. This means the real part is not a number and the imaginary part is infinity. However, when I entered the equation into MATLAB, I got x = 0 + Infi. I think my answer is better. I do not see a real part to x, so I do not see how it is not a number. In all this confusion, I completely missed that both of the answers are mathematically incorrect; division by zero is never allowed.

I only noticed this when a fellow student pointed it out in one of the forums. I joined the discussion, and it looks like MATLAB versions 2009a and 2010a display this differently. The teacher did not weigh in on the discussion.

Speaking of my teacher, he is not inspiring confidence. However, this could be a side effect of my teacher not being into teaching.

In our last assignment, there were eleven questions. Four of them were based upon his notes, while the other seven were based upon the notes of a professor. One of my teacher's problems was incomplete. It said "Create surface and mesh graphs for the function " but did not provide a function. When a student posted in the forum asking which function to use, he was met with silence for four days. When a reply was finally posted, it was the original student saying he was not provided a function and came to the conclusion the question should be disregarded.

Back to the notes comment above. For last week, the PDF file with notes for the week was 101 pages long. Of these, our teacher wrote 24. The rest were from Edward Neuman at the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. These notes on MATLAB and Linear Algebra are available for anyone to download and view. They are good notes and I would recommend them. However, when the majority of notes for a week and the homework are straight from someone else concerns about a teacher should rightly develop. I am a fan of citing more knowledgeable people when possible, but this goes too far. As I said before, I don't think my teacher is into teaching.

I will not let the fact my teachers are less than stellar interfere with my own effort and learning. I still have to work hard and understand everything as well as I can. Learning is my responsibility, teachers are only there to help me.

In light of my 13 day post hiatus and the content of this post, there is something I should say. I have never used academic responsibilities as an excuse for my lack of blogging and I will not start now.