Questions may be submitted using the form at the following link:

Submit Question Form.

The instructor's most important activity is to clarify content to students and supplement available information. 

Instructional materials are designed to provide a structured stream of questions, activities and solutions/answers as the student engages the course content. 

When you as a student have a question that isn't answered by the activity, you are encouraged to pose a question that documents what is and is not understood.  This provides the instructor with the information required to focus a specific response tailored to the specific need of the student.  It is recommended that you use the Submit Question Form for this purpose.

The instructor normally responds as promptly as possible to routine submitted work, often on the same day and nearly always by the end of the day after the work is submitted, and does so seven days a week.

I claim to be moderately well-educated in my field.  Here are my academic credentials:

B.S. Mathematics, Case Western Reserve University

(undergraduate minors in Physics and Philosophy; mathematics specialties Rational Mechanics, Mathematical Physics)

M.S. Mathematics, Case Western Reserve University

(standard PhD qualifier-level courses in Abstract Algebra, Topology, Real Analysis, Complex Analysis.  Primary subsequent concentration in Complex Analysis)

Additional graduate work in Physics

That's the end of the official information.  It's really all you need and you're not required to read what follows, which is a concise if wordy synopsis of the development of my distance courses, and a little personal information.

I’ve been teaching at Virginia Highlands Community College for a long time.

My present distance courses are the present implementation of a process that began when the first desktop computers became available.

As the technology available to me progressed from the old Apple II computers to PC’s and DOS, then to computers with hard drives running Windows and the early implementation of onsite computer networks, and soon after that to the development of the early Web, the advent of CD’s and later DVD’s, wikis (which I heard about early but about which nobody at the time could give me any information on how to implement so I followed another route), the increasing availability of broadband Internet with the ability to convey increasingly smooth and detailed video, and now to the growth of 3G and 4G networks, I have developed my courses to make use of what is available to a sufficient number of students.  

I’m not sure I kept that paragraph to 140 characters, but I’m not inclined to use abbreviations that will become obsolete in a few years. If you’re accustomed to tweets I probably lost you on the second line. Fortunately there’s nothing there you really need to know, but some of it might provide you with useful, if not entertaining, perspective. The same might be said of the next paragraph, which describes how the progress of the technology impacted the development of my courses.

Early word processing capabilities made it possible to develop content and problem sets. Programming options soon allowed me to randomize problems and create useful simulations. Availability of a local network opened the option to distribute content on campus and in class. The advent of the Web facilitated broader distribution. Writeable CD’s came down in price to $18 each (a price that quickly dropped) at about the time 30% of my students had CD drives on their PC’s, and with the availability of moderately priced video capture cards it became possible for the first time to distribute video information to significant numbers, and begin to offer courses comparable to those taught in the classroom. Blackboard came along but their vision at the time didn't appear to extend beyond allowing instructors to post a few documents, to be uploaded one at a time; with no concept that it might be useful to upload multiple documents (at that time I had about 100,000 web pages and my only option would have been to upload them one at a time, at dial-up speeds). 

Blackboard, after a very slow start in its early years, has developed some potentially useful features such as discussion boards, wikis (a full decade after they first became avaialble), and other collaboration tools. They eventually came along with problem-randomizing tools, which are however far too cumbersome to use on the scale I can achieve through my own web. They have a variety of features for administering tests and quizzes, but no efficient way of interpreting constructed solutions submitted by students (no fault of Blackboard; nobody has that). Constructed solutions being, I believe, the only way to evaluate high-level student learning, I do not administer tests or quizzes with Blackboard's tools. After developing a usable gradebook they followed up with some completely unusable implementations, but have in their last couple of versions provided a pretty good gradebook, which is now used with all courses. Bottom line on Blackboard: Blackboard’s collaboration and communication tools are very good and will likely prove valuable later in the course, I am ready to implement them when the need arises, but these tools will not be used at the beginning of the course. The Blackboard gradebook will be used.

Right now I have hundreds of hours of videos ready to post to the Web as soon as I think it would benefit my students to do so. Within the last year I've developed over a hundred additional hours. I can easily encode these videos to various formats, and of course they easily upload to YouTube and similar services. However the videos were and are designed to run on a computer screen, preferably in full-screen mode, and they still run far more efficiently from a disk or a memory device than over even moderately high-speed broadband. The content of these courses is not appropriate to small screens.  Even with 4G my students tell me the videos are hopeless on a smartphone, has the above-mentioned disadvantage of a small screen (though the resolution and video quality of this and other similar devices is impressive). So you’re going to need to buy DVD’s (they are produced in-house and are inexpensive) to get videos. My on-campus students will let me know, believe me, when it’s time to move the videos online, but the technology just isn’t quite there yet. If I move the existing videos online, I know that many students, out of habit, will lost needless hours buffering, uneven video and other frustrations that are absent when the videos are run as intended on a full computer screen while housed within the computer. 

I do plan, beginning if Fall 2013, to begin posting short videos in answer to selected questions.

Webassign and masteringPhysics are two widely used online homework utilities. Some of my most respected colleagues across the state have had good experiences with one or the other. However I've looked at both many times over the years, hoping that they would develop a certain critical level of artificial intelligence, and they have not yet managed to do so. My students confirm what I think I already know, that each of these utilities has a system that’s easy to beat, and that under time pressure students will do exactly that, learning very little in the process and not getting their money's worth.  Without more positive feedback from students I’m not require my students to spend money on these programs. I’ll stick with solutions I can evaluate and to which I can respond, using the most efficient means to do so.

The technology we are going to start off with in this course is very rudimentary.  As you will see very shortly, we will be communicating by text documents, which you will submit and I will review and post, with my comments, to your portfolio. Plain old unformatted text can convey all the information necessary to the communication process, in what has proven to be the most efficient way. You’ll see how that works.

OK, I started with information about me and ended up with my courses. I suppose it’s all relevant. But back to me:
If I’m old enough to have been teaching in the days of Apple II’s then I’m old enough to have grandchildren, and I have a middle-school-aged grandson who has the sort of aptitudes and interests that could make a good engineer (he can be a really valuable assistant in the lab), if he can limit his time on video games and other distractions. I mention this along with advice to curb your own appetite for diversion. If it takes time away from math and physics, and it needs to be strictly limited.

I played a lot of sports when I was younger, most of them adequately, some fairly well..  I stay in fairly good shape by lifting weights, swimming and hiking, but the heel spurs I developed on the basketball court (one of my just-adequate sports) limit running and jumping (except when the grandson decides to throw the football over my head and I have to go for it to teach him some respect, though it doesn’t always work out). I still have a low-handicap golf swing and dust it off every few years; so far it seems to be intact, but the short game doesn’t hold up under infrequent use.

I have a wife and two daughters, both of whom graduated from good schools with degrees in psychology (not sure what that says about me). Both daughters married computer guys, both now well into their prime years, both with extraordinary physical and athletic skills, and both smarter than I am, but with whom I nevertheless get along.

My main concern about students:  Most students simply do not allot the necessary amount of time for the course, and procrastinate themselves into an unfortunate result, though this is less true of students who are succeeding in their programs at the top universities in Virginia. I find student failure for this reason to be disturbing but have not found a way to counter this tendency. Students who from the beginning show the discipline necessary to do the work in a timely manner, and who have the prerequisite knowledge, have a high success rate, and this leaves me much less disturbed, to the extent that while I deeply regret it when students do not succeed, I very much enjoy what I do.