What makes a college course popular or unpopular? I’ve long been interested in courses for non-science majors that satisfy “general education” requirements, their aim being to foster overall scientific literacy and to convey an understanding of topics that are important to society. I often teach such courses at the University of Oregon, for example a … Continue reading Online courses, supply and demand, and academic integrity
On a Sunday evening in March, nine months ago, I sat on an airport floor in Los Angeles staring at my laptop, attending an online meeting of the University of Oregon’s faculty union, facing the possibility of going on strike the next day. In August, I wrote emails trying to persuade the university administration not … Continue reading Remembering the year when I almost went on strike
Does homework matter, in a college gen-ed science course? I’ve been thinking more about this question over the past year or two, as AI tools are able to quickly and correctly answer nearly all questions I could pose to students (see this 2024 post, for example, or the examples below). I often teach general-education courses … Continue reading Some data on homework and its correlations
Last term, I taught The Physics of Solar and Renewable Energies, a course for non-science-majors at the University of Oregon. I’ve taught this course several times and I wrote a blog post about it in 2021 (link). Here are some thoughts on this Spring’s iteration. Enrollment for this course fluctuates between about 50 and 150 … Continue reading Course Recap: Physics of Solar and Renewable Energies, Spring 2025
How does public funding for science work in the United States? How much money is there? Who gets it, and how? How much does a graduate student cost? Even normally, science funding is a rich topic worth exploring, and now, as the president is attempting to radically change the structure of science in the U.S. … Continue reading An Informal Overview of US Science Funding
How many out-of-state (non-Oregon-resident) students are there at the University of Oregon (UO)? This is an easy question to answer: about 9000, or about 45% of the total undergraduate student population. (Source; select “Class level”.) This is high but not unusual for similar public universities; as I plotted a few years ago, we have company … Continue reading Are we missing 400 students?
Last quarter, I taught for the first time the first term of the introductory undergraduate physics sequence, the standard “physics with calculus”:” class that exists in some form at nearly every university. Usually I teach courses for non-science majors (on renewable energy, for example) or graduate courses (on biophysics, for example), so this was a … Continue reading The most important, and the most pointless, course I’ve taught
Last term (Fall 2024) I again taught the computational image analysis course I developed a few years ago (see 2021, 2022). It was again a mixed graduate and undergraduate course, this time with an enrollment of 18: 14 graduate and 4 undergraduate. For a primarily graduate elective course, this is a large number of students; … Continue reading Image Analysis Course Recap, Fall 2024
Salary negotiations are currently underway at the University of Oregon (UO) between the faculty union and the administration. If this sounds familiar: graduate student salary negotiations concluded earlier this year. Two weeks ago, the administration emailed a description of its perspective on faculty pay that included some interesting data and graphs, such as the amount … Continue reading Is Our University President Poorly Paid?
On January 5, 2024, the graduate student union at the University of Oregon (UO) announced that they would go on strike, giving notice that it would begin on January 17. On January 15, the union and the university administration reached a deal, averting in the nick of time a strike and the massive disruption that … Continue reading A strike, averted
The Eighteenth Elephant 