We have archived our recent ICTS course on the black hole information paradox. This was a research-level topical course covering several recent developments.
The lecture archive is here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ-YA8uOwUlACfn49iD7TvA
and some more resources including handwritten lecture-specific notes and assignments are available at: http://www.suvratraju.net/classes/black-hole-information-paradox
The course followed the lecture notes available at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.05770.pdf
Thanks to Chandramouli, for being such a great teaching fellow!
Some reflections:
I felt this was an interesting experiment in teaching. Usually for a very specialized course of this kind, we would have a small group of participants across Bangalore institutions — ICTS, IISc and RRI. But this time since it was virtual, we opened it up more widely.
So not only were there participants from other institutes in India, we had a large international group including participants from at least 10 other countries across 4 continents.
Zoom teaching can end up being a lecturer’s monologue but these lectures were pleasantly interactive because of the diversity of students.
The course did involve a lot of work. My estimate for the first time I teach a graduate course is that preparation hours:lecture hours is about 5:1 (reducing by a factor of 2 for every time the course is repeated.) For this course, I think it was more like 10:1. I’m not sure why. Perhaps one reason was that I knew everything was being recorded. In the classroom, if one messes up the algebra one can say “and if you work in units where 2=1, the answer will come out right as you can check at home.” :-) But I was uncomfortable doing this while being recorded, which obviously meant more work. Also, since there is no visual feedback, teaching virtually just requires work in organizing the subject matter better.
On the other hand, we generated a lot of archived teaching material, and hopefully this will be useful for students in the future as well.
Some institutional ideas:
Online teaching has been rightly criticized. I can see how much of a disaster it has been at school level. The most serious problem is that it exacerbates inequities among students. But even for those privileged school students who have access to stable internet, a place to study and parental support I think the last year was largely a washout. The same problems persist at an undergraduate level. Also the state uses virtual education as an excuse to reduce investment in education. So to be clear: I hold no brief for the virtual classroom, in general.
Nevertheless, I have been wondering whether, within the niche area of graduate education, such virtual courses might have an important role even when the pandemic ends.
Just within theoretical physics, most institutions have neither the faculty strength not enough student demand to run regular courses on a subject like advanced QFT. It is even rarer to have topical research courses of the kind above. So cross-institutional courses could help to bridge this gap. At this level, participants are both mature and highly motivated and so may be able to benefit from virtual courses.
In India, there has been an indefensible policy of separating research institutions and teaching institutions. These kinds of courses are a small reform that might help in the short run. (In the longer run, obviously, the policy must change.)
There are some immediate administrative issues. In this course, except for a small set of ICTS students, everyone was “sitting in”, and we couldn’t give anyone else “credit” for the course. This is because most institutions have administrative issues in accepting credit for courses from other institutions. These barriers need to be dismantled. We also need a system of sharing teaching fellows so that if X students from an institution take a course, the institution also offers grading support to avoid an undue burden on the home institution. But these don’t seem to be insuperable.
I’m skeptical of my own ideas since I’m skeptical of virtual teaching for the reasons above. Am I missing some obvious reason that this is a bad idea?