I definitely enjoying the formal study of the courses I am taking, however, I find University courses inferior to self study in many ways. There are two specific benefits to a University course:

1) Having a knowledgeable instructor at hand to answer questions.
2) Having that same knowledge base available to set the study curriculum, since that instruction can direct attention to the most important aspects of the study.

The fixed formal lecture format is not terribly effective, at least for the scientific topics that I have been studying. In this day and age, when the technology to record lectures is so pervasive and freely available, there is really no excuse for the formal and fixed lecture style still found in the classroom. In an ideal learning environment, there would be time available between concepts to work through problems and gain complete understanding of each idea before going on to the next. Such an ideal learning environment would interleave practical work, text study and lectures. Testing should be used as a metric for whether or not the material is fully understood before continuing to the next aspect of study (or returning to areas of deficiency). In University classes testing is designed to produce a grade, not understanding, something that is completely backwards.

I am also surprised to see that grading for many graduate courses is still primarily based on exams. Having spent twenty years working before coming back to school it is a rude shock to come back to such an artificial metric for success. In nowhere other but school is it considered reasonable to make the metric for success based on how quickly a student can rush through a test, with no references at hand, attempting to construct answers that are optimized for maximal marks. In industry, the kind of mistakes that are inevitable in an examination context would lead to millions of dollars of service and product maintenance costs, and get people fired.

It is asinine that there is no feedback mechanism in place to review and retest of failed or partially successful final exam material. This seems to highlight the fact that university courses do not seem to be designed with learning as the primary goal. It is not clear what that goal is.

I’m trying to plot out a potential sequence for the remainder of my M.Eng courses. Most of the physics courses only run in the fall, and I still have to take a few more engineering courses to meet the requirements for the program. The following sequence, starting with the courses I’ve taken or am now enrolled on, gets one interesting course into each time slot:

• (Fall 2014) ECE1254H Modeling of Multiphysics Systems
• (Winter 2014) ECE1229H Advanced Antenna Theory
• (Fall 2015) PHY1520H Graduate Quantum Mechanics
• (Winter 2016) ECE1236H Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Techniques (i.e. waveguides)

My plan for the rest of the program is currently:

• (Fall 2016) ECE1228H Electromagnetic Theory
• (Winter 2017) PHY2303H Quantum Theory of Solids II
• (Fall 2017) PHY2403H Quantum Field Theory 1
• (Winter 2018) PHY2203H Quantum Optics I
• (Fall 2018) ECE1243H Topics in EM Waves: Advanced Engineering Electromagnetics

I’m hoping that the ECE Introduction to Computational Electrodynamics course will run again, and if it does I’ll switch things up to accomodate it.