Here are our guidelines and expectations for how minicourses should be run in this new online format.
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Minicourse Objectives:
The Minicourses are a series of summer lecture/problem sessions, where graduate student experts to communicate ideas that may be helpful for research level mathematics. Minicourses run for a week, and should have a clear focus and not be too broad in scope.
The topics may include computational tools, introductions to certain specializations of mathematics, overviews of new areas of research, or studies of important theorems. Topics are intended to be more specialized than a preliminary course and are aimed at being useful for research level mathematics.
One example of a previously successful course is Arun Debray’s course on characteristic classes: lecture notes and exercises are available here.
Advanced undergraduates and post doctoral researchers are welcome to participate or lead courses but should keep in mind the general intended audience is graduate students.
Minicourse Format:
Minicourses will run between mid-May and the first week of August in 2020. Minicourses are one week long (Monday-Friday), with at least one hour of lecture per day. Furthermore, an hour of office hours or group problem sessions is strongly encouraged to create an interactive component.
This summer, due to the current global situation involving COVID-19, Minicourses will be streamed online via Zoom to their audience. Unless the Minicourse leader requests otherwise, Minicourses will be advertised to the general academic community. However, Minicourse leaders will be given the option to limit the number of participants.
Minicourse leaders are strongly encouraged to enlist a TA for their minicourse for two main reasons: the first is to monitor the chat and help manage Zoom features, and the second is to serve as another expert during problem sessions and office hours. For problem sessions, we strongly recommend using Zoom's breakout room feature, and making the TA a co-host.
We recommend preparing slides (or lecture notes) if possible, and making those resources available to the participants. Minicourse leaders may also record their lectures (with participant permission) and post them online for future usage, but this is not required. Leaders can email any resources to the SMC organizers at SMC.Organizers@gmail.com to be posted on the website.