Randall Pruim
office: North Hall 284
E-mail: rpruim@calvin.edu
You can also message me in Teams if you prefer.
Monday - Friday, 2 - 5 pm, via Teams.
I will maintain an email list of all students registered in this class and will occasionally use it to distribute information and reminders of various things pertaining to this course. If you prefer to read your email from an account other than your calvin student account and do not have it set up to forward automatically, send me email with the email address you prefer.
Please check your email daily. You are responsible for any information communicated via email.
Note: I plan to send email to both our course list and to MS Teams, at least to start the term. That way you will have two places you can find it. If that redundancy is annoying, we can revisit this.
MS Teams will be our main platform for interactive remote learning. Remote class sessions will happen here, for example. But Teams can be used for other things as well:
In addition to this home page, I will also maintain a list of web resources pertaining to this course. You are responsible for any information appearing on the course web pages. Items I have prepared and maintain online include
daily dope sheets which give the details for each day.
a list of homework assignments and due dates.
information about tests and exams (appearing shortly before each test date).
For quick access to these and other resources, see the navigation bar at the top of this page.
I won’t be using Moodle as the primary organiztional structure for this course, but I’ll put a link there to the online materials, and we will use the quiz feature of moodle for some quizzes, homework, and tests.
You should already have received an invitation to Gradescope. Gradescope (https://www.gradescope.com/) is a system for submitting homework. Basically you scan your hand-written work to a PDF or upload PDFs that you create some other way (Word, RStudio, etc.) Gradescope provides a nice grading interface and has the potential to give you better feedback than most other systems I have seen.
Some instructions/tutorials
Note: Please take two important steps to make grading work as smoothly as possible.
Submit your work as a PDF. Gradescope allows you to submit other types of files, but they are harder to work with for the grader. If you work in RStudio or Word, simply save your work as a PDF. Hand-written work can be converted to PDF using one of many online tools or an MFD on campus. Here are a couple examples of ways to create PDFs.
Identify which pages of your submission have work for each problem. This way, it is much easier for the grader to grade one problem at a time without spending lots of time trying to locate your work.
Gradescope can also handle things like multiple choice and the like, but for those sorts of items, we are more likely to use Moodle or WebWork, I think.
If you are having difficulty with any portion of the course, do not hesitate to contact me. This is especially important in the interim schedule.
We will be using online resources for this course. These will include
Data are critically important to all sorts of scientific and engineering investigations. In this course we will learn some of the most important elementary methods for obtaining information from data. In this course students will
Grading will be based on the following approximate weighting:
Homework, Labs, Quizzes, etc: 30%
Mid-term: 25%
Final Exam: 45%
When we need a statistics package in this course to ease our calculations or visualizations, we will use a program called R. R is a very powerful statistical tool and programming language and is being actively developed by statisticians from all over the world who contribute to the main program, its interface, or the many add-on modules (called packages) that are available to handle specialized tasks. R is free and available for Mac, PC, or Linux. It has also been installed on the computers in the Mathematics and Statistics Computer Lab (basement of North Hall) and on some other machines around campus (CS lab and Engineering lab, I think).
The RStudio company has provided an excellent integrated development environment for R. This is the current best and easiest way to use R. Furthermore, we have set up an RStudio server on campus that allows you to run R in a web browser without any need to install the software yourself. Your session is restored each time you return, and you can work on multiple computers without losing your work when you move from one to another.
If you prefer to install R and RStudio on your own machine, the software is free and easy to install on Macs, PCs, and linux boxes. You can get R at http://cran.r-project.org/ and and RStudio at http://rstudio.org/download/desktop. You will also need to install a few R packages, most notably:
Let me know if you want to install R and RStudio locally and have any trouble.
Occasionally there are special circumstances that require that the class policies be adjusted for a particular student. In such cases, it is the responsibility of the student to inform me of the situation as soon as possible, so that the appropriate arrangements can be made. This includes, but is not limited to, students with documented disabilities.
Calvin University has a continuing commitment to providing reasonable accommodations for students with documented disabilities. Like so many things this fall, the need for accommodations and the process for arranging them may be altered by the COVID-19 changes we are experiencing and the safety protocols currently in place. Students with disabilities who may need some accommodation in order to fully participate in this class are urged to contact Disability Services in the Center for Student Success (disabilityservices@calvin.edu) as soon as possible to explore what arrangements need to be made to assure access. The three of us (student, instructor, and Disability Services) will work together to come up with an appropriate solution.