Thinking about enrolling in an Engineering Mathematics Distance Education course?

Computer Requirements

Hardware Requirements:

• PowerPC
• 200MB hard disk space (300 on OS X)
• MacOS 8.1 or later (MacOS X recommended)
• 32 MB RAM minimum (64 MB RAM recommended)

A list of recommended machines includes:

• Any iMac or iBook
• Any G3, G4, or G5 Macintosh
• Any Power Macintosh (G3 or faster recommended)

The minimum requirements for a PC are:

• Windows 98 or newer (98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003)
• 64 MB RAM (128MB recommended)
• 345MB hard disk space

Internet Requirements:

• Any internet connection
  (modem or broadband will work equally well)
• Each student must also have his/her own email account

• Mathematica4.2 or higher
• Netscape Navigator/Communicator 6 or higher, Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, or a recent version of Mozilla
• To unzip returned homework files you need either:

Stuffit for Macs
OR
Aladdin Expander or WinZip for PCs

Studying in an on-line Engineering Mathematics Class

For some information on the structure of the lessons and how to interact with the Mathematica notebooks, click here.

Each lesson is comprised of three Mathematica notebooks. A student works through the Basics notebook and the Tutorial notebook and then attempts a collection of problems chosen from the Give It A Try notebook. When these problems have been completed the student submits the solutions electronically as a Mathematica notebook to the C&M coursespace server, after which it is down-loaded, graded and returned .

There are also literacy sheet problems which require hand-written solutions, the purpose of these being to test how well the concepts involved are being understood.

Contact with the mentor is very important as the mentor is the students communication link with the university.

The Teaching Assistant and Mentor for the course can help with Mathematical questions and can also help solve problems that might arise in getting Mathematica code to work.

Although the student works on his/her own the course is tightly structured in the sense that there are deadlines to be met in that each homework has to be submitted by a prescribed due-date. (Some lee-way is given with the first couple of homeworks in case there are problems that need to be ironed out in getting the software to work smoothly /delays in getting the lesson discs/Mathematica code problems arising from lack of practice and so on). There is some flexibility about due-dates if there is a reason why a student might have difficulty meeting a particular deadline but note that all homeworks need to be submitted by a final deadline so that University deadlines for submitting final grades can be met.

The majority of the grade will come from homework scores. A small percentage comes from weekly contact with the mentor and the final part comes from an oral final which will test the understanding the student has acquired of the material in the course. See the grading policy page for more details.

How to enroll in an Engineering Math Course

Go to University of Illinois Engineering Online homepage for more information. If you know which course you wish to take then click on "Courses", click on the semester for which you wish to enroll, then on the course you wish to take and finally click on "Register".

Back to Engineering Mathematics Distance Learning Homepage.