Yesterday I attended my first on-line tutorial this year. Ben Mestel (course chair of M820) hold this Elluminate tutorial and I really liked it. Firstly he introduced himself and the other tutors and OU staff who also attended the on-line tutorial. Altogether 95 people attended the on-line tutorial which was amazing, because last year when I "visited" the MST209 tutorials from Maria (which were fantastic and helped a lot) about 4-8 people attended.

The purpose of those eTutorials (as they call them) is to help us students to cope with the course material, the TMA and the exam. Also Ben showed us how to submit TMAs using the University's eTMA process. He stressed that using the eTMA system does not mean that the TMA has to be prepared electronically, moreover he said that the eTMA system is able to cope with scanned TMAs as well.

Ben also pointed out that we can download a Course Guide - I have not done it yet, but I'll plan to work through the Course Guide as soon as possible.

Then we were told that we should not spend too much time on Chapter 1 as this is revision and also we should not dwell too long on Chapter 2. Chapter 3 and 4 are significant for TMA1, since the priniciple technics are introduced in chapter 4. After this, Ben introduced two topics: "Distance between two points" and "Brachistochrone". Unfortunately I was not able to follow entirely, because I was not able to understand some English words and moreover I realized that I have to repeat Taylor expansions and Order notation. I guess both topics were introduced in MST209. The interesting thing about this was that as we all know from school and also intution tells us: the shortest path between two points is a straight line. But what is the fastest path between two points? This video on youtube.com about this problem (called Brachistochrone) from a physics professor explained it.

Then the presentation was over and we were allowed to ask questions. One student asked if the exam in October would have the same level of difficulty as the TMAs. And Ben's answer was yes, but he also explained that they will take into account that for preparing a TMA we have far more time than for a TMA.

Also, a question about past exam papers came up. Ben said that they would not release the past exam papers, but they will write another Specimen Paper, so that we will have 2 Specimen Papers. Also we can attend the eTutorial on exam revision and also exam revision can be visited on the M500 weekend (which I attended the last two years and I can recommened it!).

The next tutorials are appointed with regard to the TMA deadlines (always about 14 days before deadline).