3.2 Course Offerings

Please direct comments to Janis McKenna.

3.2.1 Course Organisation

In the past two years, we have split all but one of the full-year graduate courses into 1 term courses and have cross-listed several 4$^{\rm th}$ year courses as graduate courses. Recent additional flexibility in the 4$^{\rm th}$ year honours program allows strong undergraduates to take some graduate courses. These changes have helped keep enrollment numbers in graduate courses above the minimum required.

3.2.2 Videoconferencing

Videoconferencing has been used in a graduate course for the first time in 2000 in Physics and Astronomy. The course used as a test was an advanced level graduate course, taught at SFU by an SFU professor connected here to UBC on the Subatomic Videoconference system. This worked acceptably well, and we and SFU have both expressed a desire to consolidate some more advanced level courses in the future. This term we are consolidating with a course taught at TRIUMF by a SFU professor. We plan to extend this to several more courses in the future and look into getting other universities also involved.

3.2.3 Attracting ``outside'' students to our Graduate Courses

In 2000/01 we have about 10 students (mainly from SFU and UNBC) taking graduate courses here in our Department under the Western Dean's Agreement (WDA) - this represents a big increase over the past years, due to aggressive advertising of our graduate courses at both of these universities. These WDA students increase our graduate enrollment figures, enabling us to offer several courses which would otherwise be cancelled due to low enrollment. The program has also enabled some of our students to take advanced level courses not offered at UBC at other WDA universities.

We should also actively promote our broad interest graduate courses to students in other Departments at UBC, and promote our specialized advanced level courses to students at other universities participating in the Deans' Western Agreement exchange program.