Hello everyone. I guess it's time to wrap up this course.
I hope that you found this course enjoyable, interesting, that you learned a
lot from it. I certainly learned a lot from teaching
this course. Well, this was the first course that I've
taught at this scale in this online fashion, and there was, there are a lot of
new things about it. The lecture format, these multiple choice
homeworks. It took, it all took a lot of getting used
to, and a lot of this getting used to happened you know as, as we were going
along so, so, you know, perhaps you have to deal with you know.
Things were a little rough as we, as we started off.
Actually, there was, there was another aspect that we have made the course much
rougher than, than I would have liked. Just as we were getting started with the
course, there were some serious and unexpected time commitments that, came up
for me. And so I actually was unable to put in
even a fraction of the time that I anticipated investing into the course, In
fact, if it is wasn't for your TA, Seung Woo Shin, the course would probably have
had to be cancelled. He really did your man's job you know
taking up all the slack and, and going well beyond the call of duty in terms of,
in terms of you know doing everything that was, that was thrown at him.
So if you enjoyed the course the person you should thank is really Seung Woo Shin.
Now, let me just, say a little bit about the course, the way it was, it was
organized. I, I think I'd said this before, at the
beginning of this, beginning of the course that, this is based on the course we teach
at Berkeley. And this is roughly the first two thirds
of that course. The last one third of that course focuses
on the physical implementation of, of qubits, of quantum gates, of measurements.
So, I have planned to, you know once this first installation of the course was over
I was, I was planning to depending upon how it went possibly offer a second you
know, segment of the course which would deal with these final four weeks.
You know this material on the physical implementation.
Possibly this, this, this second unit might contain a few other topics.
You know like well, there's a long list of such topics.
But, you know, maybe, maybe there would be about, couple of more weeks, two or three
weeks of those topics selected from, from some, some list like quantum cryptography
or you know the, more generalized description of quantum states, which are
called density matrices. Which are used to, you know which are used
to describe what quantum state look like after they well, after they decohere which
means you know it's, it's hard to keep quantum state isolated form the
environment. And the environment actually degrades the
state, or by through accidental measurements.
There is also quantum error correction, which is used to protect quantum states
from this kind of decoherence. And then there are topics like the quantum
adiabatic algorithm, that I talked about earlier in this lecture, or quantum
complexity theory. So these are all possible topics that,
that might go into such a course. But having, you know given how this course
actually unfolded, when there's time I, I also have the thought of going back and
doing this course right, you know, investing the time that I, that I had
expected to invest into making up the lectures, but also modifying all that
based on everything that I've learned from actually teaching this course.
And so to help to do that better, I've created a survey in which to get your, get
your feedback about the course your experience of this course.
So, so, in the survey, well the survey starts off with the first part asks you
about yourself. You know these are questions that you've
answered already. If you have taken a previous survey there
isn't a repeat as it that this information is that it helps put the rest of your
responses in context. So, in terms of the rest of the responses,
there are two real parts to it. One is about your, your, your feedback
about this particular, how this course went, so in things like the level of
difficulty whether it was, whether you thought it too difficult or just a breeze
or, or whether it was challenging but in a nice way, you know whether you learn a lot
of material, and even if it was challenging in a nice way, you know what,
what could have been done to help make things easier, or more interesting?
So, in the survey, you will find a lot of questions which with, with, with a, with a
number of boxes to take in terms of your, you know which option best describes your
experience. But also, you'll find space to actually
write in an answer. So if you, if you have this kind of
feedback please take the time to write this kind of feedback because it's, it's
probably the most useful thing, you know it's, it's probably the most useful way
to, to convey information back to us. Other kinds of questions in this, about
the course, you know the just in time approach to presenting math.
Did you find that useful? Did that, was that, was that too
disorienting for you? Even if you found it useful could, are
there ways, you know are there small changes we could make that would help make
it better? And then there's this whole other thing
with the multiple choice assignments. Which actually took me a lot of time to
get used to in terms of how to actually reformulate questions as, multiple choice
questions. But, what was your experience of it?
Was it, was it a good learning experience? And did it get better over, over the
course of the semester? And then there was there, there was also
this whole issue about grading policy and deadlines and so on, which you know maybe
some of you didn't enjoy. I certainly don't enjoy making those,
those policies up, The, the, the real question here is given that many of you
did not have a background in quantum mechanics.
And given the, the rate at which, you know there was new material being presented in
the, in the course. It was, it was important for you to
understand the previous material to, before you actual tackle the, the new
lectures. So, that was, that was the whole thought
behind keeping these deadlines, and you know, policies.
But, how successful it was, you know this is something that, I'd love to have
feedback from you about. Just so that, just to get a sense of how,
whether it worked well or whether there were ways that we could modify these,
these policies in the future. Finally, the next part of the survey is
about the future so what sort of material ideally you'd like to see in the course?
You know, should we focus on basic material, simple, concrete, easy to
understand or you know, it's possible also to throw in a lot of, you know there are
possible discussion about, and point is to research results.
I did a little bit of that but, you know I could do a lot more of that.
There's also philosophical aspects to quantum computing, you know what it says
about the foundations of quantum mechanics.
There's a physical implementation that I talked about.
Whether you'll be more interested in seeing much more by the computer science
side of the picture, with more algorithm and quantum complexy theory, and then this
you know there's this whole issue about assignments, exams, how these should be
organized. So, you know, there, there are various
questions to try to get your get your feedback on these.
And certainly if you have any other pressing thoughts, you know, please feel
free to, there's, there's space in the survey for you to write, write, write
those in and give us that feedback. Okay, so It's time to say goodbye.
I you know, I have to say that this was this was really quite a rewarding
experience. It was quite a it was, it was it was,
it's, it's certainly something that I intent to, at the next.
Next opportunity, we'll have the time to put something together.
I do intent to put more courses together and I hope you enjoyed this, this course.
Thank you.