CALL FOR (OPEN) ONLINE CIMPA COURSES

An (open) online CIMPA course is online teaching at master or research level in Mathematics for selected students from developing countries. It exists in two formats:

  • A course for students from one (or several) institute located in a developing country which locally coordinates the project;
  • An “open” format for a basic Master course in the direction of a broader audience.  CIMPA will organize a call for applications to students from developing countries to attend the course. The teacher will then make a selection. The laureates will be able to interact remotely with the teacher during several weeks, ask questions about the lectures and do exercises.

Online teaching is a demanding task and CIMPA helps by offering logistic assistance to the lecturer and the audience:

  • The lecturer may come to Nice or to Nesin Mathematical Village where his/her lectures will be recorded in good conditions and put on our networks for everyone to watch and download. This step is of course not mandatory: the lecturer can also re-use the videos of a course which were recorded for another purpose, record it in other places or broadcast it (if the quality for the students is good enough);
  • We offer a well-designed open-source platform to handle online interactions with students;
  • CIMPA will support a small equipment to follow the course in good conditions to the laureates who may need it.

The teacher must think about her/his videos as the first step of the course as the value of the course lies equally in the interaction with the students. The teacher is free to suggest any appropriate method to reach this goal. We propose the following format:

  • Once the courses are recorded/broadcasted, the students are free to watch them during a period of time to be defined by the length and complexity of the course and by the availability of the lecturer;
  • During that time, a chat platform (e.g. Zulip) and web-conferencing (e.g. BigBlueButton) is set up, so the students can interact and ask their questions about the videos. CIMPA has a ready-to-use platform with all these functions;
  • Meanwhile, or at the end of this period, the students give feedbacks to the lecturer, for instance during video-sessions of corrections of exercises.

The Call for Applications is open permanently, projects of (open) online CIMPA Courses may be submitted at any time during the year.

Preparation/Submission stage:

After acceptance of the proposal: