HOME

TheInfoList



Click Here for Items Related To - Taught Course Centre
OR:
Taught Course Centre on:   [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Amazon]

{{Use dmy dates, date=April 2022 The Taught Course Centre or TCC is a collaboration between the mathematics departments at five UK
universities A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase ''universitas magistrorum et scholarium'', which ...
aimed at providing a broader range of lecture courses for postgraduate students.


Members

The five collaborating universities are: *
University of Bath (Virgil, Georgics II) , mottoeng = Learn the culture proper to each after its kind , established = 1886 (Merchant Venturers Technical College) 1960 (Bristol College of Science and Technology) 1966 (Bath University of Technology) 1971 (univ ...
*
University of Bristol The University of Bristol is a Red brick university, red brick Russell Group research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Society of Merchant Venturers, Merchant Venturers' sc ...
*
Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a ...
*
University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest university in contin ...
*
University of Warwick , mottoeng = Mind moves matter , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £7.0 million (2021) , budget = £698.2 million (202 ...
Lectures are given at all five universities and, using
Access Grid Access Grid is a collection of resources and technologies that enables large format audio and video based collaboration between groups of people in different locations. The Access Grid is an ensemble of resources, including multimedia large-format ...
technology, students at each of the other four institutes may participate with each lecture. The TCC was set up in 2007 with funding from the
EPSRC The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical sciences, mainly to unive ...
. Twenty six courses were made available to students in the first year of the collaboration, with topics from diverse areas of mathematics including
number theory Number theory (or arithmetic or higher arithmetic in older usage) is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and integer-valued functions. German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) said, "Math ...
,
partial differential equations In mathematics, a partial differential equation (PDE) is an equation which imposes relations between the various partial derivatives of a multivariable function. The function is often thought of as an "unknown" to be solved for, similarly to ...
, random matrix theory, and
group theory In abstract algebra, group theory studies the algebraic structures known as group (mathematics), groups. The concept of a group is central to abstract algebra: other well-known algebraic structures, such as ring (mathematics), rings, field ...
. One of the aims of the project was to encourage contact between postgraduate mathematics students at the five universities and set up future collaborative work.


Configuration

In normal operation, the TCC uses
access grid Access Grid is a collection of resources and technologies that enables large format audio and video based collaboration between groups of people in different locations. The Access Grid is an ensemble of resources, including multimedia large-format ...
technology for video conferencing using the proprietary IOCOM software suite. The lectures take place in the virtual venue named ''Maths TCC''. These lectures may be recorded upon request if permission from participants is obtained in advance. TCC lectures normally transmit video streams using
H.261 H.261 is an ITU-T video compression standard, first ratified in November 1988. It is the first member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T Study Group 16 Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG, then Specialists G ...
and audio as
G.711 G.711 is a narrowband audio codec originally designed for use in telephony that provides toll-quality audio at 64 kbit/s. G.711 passes audio signals in the range of 300–3400 Hz and samples them at the rate of 8,000 samples per second ...
for compatibility with the freely available AG3 software. Each Access Grid session is paired with a Jabber/XMPP session on the Access Grid Support Centre (AGSC) Virtual Venue Server. The XMPP session allows instant messaging with other participants allowing fault diagnosis or communication without interrupting a session.


Oxford

The Oxford TCC is equipped with a
Smart Board Smart Technologies (stylized as SMART Technologies) also known as Smart, is a Canadian company headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and wholly owned by Foxconn. Founded in 1987, Smart is best known as the developer of interactive whiteboar ...
and Sympodium that can be viewed locally and transmitted to all participants of the meeting.


Events

* January 21, 2008 : TCC Number Theory Event Day was held at Bristol and students were given a chance to talk about their research to their peers and share ideas. * May 21, 2013 : Graduate TCC Conference in Number Theory was a successful continuation of the aforementioned event.


See also

* MAGIC (postgraduate mathematics) a similar project with a different group of UK universities


External links


The TCC websiteThe Graduate TCC Conference in Number Theory website
College and university associations and consortia in the United Kingdom Taught Course Centre Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Grid computing projects Mathematics education in the United Kingdom Organisations associated with the University of Oxford