Online Seminar on Undergraduate Mathematics Education (OLSUME)

Nathan Alexander describes an introductory statistics curriculum that combines logic, theory and computation to develop critical quantitative analysis. Open-source tools support an interdisciplinary process in which students define concepts and propositions, then apply statistics to social questions. The approach aims to strengthen technical skills alongside critical reasoning. The talk also introduces the structure of the critstats package and its role in a community framework for building informational data systems that help users investigate particular histories, issues and challenges.

Alice Mark examines faculty participation when mathematics departments gradually coordinate their courses. The session considers who influences the process, whether instructors can opt out, how coordination affects teaching assignments, and what it means to ask colleagues to support a shared approach. It focuses on maintaining constructive discussion when faculty agree to coordinate but differ over implementation. Participants will explore these questions and develop strategies relevant to their own course-coordination efforts, rather than receive a prescribed set of answers.

Rebecca Swanson draws on more than a decade of teaching at the Colorado School of Mines to examine both partial and complete flipped-classroom approaches. Examples span Calculus II, Linear Algebra, Foundations of Advanced Mathematics and Topology. The discussion addresses how different designs supported learning, how they extended to courses with multiple sections, and how implementation challenges were handled. It treats flipping as a flexible set of instructional choices, allowing teachers to adapt the approach to their own aims and constraints instead of adopting a single uniform model.

Dan Meyer considers the questions generative AI raises for mathematics learning after four years of rapid technological development. He argues that its novelty has been accompanied by educational adoption and institutional change falling short of early expectations, including lower-than-anticipated teacher use. The session explores what the technology can do, what students need and what teaching entails, using these questions to examine AI’s contribution to education.

Marty Weissman presents a University of California, Santa Cruz course that develops mathematics for the life sciences through models of biological dynamics. Adapted from UCLA’s LS30 course, it integrates calculus, dynamical systems and linear algebra. The seminar describes the curriculum and its active learning discussion sections, where deliberate choices range from custom dynamical-system simulators to paper exercises and blackboard work. Drawing on two years of teaching, Weissman reflects on which approaches appear to support student learning and the development of the teaching team.