Yesterday the M820 books arrived via DHL and as usual instead of getting on with more pressing tasks I went straight into whizzing through the box and having a look at the new materials! I was a little bit disappointed, because there are no shiny booklets with about 50 pages, but instead nearly 400 pages hold together from a ring binder.

The contents of the box are:

• Course Notes (with 14 Chapters)
• Solutions to Exercises
• Course Handbook (I am allowed to take this into the exam and I am allowed to annoted :) )
• Programme and Course News
• Study calendar (only on A4 not on A3 paper, like in the undergraduate courses :-/ )
• Assignment Booklet I
• Letter from course team chair
• TMA Form (only one; they changed this. Instead of sending all TMA Forms at the beginning they'll send a TMA Form with every returned TMA. Good idea!)
• Specimen and solutions

And the seasoned person might have spotted that, yes, they have finally stopped sending a “general software” disc with every package – how many copies of FirstClass etc do we really need!

The course is divided into 14 chapters (all in one book and on nearly 400 pages ... spooky) and according to the index details they are:

• Preliminary Analysis
• Ordinary Differential Equations
• The Calculus of Variations
• The Euler-Lagrange equation
• Applications of the Euler-Lagrange equation
• Further theoretical developments
• Symmetries and Noether's theorem
• The second variation
• Parametric Functionals
• Variable end points
• Conditional stationary points
• Constrained Variational Problems
• Sturm-Lioville systems
• The Reyleigh-Ritz Method

I’ve had a scan through the course notes and they look like the Fernuni Hagen Course Material, as expected, since now I study on postgraduate level. That means for me that I have to work out my own strategies for solving problems (in my former courses those strategies were mentioned; whereas level 3 courses mentioned less strategies than level 2 courses).

In chapter 1, they repeat important Analyis facts, for instance, continuity, monotonic functions, L'Hospital's rule. Chapter 2 seems to extend the ideas from MST209 on differential equations and the from chapter 3 it all looks new to me.

On the course website also some units from MST209 are downloadable, that is really nice for those who are new to the OU or did not need to study MST209. It also looks as if I am able to send my TMAs as pdf files via the eTMA system, this would be great.