We do spend time in rudimentary functional analysis, and variational calculus, but this is only to highlight the mathematical basis for the methods, which in turn explains why they work so well. It is not formal, however, because the main goal of these lectures is to turn the viewer into a competent developer of finite element code. The treatment is mathematical, which is natural for a topic whose roots lie deep in functional analysis and variational calculus. Here they are then, about 50 hours of lectures covering the material I normally teach in an introductory graduate class at University of Michigan. I first had to take a detour through another subject, Continuum Physics, for which video lectures also are available, and whose recording in this format served as a trial run for the present series of lectures on Finite Element Methods. From there to the video lectures that you are about to view took nearly a year. Finite Element Methods, with the centrality that computer programming has to the teaching of this topic, seemed an obvious candidate for experimentation in the online format.
Particularly compelling was the fact that there already had been some successes reported with computer programming classes in the online format, especially as MOOCs. Articles about Massively Open Online Classes (MOOCs) had been rocking the academic world (at least gently), and it seemed that your writer had scarcely experimented with teaching methods. The idea for an online version of Finite Element Methods first came a little more than a year ago.
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