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The Taught Course Centre or TCC is a collaboration between the mathematics departments at five UK universities aimed at providing a broader range of lecture courses for postgraduate students.
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The Taught Course Centre or TCC is a collaboration between the mathematics departments at five UK universities aimed at providing a broader range of lecture courses for postgraduate students.
The five collaborating universities are:
Lectures are given at all five universities and, using Access Grid 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. 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, partial differential equations, random matrix theory, and group theory. 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.
In normal operation, the TCC uses access grid 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 and audio as G.711 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.
The Oxford TCC is equipped with a Smart Board and Sympodium that can be viewed locally and transmitted to all participants of the meeting.
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