Welcome to the course Introduction to Power Electronics. I'm Professor Robert Erickson from the University of Colorado, Boulder and the Department of Electrical Computer and Energy Engineering. This course is available in both non-credit and for-credit versions. It's the first course within this specialization on power electronics. It's also the first course of our Graduate Certificate in power electronics. It serves also as the first course in a pathway specialization that can allow you to gain admission into our Master of Science Degree program. In this short video, I am going to discuss how the credit and non-credit courses work including enrollment and grading. It's very important. So I hope you'll watch the video all the way through. This course uses our textbook Fundamentals of Power Electronics. However, You don't have to buy the book to take the course. All of the material that you need is available in the videos and in the PDF files containing the lecture slides. While we're not able to formally enforce prerequisites, this course is taught at the graduate level. The basic assumption is that you are fluent in the material of circuits and electronics at the level that it's taught in a typical undergraduate electrical engineering degree. So as I mentioned, this course is the first course in a specialization called Introduction to Power Electronics. If you sign up for the for-credit version of this course, it carries the University of Colorado Course number ECEA 5700 and you can receive transcripted credit for this course. The three other courses that follow this course in the specialization are listed here. The second course is on converter circuits, the third is on control of converters, and the fourth is on design of magnetics for converters. The intent is to give you the basic technical foundation to actually build power converters in the lab. For your information, the specialization covers the same technical material that we teach in our regular on campus course that's called Introduction to Power Electronics. It's numbered ECEN 5797. We have both for-credit and non-credit versions and here's the difference between them. So you can sign up either way. If you sign up for the non-credit version, you pay Coursera the fee for the non-credit course. If you complete the assignments of the non-credit version, then you can earn a Coursera certificate of completion. If you sign up for the for-credit version, then you pay university tuition. If you complete the assignments and the examination in that course, then you can earn transcripted university credit that you can apply towards our campus Graduate Certificate in power electronics and to our master of science degree in electrical engineering. Both the non-credit and the for-credit versions give access to the same lectures homework assignments. Supplementary materials and discussion forums. To get access to the exams, you need to sign up for the for-credit version. The for-credit version also additionally gives you access to course facilitators Also known as teaching assistants, and they will hold office hours, regular office hours where you can dial in remotely and talk to the course facilitators. The non-credit version is continuously available so you can start and stop at any time. The for-credit version is scheduled into eight week sessions. So once you sign up for for-credit version, you need to finish before the eight-week session concludes. If you sign up for the non-credit version, you can transfer if you want into the for-credit version. You'll have to pay the university tuition for that for-credit version to do that. But when you do it, then any work that you've done on the homework will be automatically transferred into the for-credit version of the course. We have a performance-based admission process to our MS-EE degree program. This involves completion of the for-credit versions of the power electronics courses, the four courses of this specialization with a grade point average of at least B or better throughout those four courses. If you complete the for-credit version, then it can be applied towards that performance based admissions process. It can all the for-credit version can also be applied as I mentioned, to the university graduate certificates and towards the MS-EE degree. A little bit about changing your enrollment status. So first of all, as I mentioned, you can switch from non-credit to for-credit at anytime. One strategy might be to sign up for the non-credit version, try the homeworks, and see how they go. If you feel like you can handle the work, then you can at that point upgrade to the for-credit version. So to do that, you will have to pay the university tuition for the for-credit version. But any work that you've done in the non-credit version is automatically transferred. In the for-credit version of the course, you can drop the course within 14 days of enrolling and receive a full tuition refund. When you do this, the course then does not appear at all in your university transcript. After the 14 days, you can still withdraw from the course. At that point, you won't receive a tuition refund and course will appear on your transcript but with a greater "W" which stands for withdrawal. The W grade does not impact your grade point average and really doesn't mean anything except that we're not going to issue you a grade. You can withdraw at any time up until the point when you access the exam of the course. Once you access the exam, then you're committed and you'll be issued a grade on your transcript. At the end of the eight week session for for-credit course, your course grade is computed. If you haven't withdrawn. So your course grade is computed on whatever work you've entered and you will be issued a grade. I hope that if you don't complete the class, that you would withdrawal or drop and not just let the grade turn in automatically into an F. That's not the goal here. So please be diligent in dropping or withdrawing if needed. For this course ECEA 5700, there are three homework assignments. Basically, it's one per week or whatever pace you went to go at. You're allowed unlimited attempts to these assignments. They are auto graded and you can find out what your score is immediately and try again if you like. There are also in-video quizzes. These are just for your own edification and they're not graded. At the end of the for-credit course, there are some examination preparation materials. These are not in the non-credit version, including a practice exam. This practice exam is not graded but it has the similar conditions to the real exam. I suggest you try it and see how it goes. You can withdraw from the course at any point, including after you've done the practice exam. Then finally, we have a proctored examination which is the one that counts. Again, this is only in the for-credit version of the course. The proctored exam is similar to the homework assignments and it has a similar format. The main difference is that it's a closed book exam that it uses the proctoring service and it's a timed two-hour exam. So what you will be able to do is have unlimited submissions to the problems within the two-hour time period and get feedback on which ones are right and wrong according to the auto-grader. But when the two hours are up, then the exam is over and it will use your last submission as the final grade. So we have three homework assignments. Here's how they are weighted. So 15 percent, 20 percent and 15 percent, and then the exam is weighted 50 percent. This weighted average then determines the final course letter grade for this course and it is all really automatic or it's machine graded. The non-credit course has the same materials as the for-credit course except for the exam module. So it has the three homework assignments. It has all of the lectures and supplementary materials. To earn a Coursera certificate of completion, you have to successfully pass all three homework assignments and the typical passing threshold on the assignments is 70 percent. So what's on the course site? There are recorded lectures for the entire course. There are the slides used in each lecture, which you can download as PDF files and follow along. There are the homework assignments and some solved sample problems for additional help. There are discussion forums for each homework assignment. The first assignment relates to simulation of a switching converter and so there are some simulation files. You will need to be able to run LTSpice Which is a circuit simulation program that you can download for free. The for-credit version of the course has exam preparation materials and it has a link to the actual exam. So for the first week of class, what you should do is view the lectures for module one. Then do homework assignment number one, which is simulation of a boost converter. I look forward to your participation in the class and I hope that you find it a useful and high quality course.