Additional resources¶
None of the material below is required. All of it is there for when the textbook explanation of something has not clicked and you want to hear it a second time, in a different voice.
WileyPLUS¶
Homework for this course is set and graded in WileyPLUS, so the one genuinely non-optional item on this page is getting into it and staying in it.
Start from Canvas: click Wiley Course Resources. That is the entry point — it begins registration and lets you purchase access directly from Wiley. Going to Wiley's site independently risks registering for the product rather than for this section, which is tedious to unpick.
An access card bought at the bookstore works too, and you redeem its code through that same link. Two cards exist:
| WileyPLUS access card | ISBN |
|---|---|
| Single semester | 9781119798590 |
| Multi-semester | 9781119798606 |
The single-semester card is all this course needs. The multi-semester card extends access past one term, which only matters if you expect to use the same Wiley title again.
- WileyPLUS — getting started (video) — Wiley's own orientation for students: registering, finding your assignments, submitting answers, and how the attempt and feedback mechanics work. Ten minutes now saves an evening later, particularly if you have not used WileyPLUS in a previous course.
Deadlines are enforced by WileyPLUS itself and I cannot see a submission that was never made, so treat a technical problem as urgent: email me before the deadline, not after.
Simulations — try these first¶
Physics simulations are unreasonably effective for electricity and magnetism, because the fields you are asked to reason about are invisible. Building a circuit and watching the current is worth a great deal of reading.
- PhET DC circuit construction kit — build circuits, put meters on them, watch what Kirchhoff's rules actually say. The single most useful link on this page for chapters 26–27.
- PhET physics simulations — the full collection, including charges and fields, Faraday's law, and geometric optics.
- Lenses and mirrors ray tracing — drag an object around and watch the image move. Use this alongside chapter 34; ray diagrams are much easier to trust once you have played with one.
Video lectures¶
- Yale OpenCourseware — Fundamentals of Physics II, Ramamurti Shankar — a full lecture course covering essentially our syllabus, at a similar level. The closest thing available to a parallel version of this course.
- MIT OpenCourseWare 8.02 — Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism — more mathematical than we are, but the demonstrations are superb.
- Khan Academy — electric charge, field and voltage — short, patient, worked at exactly the level of our homework.
Reading¶
- The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume II — freely available online. Not a substitute for the textbook and not aimed at a first course, but if you want to know why electromagnetism is put together the way it is, this is where to look.
Mathematics¶
The prerequisite is calculus, but this course leans much more on geometry, algebra and careful bookkeeping than on integration technique. If the maths is what is slowing you down:
- Khan Academy — calculus
- Vectors, dot products and cross products — worth reviewing before chapter 28, where the cross product arrives and stays.
Prior offerings of PHYS 1308 at SMU¶
Previous instructors have left their material online. Chapter numbering and emphasis differ from ours, so treat these as supplementary explanation rather than as a guide to what is examinable.
- Randall Scalise, Spring 2025 — complete handwritten lecture notes covering the whole course, plus three practice exams with answer keys.
- Stephen Sekula, PHYS 1308 — course material and a YouTube playlist of recorded lectures.
Getting help¶
Office hours are the main channel: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00 – 3:00 PM, in Fondren Science Building, Room 203. No appointment needed, just turn up. There is no teaching assistant on this course, so office hours are far more efficient than email for anything involving actual physics.
Both blocks are on class days, about ninety minutes after we finish, so you can bring a question straight from the lecture it came out of. Come with the problem you are stuck on and what you have already tried — "I don't understand chapter 27" is much harder to help with than "I set up the loop equation for this circuit and I get the wrong sign."
Note that Thursday afternoon is the last office hour of the week. Several problem sets fall due over a weekend or on a Monday, so for those, Thursday is your last chance to ask in person. Start early in the week rather than the night before the deadline.