Thanks, everyone, for taking your part on our inaugural offering of Logic: Language and Information 1. It's been a wild ride and now hat the peer assessment phase has completed, we're processing results and we'll be awarding certificates. In our experience, this process takes Coursera between 7 and 10 days, so don't panic if you don't receive your notification of a certificate for a couple of weeks. (It may be early May when certificates are released. Don't worry if it takes a while.)

In the mean time, our initial check of the grade data has shown that over 230 students will achieve a score of 100%, and well over 400 will achieve a distinction in the subject, and many more again will receive a certificate. This is an incredible amount of effort from all of you. Well done, everyone!

Many of you have filled in surveys for us. Your feedback, both in the surveys and in the subject forums, has been really helpful in informing how we teach his subject, and how we plan for our future offerings. Now that the course is over for you, we will ask you one more time to fill out a survey, since you can now look back on the experience of the course as a whole. So, please take a few minutes to fill in our End-of-Course Survey. We value your responses and read each and every one of them as we reflect on the experience of the course and plan for the future.

Here is what we have decided about the future of this subject:

• First, the subject will remain open for at least next nine weeks, the notes, the videos, and the practice quizzes will remain available for you to use, and to share with your friends. People can still sign up and work with the materials. However, the Forums for Logic 1 will not be attended by staff during this time.
• Second, We plan to offer Logic: Language and Information 1 in the future, but this will not be before 2016. We have a lot of work to do before then to update our materials for the next time we run the subject.

Before then, however, we've just opened Logic: Language and Information 2, which takes what we've learned in elementary propositional logic and its applications, and builds on it to cover first order predicate logic, and its applications to Computer Science, Electronic Engineering, Linguistics, Mathematics and Philosophy, and covers this material over 8 weeks, 4 on the core techniques of logic, and 4 on its applications. If you have enjoyed Logic 1, please sign up to Logic 2. We'd love to have you with us. If you've enjoyed the subject, please tell your friends, and spread the word.

We hope that your experience with Logic: Language and Information 1 has been all that you wanted it to be. It's been our privilege to teach logic to a community from all over the world. Thanks so much for being a part of it.

Best wishes,

Jen and Greg

Dr. Jen Davoren and Prof. Greg Restall

[Apologies again for an announcement with incorrect dates accidentally being sent out. This is the correct announcement.]

Welcome to Week 5 of Logic: Language and Information 1.

Thankyou, everyone, for taking this ride with us, whether you've been here from the beginning and tried out each assessment, or if you've joined us in the last week, or if you've been around for a while and have watched a few videos and read a few things to brush up on some logic. It's wonderful to have been a part of this learning opportunity with you.

We deadlines for assessment are coming up. The core graded quizzes have four more days to run, and the four application quizzes and peer assessment tasks for the Philosophy and Linguistics Sections are due soon after that (April 6 and April 7, Melbourne time). Check the assessment deadlines in the Quiz and Assignment sections of the site for the exact times for submission in your area.

If you have collected enough points to pass (or to gain a distinction) already, you don't need to complete the final exam if you don't want to. We already have over 20 submissions for the final exam already, and this is enough for the Peer Grading system to work. But the more who submit, the better, and it's good to attempt to answer this question—and to read and assess the attempts of other students—as a part of your own learning experience. The final exam is a great opportunity for you to extend yourself and display your understanding of logic at a greater level. The final exam questions will stretch you, and help you move beyond applying the tools of logic to particular problems towards reflecting on how they work. (This is what we call metalogic, the study of different properties of logical systems.) Working through the final exam questions is like a “capstone” on the conceptual building you've been assembling these last weeks. We're looking forward to seeing how you go with it. It's due on April 9, Melbourne time.

For both the final exam and the philosophy and linguistics peer assessment tasks, if you submitted an answer to the question, after the due date, you will be asked to assess the submissions of four other students. (You can do more if you like, that's great for your own learning and it helps give better feedback to students.) These scores are then used in the assignment of grades and feedback for each submission. Do take care in evaluating your peers’ work. Be polite and helpful, as you'd like people to be polite and helpful to you. The quality of the feedback you put in will help determine the value of this exercise for everyone.

To give good feedback, carefully read through the grading rubric and the instructions for grading each question. We've included a sample answer in each case. A good answer to each questions will not necessarily look like the sample answer, but we've included these to give you an idea of what a comprehensive and well-structured answer can look like.

Your evaluations of your peers’ exercises—both for Philosophy and Linguistics and the Final Exam—will be due on 6pm Monday April 14 (Melbourne Time) (check the assignment for the deadline in your timezone). You need to complete four assessments—as well as assess your own answer—in order to receive full points for your own answer. (If you do not complete four evaluations, you will suffer a penalty of 20%.) Once those evaluations are in, we'll check the results for any discrepancies we can find, and then we award certificates for those who pass or receive distinctions. This should all be finalised within two weeks of the end of the subject, all going well.

So, good luck with this last phase of the subject! If you have any questions, please read through the forum thread on Peer Assessment.

Don't worry if you don't get everything done by the assessment deadlines and you want to keep learning. We are delighted that you want to keep learning with us, and the learning doesn't stop with the end of the assessment phase. (We have hard deadlines of our own for wrapping this up and preparing for the next subject Logic: Language and Information 2, which starts on April 14 (Melbourne Time). However, we will keep available the videos and practice quizzes for Logic 1 during the next 9 weeks (while Logic 2 is running), for you to keep working at your logic study, in case that's helpful for you.

Thanks again for your involvement in the subject.It's incredible to us to see students all over the world, enthusiastic and excited about what we've been teaching, completing quizzes, discussing in the forums and learning logic in many different ways. We'll see you in the forums, or again in our next announcement, when we begin to wrap things up for Logic: Language and Information 1 and look onward to Logic: Language and Information 2.

Best wishes,

Jen and Greg

Dr. Jen Davoren and Prof. Greg Restall

Welcome to Week 4 in Logic: Language and Information 1. We're now in the downhill run to the end of our time together in the course!

[This is the correct version of Announcement 4. The previous version accidentally sent out three days ago had stale links and was last year’s announcement sent out by mistake. My apologies for the confusion! —GR]

• We didn't announce this in the last email, but a few days ago we released a Mid-Course Survey. A few students have noticed this and filled it in—thank you, this has already been useful feedback. If you have half a moment, please head to the course survey page and select the Mid-Course Survey. Your feedback will help us in the final weeks of the subject, as well as in planning for the future.
• We've noticed that small number of keen students have already completed enough assessment to get a distinction in the subject! Congratulations to you! We think this is a wonderful effort—it's true, you can get 80% by achieving full marks in the core quizzes and two application areas. There is no need to complete the final exam to achieve a distinction.
• On the other hand, the final exam is a great opportunity for you to extend yourself and display your understanding of logic at a greater level. The final exam questions will stretch you, and help you move beyond applying the tools of logic to particular problems towards reflecting on how they work. (This is what we call metalogic, the study of different properties of logical systems.) Working through the final exam questions is like a “capstone” on the conceptual building you've been assembling these last weeks. We're looking forward to seeing how you go with it.
• In fact, some of you don't need any encouragement to get into the peer graded writing assignments. Although we're over a week away from the deadline for any of these assignments, over 70 people have already submitted the Linguistics assignment, over 50 the Philosophy assignment, and over 20 have completed the Final Exam. In next week's announcement, we'll detail what is involved in the Peer Grading stage of the assessment. If you have any questions before that time, please read through the forum thread on Peer Assessment.

We hope that you continue enjoying learning logic with us, that you enjoy the chance to exploring logic and its applications, and that it's a pleasure to test your knowledge, as we reach this last part of the course.

Best wishes,

Jen and Greg

Dr. Jen Davoren and Prof. Greg Restall

Welcome to Week 3 of Logic: Language and Information 1, whether you've been with us since the beginning, or if you're one of the many who joined us in the last week, it is good to have you with us!

Now that we're halfway through the subject, we'd love to get some feedback from you about how you're going. When you have a moment, please answer the six questions in this little Mid-Course Survey. It will help us understand how everyone is going.

In the last two weeks, we've been covering the basics of propositional logic: the language of propositional logic, truth tables as interpretations of that language, and tree proofs as an alternate way of evaluating formulas or argument forms expressed in that language. That's a lot of ground to cover in two weeks! Now we change pace for the rest of the subject, as we turn our attention to four different domains in which logic is interpreted or applied...

• ...in Electronic Engineering, in the specification, design and analysis of combinational digital systems),
• ...in Philosophy, in the issue of vagueness, the way we attempt to understand the interface between a language that makes yes /no claims, and a world in which there are few sharp borderlines,
• ...in Linguistics, where we examine the different ways we the 'norms' governing conversation can help us infer information from what is said beyond the explicit content of what's been said, and
• ...in Computer Science, where we introduce Prolog a programming language that allows us to use logical deduction to derive facts from a database.

We have released the lectures and assessments for each of these four topics today. You are free to explore them at your own pace and in whatever order suits you. Explore the topics that appeal to you! Dip in to each of them, or concentrate on just one or two—the choice is yours.

As with the first two sections of the course, we recommend that you

• Start with your study planning by reading through Study Guide for the section you're working on.
• Then work through Video Lectures in your own time, and
• read through the Course Notes.
• Then practice your skills with the Practice Quizzes and
• take part in the Discussion Forums
• before attempting the Graded Quizzes, and (if there are any for your area) the Peer Assessment Task to contribute to your final score.

Above all, have fun, following your interests where they lead, and engaging with concepts which have proved really fruitful in our thinking in many different domains of knowledge and understanding. This is truly exciting and challenging material—we hope you enjoy giving different parts of your brain a workout as you see the many different to think about logic.

If you intend to gain a certificate in this subject, you should aim to complete the assessment tasks from two topic areas, but you are free to do as many as you like. Each topic area has assessment worth 20% of your final grade. In Computer Science and in Electrical Engineering, these are multiple choice quizzes. In Philosophy and in Linguistics, there are 10% in quizzes, and 10% for a peer assessed writing exercise (500 words).

The due dates for submitting your application tasks—whether they be Graded Quizzes, or Peer Assessed Writing Tasks—is Midnight 6th April PDT. That will give you plenty of time to explore the applications, and decide which to submit. Your final score for applications will be your best two application scores plus 1/2 of any other applications you complete. (So, if you complete three, with scores of 20, 18 and 14, you will get 20 + 18 + 7 = 45. If you have also received 36 for your core quizzes, your total score from this would be 81! This is above 70, our threshold for a distinction in the subject—without completing the final exam. To achieve a score like this you have a thorough grounding in propositional logic and its applications, and you can be proud.)

The final 20% of the assessment is the Final Exam. It's due on Midnight 8th April, PDT. It will be available very soon, on the Peer Assessment section of the website. We'll say more about it next week.

So, welcome to Week 3! We're loving working with you. Please, don't hesitate to ask questions as they come up for you. Thanks for taking this journey of learning logic with us.

Best wishes,

Jen and Greg

Dr. Jen Davoren and Prof. Greg Restall

Wow! What a start for our course! With over 20,000 students signed up, from all over the world, we've had an overwhelming and exciting start. If you've joined us online in the Class Forums, in the Facebook Group or on Twitter, thanks so much for taking part, for helping make this a welcoming, encouraging and hardworking community. This has been such fun to be a part of already, and we're only 1/5 of the way in to the subject! If you've not shown up yet, feel free to dip in to these learning communities as much (or as little) as makes sense for you. We'd love to see you online with us.

Our topic for Week 1 was the language and models (truth tables) for propositional logic. In Week 2, we'll finish off the section on truth tables with two lessons on how you can use truth tables to show how different statements relate to each other, and in particular, how you can use them to assess arguments as valid or invalid. Then, we have four lessons on proof trees for propositional logic—our way to represent the structure of reasoning, and to test statements or arguments without having to list out all the different rows of a truth table. (This doesn’t make much difference when it comes to a 2 or 4 or 8 row truth table. But a 65536 row truth table? We never want to have to produce one of those!)

If you haven’t yet looked online and started dipping in to the Lecture Videos from Week 1, of course it's not too late to start. The Week 2 lessons have gone live, and the Week 1 lessons are all still there for you to work through. You've still got plenty of time to do the quizzes from Week 1 and Week 2, to give yourself a good foundation in the basics of propositional logic. (Next week, we release the rest of the topics we're covering in this subject, to give you lots of freedom to explore four different ways logic is applied---in Digital Systems, Philosophy, Linguistics and Computer Science—you can take these topics in any order that suits you.) So, whether you're just starting out, or whether you've got one week's work in logic under your belt, we recommend that you

• Start with your study planning by reading through Study Guide for the section you're working on.
• Then work through Video Lectures in your own time, and
• read through the Course Notes.
• Then practice your skills with the Practice Quizzes and
• take part in the Discussion Forums
• before attempting the Graded Quizzes to contribute to your final score.

If you have haven't already done so and you have a few moments spare, please do fill in the pre-course survey. This information helps us run the course well. The data we've already seen is really interesting:

• Survey respondents come from over 30 different countries.
• Our survey respondents (so far) have included exactly one student from these locations: Albania, Bangladesh, Chile, Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guam, Palestine, Qatar, Slovakia, Syria, and Vietnam. Welcome, one and all!
• Of the survey respondents, for around 38% this is your first MOOC. Welcome! We hope that this is an excellent resource for you. And one survey respondent has completed 60 MOOCs!
• Of the special topics, 64% of survey respondents are intending to do Linguistics; 63% Philosophy; 56% Computer Science; and 29% Digital Systems. (This surprised us. Digital Systems is the most popular of our topics when we teach on campus at the University of Melbourne.)
• Most of you are between 18 and 34, with 4% of respondents under 18 and 4% 65 or over.

So, welcome to Week 2! It's exciting to be working with you. Please, don't hesitate to ask questions as they come up for you. As we said in our first email, we're doing this because we love teaching logic. It's wonderful and a delight to have students from all over the world who are interested in sharing this experience with us.

Best wishes,

Jen and Greg

Dr. Jen Davoren and Prof. Greg Restall

Welcome to Logic: Language and Information 1! We are really excited to have the opportunity to share logic and its applications with you. These five weeks are sure to be an exciting learning experience for all of us. We hope you will find this introduction to logic and its applications fun, challenging and rewarding---it's certainly been challenging and rewarding to prepare this material for you. This course assumes no background knowledge other than a good reading competence in English and the patience to work with complex ideas. We expect a typical student to require 6-8 hours of work each week in order to succeed in this course. This is a significant commitment, but we think you will find working with a broad range of skills---in core logic, and in its applications in the sciences, humanities and engineering---really rewarding. Earning a certificate in this course demonstrates you have learned quite a lot of logic. (We also provide a certificate with distinction for students who truly excel in the subject.)

This course has a novel structure: the first two weeks---covering basic logic---is linear. Everyone will is expected to cover this material first. Then the remaining three weeks---on applications of logic---is to be explored in any order you like. Start with what looks most interesting, and work from there.

For each section of the course, we recommend that you:

• Start with the Study Guide for that section.
• Work through Video Lectures in your own time and
• read through the Course Notes.
• Then practice your skills with the Practice Quizzes and
• take part in the Discussion Forums
• before attempting the Graded Quizzes and Peer Assessments (if there are any in that section) to contribute to your final score.

For now, we've released the first block of videos and practice quizzes. Once you have had a chance to practice on these, we'll release (within a week's time) the first block of graded quizzes, and the course will proceed from there.

If you have a moment in these first few days, please fill in the pre-course survey. That will help us get to know your background and expectations, and this information will help us run the course well.

Please, don't hesitate to ask questions as they come up. We're making all of this material available to you because we love teaching logic, and it's exciting having students from all over the world who are interested in learning logic together.

Best wishes, Jen and Greg

Dr. Jen Davoren and Prof. Greg Restall