External students policy

MAGIC is a consortium of 22 university mathematics departments in the UK that share live video broadcast and assessment of PhD level Mathematics courses.

The courses cover a wide range of applied and pure mathematics, and MAGIC has been running continuously since 2007.

Students who are not members of the MAGIC consortium institutions are welcome to participate in the advanced mathematics courses offered by MAGIC.

For the academic year 2020-2021 MAGIC is welcoming external guests to access some of the resources of MAGIC free of charge. In particular, we will offer external PhD students free access to recorded lectures, lecture notes and examples sheets.

You can also subscribe as an external subscriber to MAGIC (for which there is a charge of £270 per student per term, payable soon after the start of that term), which gives you access to:

  • live lectures
  • recorded lectures
  • lecture notes and examples sheets
  • assessment in up to 50 hours’ worth of courses per term.

This offers you the same services as other student members of the MAGIC consortium. Please refer to the MAGIC website for full details of courses, term dates and exam periods.

To become an external guest or external subscriber complete the MAGIC External Student enquiry form so that an account on the MAGIC website can be created.

To subscribe as external subscriber you then need to make payment via the Exeter online store .

MAGIC will be delivering lectures via Zoom from September 2020.

We regret we cannot offer technical support for external guests or subscribers and we reserve the right to revoke access to MAGIC lectures to any guest or subscriber who abuses the system.

Terms and Conditions for External Guests and Subscribers

Terms of access

Access as an “External Guest” gives you access to recordings of lectures and access to lecture notes and formative examples sheets posted on the MAGIC website.

The subscription lasts until the end of academic year and may be upgraded to External Subscriber upon payment of a fee.

Access as an “External Subscriber gives you access to the same services as other student members of the MAGIC consortium, including access to live and recorded lectures, access to lecture notes and formative examples sheets, and the option to be assessed on up to 50 hours’ worth of courses per term in addition to access to the MAGIC website.

The subscription lasts from the date of receipt of payment until two weeks after the end of any assessment period for the subscribed term. Access to the live lectures will be available within at most one week from the date you pay the subscription.

It is the subscriber’s responsibility to ensure they have the correct IT equipment and software licenses to enable access to Zoom and the MAGIC website - we can only provide basic technical guidance on this.

We reserve the right to revoke access to MAGIC lectures and/or the MAGIC website if anyone abuses the system, for example by posting inappropriate or disruptive material, or disrupting lectures.

The lecture courses advertised at the beginning of term are for general guidance only – we may fully or partially cancel an individual courses in the case that the member of staff becomes unavailable and no replacement can be found, and lectures may change times or dates as the term progresses, though lecturers will give you due warning of this.

The material used by lecturer and any recordings of the lectures remains the copyright of the lecturer and/or their institution.

Permission needs to be requested from the relevant lecturer before use and/or further distribution of any material given as part of a MAGIC course, other than for the purpose of private study.

Note that course assessment is provided only for guidance, as for full members of the MAGIC consortium.

MAGIC does not issue awards, degrees or certificates of any type, and any marks returned to you and your institution are purely for informational purposes.

Cancellation policy

Up to the end of week six of a MAGIC term to which you have subscribed, or up to two weeks after payment of a subscription fee for that term (if that is later) you can cancel a subscription to be “External Subscriber” and we will refund the fee minus a £20 administrative fee.

No refund will be given after this time.

Liability limits

External guest access and subscription is provided on an “as is” basis, with no implied guarantee of suitability of any course or liability for failure to deliver specific material advertised at the outset.

We are not liable for any hardware or software problems of the subscriber, or transmission problems associated with it.

In the event that a majority of courses fail to complete and/or be assessed within a two-week period after the end of the assessment period, we will provide a proportional refund of the subscription.

We are not liable for further costs associated with failure of the MAGIC system for whatever reason.

Personal data

We will not use your personal data (name, email address, institution) for any other purpose than communication about MAGIC courses.

Students may upload a photo, but that is optional and this will only be made visible to registered of the MAGIC website.

We log assessment submission attempts (successful or otherwise), so we can investigate any (alleged) technical issues.

We will share the results of any assessment with student's home institution on request from the institution on request from the institution.

Cancelled and recorded and recorded lectures

We are not responsible for the cancellation of, problems with the academic content, or technical problems w with any MAGIC lectures.

We will endeavour to re-schedule cancelled lectures at a later time.

We will endeavour to record lectures and post them a few days later for students to catch up at a later time.

However, these recorded lectures come with no guarantee of availability or ability or suitability - they are provided on the same basis as for consortium members of MAGIC.

Complaints

Please address any complaints in the first instance in the first instance to the MAGIC Project Coordinator, Sam Blackburn .

These terms and conditions are available from the MAGIC website .