Prof Nayana is a very understanding professor and he takes feedback from students to heart. His lectures are and explanations for concepts are generally pretty solid, and he's really helpful in office hours. You can tell he really cares and wants his students to do well.
Mandatory workload is not high at all, just Kudu problems once every 1-2 weeks, but this class is based on a curve and so it's very competitive. Studying outside class and doing harder textbook problems can be very useful. His challenge questions are especially useful but difficult, mimicking the difficulty of his exams, so it's best to study them well.
He loves bicycles in physics. Just wheels in general. He also likes friction a lot. Would take again.

1A taught by Prof Nayana is perplexing. The midterms and final are very challenging and not related to what we learned in lectures and practiced in homework. All the exam problems involve confound and frustrating mathematical deduction rather than numerical calculation and problem-solving in a normal physics class. Also, since he was just graduated from PhD, his teaching in lectures is not straight to the point, giving students a hard time comprehending. Nevertheless, homework on Kudu is worth learning and helped me reviewed knowledge of Mechanics learned in high school. Prof Nayana himself is nice and listens to students' feedbacks carefully, and I believe he will become a better professor in the future with more college teaching experience.

We had to pay for homework software called Kudu ($50, which is very upsetting since it just takes questions from a free OpenStax textbook and makes them multiple choice). It's a very poor resource in that it gives you very poor feedback (if you get a question wrong, you aren't told why it's wrong and/or what you should do). I assume it's just for getting some experience with equations and concepts. The problem sets took me longer and longer to finish as the quarter went on.
Before each test (2 midterms and a final) we were given "challenge problem sets", which reflected the difficulty of the tests much better. The difficulty of the problem sets was weighted heavily in math in that there was a lot of algebra to do after the physics portion of each problem was over. The exam questions were often extensions of challenge problems or in class examples.
His lectures are live and recorded. They weren't particularly engaging, but he's not monotone. He just lectures until someone asks a question and stops occasionally to ask if anyone has any questions. His lectures consist of blank slides that he posts before lectures so people can fill them in as he fills them in. They're well organized. The filled in slides aren't always self explanatory, sometimes the corresponding lecture video was needed as well.
He listens to student feedback. He gave us more time on our second midterm because of student feedback. I felt that he cares about students. He's also pleasant.
There is a curve at the end of the class. His supervisors want to see a certain distribution for grades, so he adjusts the difficulty of the tests accordingly.
I can imagine that Professor Nayana is particularly good for physics majors. I heard that previous physics experience helped a lot in this class.

Prof. Nayana is a very understanding and helpful person, who acts on the feedback he receives to ensure the class learns as much as they can.

Lectures covered all the content, but there were slight pacing issues at the beginning (he spent too much time going over derivations that weren’t needed for the test), but that was later adjusted after midterm feedback, when he focused more on examples.

In terms of workload, there isn’t a huge amount. You get participation and homework points for completing questions on Kudu - a homework site. (Side note - you will be frustrated by Kudu, it’s a slow platform, but it wasn’t developed by Professor and was chosen by the physics department)

The exams are definitely challenging and competitive. The homework problems seem ridiculously easy in comparison, so he also releases challenge problems that mirror the exams. Whether you solve them or not, please spend a few hours labouring over the challenge sets, and then thoroughly review his solutions. While exam averages will be low, he will curve, so dont fret!

NOTE: if you’re a physics or engineering major, try and get him as a professor, as you’ll be exposed to challenges and will be better prepared for upper divs. If you’ve never done physics before, then tread with caution as this will take up a substantial amount of time.

Let me start out by saying that the professor for this class is super nice. He's great at explaining things in great detail while still being clear and is always willing to answer all your questions. That being said, I found the exams to be really stupidly difficult. It isn't anything like the homework, though he does give you a challenge set he writes himself with enough questions to allow you to gauge how difficult the test is going to be. He has also set a very generous curve this quarter (but this is likely only due to covid-19). Overall I learnt a lot in this class and would take it again.

I think this class is intrinsically difficult. I had plenty of physics experience (not calculus-intensive though, which is how this class is different) but I still struggled a lot. Prof Nayana's lectures are really clear and good, and he gives a lot of good examples, but his tests are really difficult. His Challenge PSets are a good practice for the midterms and exams, but even then there's a lot of math and concept that you need to be great at to do well. Even if you have prior Physics experience, don't ride on your knowledge to ease through this class : college physics is a different ballgame and I wish I knew that going in. Even without prior experience, I think anyone can manage - just pay attention in class and grind hard problems.

HW is not time-consuming at all - so, light workload.

Still a really interesting class and a pretty good professor overall. If you're a Physics major, go for him 100% : You will probably learn a lot more in-depth mechanics than you would in other 1A classes. If you're not a Physics-related major/not too invested in physics and only doing this as a major req, I'd say 50-50(If the rest of your courseload is manageable)

As somebody taking this class without any prior physics experience, it definitely required a LARGE amount of time & effort. The midterms were very challenging, especially with the knowledge that the class is based on a curve. The challenge problems Prof Nayana creates before the midterms are extremely helpful - definitely make sure you struggle with those for a while, and then use his answer key to make sure you understand where each step came from.

The class had two midterms: for the first, we were given a 24 hour time frame & for the second, we were given 2 hours and 15 minutes. (From my understanding, this change was because of outside pressure from the physics department.)

Despite the fact that I definitely struggled my way through this class, Prof Nayana is very understanding and helpful. He makes sure he's available on slack during the midterms in case we have any questions, is very helpful in office hours, and re-opened the homework once when the deadline was accidentally placed earlier than it should have been. (And, after getting permission from the physics department, he said that he is going to be curving the class much more leniently.)

tl;dr - if you haven't taken physics before, this is going to be a HARD class, no matter what. you're going to need to really put in the time to go to office hours, struggle with practice problems, etc. Prof Nayana doesn't make the class easy, but he's understanding & cares about his students and their success.

Background: I'm a first-year math major and I had taken both AP Physics 1 and 2 before this class. I took this during the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Okay, this class was quite difficult for me because physics (especially mechanics) and I simply don't get along, but I don't think it was necessarily Nayana's fault. I think the thing with Nayana is that he just needs more experience (this was his first time being a professor ever). He makes it clear that he cares about his students and their success. He was very accommodating, nice, and arranged extra office hours for us to help us study for the final. He also gave us challenge problems (very hard but VERY good for preparing for tests) with answer keys to help us prepare. He also makes it clear that he wants to improve as a professor, and I think with time he could be great. He even curved the class to have an A- average, which was amazing! However, without that curve, I would not have gotten anywhere close to an A.

One of the main problems I had with this class was Kudu. The textbook is honestly not that helpful and the homework really doesn't help with preparing for tests. The site is also extremely buggy. It also costs $50, which is $50 more than I am willing to pay for it. The other was that lectures were not that engaging in my opinion and I often found it hard to pay attention. I relied more heavily on my previous physics knowledge than the lectures to get through this class. I think that the lectures improved with time though, but they still weren't great. The last problem I had with this class was that the tests were way too difficult for the amount of time we were given to complete them. The averages for midterm 1 (not timed, 24-hour test), midterm 2 (timed, 2 hours), and the final (timed, 3 hours) were 87, 52, and 45 respectively. The tests are very theoretical and have no numbers (all variables and knowing how to manipulate them in equations). I had 2 years of physics going in and had a hard time. Definitely study as much as possible and know the challenge problems and go to office hours.

Despite the problems I had with this class, I don't blame Nayana himself. I just think he needs time to develop himself as a professor. However, in general, I wouldn't recommend this class to anyone without prior physics experience (unless you are willing to work your ASS off), and expect this class to be hard no matter what. This is serious stuff and it's not always going to be pretty, but that's honestly just how physics is.

Don't take this class online I think- tests were insanely hard for no reason and he's still quite new. That being said, he was incredibly helpful and did elaborate on physics subjects and was quite interesting. As another south campus major that was not physics, this stuff was not necessarily important so I'd just caution away from this class if you just want to learn some equations and simple applications. The only upside is that the homework was super light and easy and took like 30 min every week or so and the prof was super nice and pretty responsive to class concerns.

Professor Rajapakse’s passion for the material was contagious and, quite frankly, the reason I woke up almost everyday at 9:00 A.M. everyday to attend lecture. He clearly knows a lot about what he is teaching, and he I thought he was an incredible lecturer, especially considering that this was his time teaching a class as a professor, and it was all done remotely. Weekly homework assignments consisted of about 20-35 problems on this website called Kudu which generally only took a few hours every week. If you’re considering taking Professor Rajapakse, however, be warned, as his tests are incredibly difficult. He provides a few “challenge” problems before each exam, but you really need to understand the material to do well on the tests. It is important to note, however, that I think that his tests were only hard due to the take-home format of the exams this year; had we been in-person, I doubt the examinations would have had the same difficulty. All in all, if you have the option of taking Professor Rajapakse, I encourage you to do so, you will get a lot out of the experience.