Fall '21 Week 1
Resources
Video Script
Hello, and welcome to the week one announcements video for CC 510 in Fall 2021. My name is Russell Feldhausen, and I’ll be your instructor for this semester. My contact information is listed here, and it’s also listed on the syllabus, feel free to contact me anytime. Email is my preferred method of communication for this class. But you can also find me on Discord, you can schedule one on one office hours via Calendly. And there’s lots of other options that are listed on my website and on the syllabus.
So this class is a class that I’ve taught for several semesters at this point. So there’s not a whole lot that’s new this time around. Basically, you’ll have one module of work due every other week. There is a late work penalty in this class, it’s 10% off of the total points possible on the assignment per day, so make sure you don’t get too far behind. I also have added a prototype portion to the final project. So if you’re familiar with previous versions of this class, that’s a little bit new here. In every semester I also make minor changes in each labs. So make sure that you’re reading the labs for the current semester in this Canvas course. We’ll also watch the videos from five interactive discussions that we did in the summer semester. Unfortunately, this fall I right now, I only have a couple of students in this class. So we’re not going to do new discussions this fall. But between the group we might have some more discussions on Discord and things like that.
Also, during the semester, I’m hoping to do some updates to the curriculum for this class going forward. So my hope is later in the semester, I may have a couple of beta labs to have you try, we’ll come up with some way that you can opt into the beta labs and help me test them for some credit. I’m considering maybe even replacing the last module in this class with one of these beta labs. So we’ll see how far we get on that in this semester. This is all very up in the air right now. But if I get enough time, I want to work on this. So watch for more details later.
This class uses interactive grading for labs to get lab graded, you’ll schedule a time with me via Calendly the time that you schedule must be before you can before the lab is due, but you can schedule even before you’re done with the lab. So for example, if you’re working on your lab on Friday, and you think you’ll get done over the weekend, you can go ahead and schedule your grading time on Monday, which would be the due date. And then you can meet with me on Monday so you can schedule before you’re done. But your meeting must be before the due date. Scheduling via Calendly requires a four hour notice. So if you want to schedule right before something’s due or right at the end of the day, it’s not going to let you. When we meet, we’ll meet via zoom, and I’ll have you use screenshare. So I can see what you’re seeing and have you walked through some things on your lab. And then one of the big things to be aware of is when we start grading, I will ask you if you’re sure you want to start. And as soon as you confirm that at that time, what’s there is there you can’t make any changes. Once you’ve started grading, even if you notice something that’s missing, it’s kind of like you turned in the assignment to me and then later on, you realized you missed something, you can’t go back and fix it. So it’s the only way I can really keep it fair when I do these interactive grading things. So just be aware that once you start grading, you can’t change anything, it’s going to be whatever I see as we go through. So keep keep that in mind. It’s usually not a problem. But everyone’s while students will realize, Oh crap, I forgot to turn on the firewall. It’s already too late. So keep that in mind.
This semester, we’ve got some interactive discussions you’ll be able to do. We recorded these during the summer 2021 semester, we brought in some guest speakers, they got to interact with our students. For this fall, what I’d like you to do is watch the video of those discussions and write a reaction to it based on the prompt that I give. If, as you watch the video, if you have any questions, all of the speakers from last summer, volunteered their email addresses so you can email me, I will forward your information on to our speaker and they will get back to you. They’re more than willing to answer your questions, especially some of the speakers like the K-State’s CIO, and I know both Seth and Kyle here in the computer science department would love to talk to students any time so don’t be afraid to reach out to them. But I’d be happy to send an email on your behalf to get some answers.
Other than that, that’s really all that’s going on this semester. Hopefully everything’s pretty self explanatory on Canvas. If you have any questions, let me know anytime. What I’d like you to do from here on out is keep in touch on Discord. The first module has you do a quick introduction on Discord so we know you’re there. So you can always discuss things with me on Discord. As I see news and things during the semester, you might see postings in the Discord channel relevant to this class. So keep an eye on that. We can also do look for our Zoom discussions. And then of course, we have time office hours if you’re not familiar with those every Tuesday 330 and Friday at 1030. I and some other faculty we host a tea time office hours. Tea Time is not meant to be time to ask questions about class. It’s more time to hang out and socialize and ask questions about life, the universe in general, anything outside of class that you want to talk about, we’d be happy to help. So feel free to come join us for tea time. And then of course, you can always schedule a one on one office hours with me using Calendly.
So I wish you the best of luck this semester. Good luck on all your classes. Good luck on this class. Let me know if you have any questions and I look forward to interacting with you in a couple weeks when you get the first lab graded.