Fall '23 Week 2
YouTube VideoResources
Video Script
Hello and welcome to the week two announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in Fall 2023. I’ll try and post announcements videos like this about every other week in this class. Usually these announcements videos are pretty informal, so you’ll notice I don’t have my background set up or anything, but it’s just a chance for me to talk through some things that are on my mind, things that I would normally announce at the beginning of class if we were meeting in person. But instead, I think it’s much easier to do these quick videos is.
So first things first, you should be working on lab one and you should be hopefully getting to the point where you’re about ready to get it graded. So what you’ll need to do to get your labs graded is you’ll need to schedule a time slot to meet with either Matt or myself. My preference is that you check Matt’s schedule first. The only reason I say that is because there are 26 of you and there’s only one of me, and I’m currently teaching three classes officially and three classes unofficially. So my schedule is very packed this semester and so I’m really relying on Matt to cover a lot of the grading load, but I’m available as well. So please schedule a time slot. Check matt’s calendar first. If Matt’s times don’t work for you, then check my calendar and pick a time with me. When you’re ready to get graded. Make sure you make snapshots in VMware so that you can roll back to those snapshots if anything breaks. And then when it’s time for grading, please have everything ready. That means have your VMs open, have them up and running. Have files open, whatever we ask you to do so that it goes really quickly. And then just be prepared to demonstrate your work for this first lab. We’re going to ask you to show us a few settings on each of your systems. And we’re going to ask you to run a couple of terminal commands that will show all the file permissions for the docs folders that you made. So be prepared to do some of that. Typically, lab grading only takes about ten minutes per lab if everything thing is working correctly. However, if things are not working correctly, it can take much longer as we try and diagnose problems and look for partial credit. Um. When we’re doing lab grading, we may not work with you long enough to fix those problems. You may want to schedule a follow up time to get some problems fixed, especially in labs three and four where those labs build on each other. This first lab, don’t worry about it. We’re going to delete these VMs as soon as we’re done with them, so don’t worry too much about it. This is just an introductory lab, but be aware that that’s what we’re doing with the lab grading, so let us know if you have any questions on that. But don’t be afraid to schedule your time slot. And to be clear, you can schedule your time slot now, as long as that time slot happens after you get the lab done. So if you want to get graded next Wednesday when it’s due, I believe it’s Tuesday or Wednesday when it’s due, go ahead and schedule the time slot that works for you. It’ll be on our calendars. And then make sure you have the lab done before that time slot. Do not wait until the due date to try and schedule your time slot because A, most of them will be full, and B, most, I believe Matt’s calendar does. And I know my calendar requires anywhere from two to 4 hours prior notice to schedule a time. So be aware of that.
The other thing that I’ve done is I’ve scheduled our weekly discussion times for Thursdays from one to 02:00 p.m.. That was the time slot that worked best for most people in this class and also fits my schedule. So what we’ll be doing with that is I’m going to reach out to a few friends of mine and try and get a few guest speakers to come in during those discussion times to tell you about their jobs in it and what they do. So I’ll be posting a schedule for that very soon. Some of these will be repeats from previous semesters, but I’m also going to try and get a couple of new people if I can find some, so be aware of that. So to earn points for the discussions, you’ll notice that there are five graded discussions throughout the semester. What you’ll do is you’ll submit two questions before the scheduled discussion time. So I will be updating those and posting those as soon as I get the schedule figured out. Then you can either attend the live discussion with our guest speaker Thursday from one to 02:00 P.m. That week. Or if you’re not available, you can watch the video afterwards. Either one. To earn points. If you attend live and participate by asking a question, you’ll get points. If you attend live and don’t ask a question or you watch a video, there will be a short response that I will have you write afterwards. So you don’t have to participate if you don’t want to. There are ways to earn points either way, and then for weeks where we don’t have a scheduled guest speaker, I will just use those times as office hours. Matt may also be available during those times, so I will hop in the Zoom session. If you have questions, join us and ask us any questions you have. If nobody shows up after about ten or 15 minutes, I will tend to drop out of the Zoom session. But those are kind of our open office hours times. If you have any questions for us on days that are not scheduled for a guest speaker.
The other big thing in this class if you need any help, there are a couple of different ways I recommend getting help. First and foremost, there’s the CIS 527 help email address that is posted on the Canvas website. That address goes to myself and Matt, so we can both answer those questions very quickly. We’ve also set up an Ed discussion board for this course that you can find on Canvas linked on the side. Ed Discussion is a great place to get questions answered in this class because it’s got a lot of features where we can post code and snippets and things like that. And any of your questions you post can be seen by others in the class. So it’s a great way where we only have to answer a question once, especially if it’s a popular question and someone’s confused on it. If either of those don’t work, you can also schedule a time via calendar with either myself or Matt to get some one on one help. And then of course, you’re also welcome to attend the office hours on Thursdays if we’re not having a guest speaker that week. So that’s all the real updates that I’ve got for this week. Hopefully things are going well with the first lab up. Hopefully by now you’ve gotten access to VMware and you’ve gotten access to the Microsoft Store so you can get VMware installed, get Windows installed. If you haven’t done that, I recommend doing that now. If you have any issues with that, let us know. It may take us a day or so to go through the process to get that fixed. So again, do not wait until the last minute to start on these labs. We really want you to be successful, and that means starting early. So, as always, if you have any questions, let us know. Otherwise, I will probably post another video next week. Good luck.