May 19, 2020
Resources
Video Script
Hello and welcome to week one of CIS 527. This video is basically a weekly announcements video. I probably won’t do one each week, but it’s a good chance for me to describe a few things going on in the course and things that you may want to know as you get started. So first off, hopefully you’ve seen the introductory videos, but if not, my name is Russ Feldhausen. I’ll be your instructor for this semester. This slide has my contact information. Feel free to take a look at it and let me know. You can email me anytime although for things related to the class, I prefer that you contact me through through Piazza. That allows both myself and my GTA, BreAnn, to respond to those questions very quickly.
Also, you may have already met BreAnn. She is my graduate teaching assistant for this semester. Her email is shown here. Again, feel free to contact us via email, but for things class related, we really do prefer that you contact us via Piazza so that we both see the message very quickly.
So, this class has been taught for several semesters at this point, especially during the summer, but summer 2020, I’ve made a few changes. One of the biggest changes is I’m now going to be enforcing a deadline of one module due each week. This is probably a little controversial, but in years past, I would leave the class open to the point where you could do anything at any time. And what we really found is that students would wait until the last minute to try and complete everything in this course. And it wasn’t really good for students. And it wasn’t really good for me either. And so this semester, I’m going to enforce a deadline where every module is due on a particular deadline. If you submit it after the deadline, there will be a scaling late policy where you lose 10% per day that it is late.
That said, if you know you have conflicts during the semester, if you’re going to be unavailable for any reason, contact me at the beginning of the semester and let me know. Generally what I would say is you should plan on working ahead of when you’re going to be unavailable instead of making up stuff after that deadline. Basically, I’m able to work with you on deadlines, but I really want us to stand the pace of getting one module due each week.
The other big change that I’ve made is the final project now includes a prototype portion. Originally, the final project just required you to design and analyze something. I’ve decided this semester that I’d also like you to prototype part of your design, that doesn’t mean that you have to build the whole thing or that you have to make it completely ready for the real world. But I’d like you to show some modicum of ability to design and develop the thing that you’re proposing. So this might be a little interesting. We’ll kind of see how that goes. But make sure you review the final project information closely. Especially if you’re familiar with how this class has been taught in the past because it is a little different this semester.
Finally, the other thing I’m doing diiferent this summer is I’ve decided to add some interactive discussions to this class that will be worth 10% of your grade. We’ll talk a little bit more about those as we get started. But basically, what we’re going to do is we’re going to have some regular zoom scheduled times during weeks two through six of the class, where we will get together on zoom, and we will talk about a particular topic probably for an hour. So if you can make the live session, that would be fantastic. We’d love to have really good discussions, but if not, we will record that session. You can watch it afterward. And then you can use that video to actually post your response to the discussion on canvas. We’ll probably actually use Piazza for that. But what I really want to do is give you a chance to communicate with me and your peers and some other folks about different things going on in System Administration. We’re going to try and bring in some guest speakers. For example, I may reach out to Seth Galitzer, our Computer Science Sys Admin, just to get you used to talking to people that work in that field and maybe getting some information about what’s going on. So that’s something a little bit new. We’ll see how that works. That will hopefully couple really well with the other thing we’ll do, which is we’ll continue to do our tea time office hours every week. So you’ll see messages about that. But it’s basically an open tea time where I sit in zoom. A lot of the Sys Admins and faculty and staff join me and you as students are welcome to come in and hang out with us, chat about just about anything, what’s going on in the world, whatever. So we’d love to see you there. I have a slide for that. Whoops. I already talked about this, but feel free to check it out.
Beyond that, keep in touch, there’s lot of places that you can get in touch with me- discussions on Piazza, Tea Time, office hours. You can also schedule one-on-one office hours with me anytime. There’s a calendly ilnk that you can find. So feel free to take advantage of that if you need more one-on-one time with me. You can also contact BreAnn. She can schedule some time to meet with you one-on-one. And lastly, I’ll be available on the Computer Science Rocket.Chat, which is available at chat.cs ksu.edu. So feel free to check that out as well. Other than that, that’s all I’ve got for week one. Good luck this semester. Feel free to keep in touch if you have any questions and I’ll probably post a couple more of these announcements videos as we go forward. So good luck have a good day!