June 2, 2021
Resources
Video Script
Hello, and welcome to the week one announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021, these announcements videos are usually much more unscripted than the other videos I do for this course. But I think it’s kind of fun to do these videos just so I can chat with you a little bit and tell you about what’s going on in the course. So once again, I’m Russell Feldhausen. I’m your instructor for this course My contact information is here on this slide. I work remotely from Kansas City. And so I’m not usually on campus very often. But I’m almost always at my computer and I’m on discord and watching my email throughout the day. So I should be pretty easy to get ahold of probably email is the best way to get a hold of me. But if you have short questions and want to chat with me on discord, I’ll try and keep an eye on discord throughout the day, this summer.
So this course has changed a little bit over the years that we’ve taught it online. There’s a couple of things that were new last summer that we’re continuing this summer. The big thing is now we’ve added due dates. So there is actually one module due each week, it’s not nearly as self paced as it used to be. But students find that they like having those structures in place instead of allowing themselves to get super far behind in the course, because they’re just simply weren’t deadlines. To go with that we now have a late work penalty. So once a lab is due, it’s 10% off of the total number of points available in that lab per day that it’s late, I think it goes down to a minimum of 60. So anything below 60%, there won’t be a deduction. But to get the higher grades, you have to turn it in on time. The final project does have a small prototype portion to it that we added last semester. And I’m going to continue with that this year. The big thing with the prototype is it doesn’t have to be too big, you don’t actually have to build what you’re proposing in the final project, you just have to build a small prototype so that you’ve played around a little bit with the technology itself. So that it’s not purely in theory, like some of the previous projects were. There have also been some minor changes in each lab, I will warn you make sure that you read the labs very carefully. If you are familiar with this courses content, I change things from time to time, a lot of it is I will be looking out for those changes to be in your labs. Otherwise, I will start to suspect that you maybe got the labs from a previous students. So make sure you read the labs carefully and do what they say in this semester and not what you might have seen in previous semesters, because they are subtly different everywhere. The other thing that we added last summer is we added some interactive discussion times I really enjoyed that. So we’re going to do that again this summer. And I’ll talk a little bit about that here in just a second.
The lab grading in this course is a little bit unique. What you’ll do to get your labs graded is you’ll schedule a time to meet with me virtually using my calendly link, there’s a little 15 minute time slot for grading these cis 527 Labs, you can schedule your grading time before the lab is complete, but the time your scheduling should be after you intend to have your lab complete. So if you know there’s only certain days or times you’re available, you can go ahead and schedule that time ahead of time. The calendly link itself requires four hours notice. So if you try and schedule at eight o’clock in the morning for some time yet that morning, those times won’t be available on calendly. So make sure you think ahead and schedule your times as soon as possible. Each week, you can schedule out ahead of time, if you know you’re going to be done with the lab, when we meet the calendly will actually generate a zoom link for us will meet via zoom will use screen share. And I’ll have you walk through parts of your lab and show me how it’s working. Generally, if the lab is working, it takes about five minutes to grade. If things are not working, it takes a little bit longer, because we’ll look for some partial credit to see where you’re at. But a lot of this course is a completion course it either works or it doesn’t. And you’ll get points if it works. And you get some points, maybe no points if it doesn’t work. So it’s really on you to make sure that your labs are complete and working when you’re ready to have them graded. The other thing I will stay with grading. As soon as you start grading with me, you’re not allowed to make any changes to your labs. Even if halfway through the grading process, you realize you did something wrong. It’s already too late, you started grading. So that’s just to clarify that policy. I have had some students that have asked me if they could change things really quick that they realized were wrong. But it’s like changing the answers on a test after you hand it in to your teacher. So as soon as we start grading, you won’t be able to make any changes to your labs, and you’ll get the score that you’ll get. So keep that in mind and make sure your labs are really ready to go before we start grading them.
So for the discussions, I’ve got them pretty much scheduled. If you look on canvas, you’ll already see the schedule out there. I just need to put names on the times. We’ll have one discussion per week, I actually will schedule it all eight weeks of the semester. The weeks we don’t have a guest speaker we’ll just do those as open office hours. So you can drop in Say hi ask questions, whatever. But for weeks two through six, we will have a guest speaker come in. They’ll talk for about 45 minutes to an hour. This semester. The one thing I do require you to do is submit your questions on canvas beforehand, about two or three days in advance of the session. That way I will have a bank of questions that I And ask the person even if you aren’t able to show up. And then to actually get your points, there are two things you can do. You can either show up in person and ask at least one question, hopefully one of the ones you pre submitted, but if not, if you come up with a question you can ask it, that’s one way you can get those points. If you’re not able to attend in person, you can watch the video afterwards. And I’ll have a little prompt that I want you to respond to based on what you saw in the video. So you’ll watch the video, write your response, and you’ll get your points that way, I really encourage you to attend the live sessions, if at all possible, we’ve got some great speakers coming in. And it’s a great chance for you to interact with some of the people working directly in this field.
So beyond that, this summer, feel free to keep in touch. We have a Discord server for the computer science department that I’m pretty active on so you can always chat with me there. If you’re not on that server, you can go to discord bot.cs ksu.edu. It’ll have you signed in with your case date account and your discord account and it will link them together and invite you to the server. And then when you go back to discord, you should now see the server show up in your list. Email me if that doesn’t work, and I’d be happy to help you with that. We’ll have our zoom discussions once a week on Thursdays. I also host Tea Time office hours on Tuesdays at 330 and Fridays at 1030. Those are just open drop in office hours we can come chat about anything. The link is always posted on discord when we start so join the discord server or email me if you’d like the tee time link and I’ll send it to you directly. And then of course you can always schedule time to meet with me one on one for Office Hours via calendly is the easiest way to schedule that. And I’m always more than willing to help you out where I can.
Other than that, good luck this semester. Hopefully you enjoy this course. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to email me anytime and I wish you the best of luck.