SYLLABUS FOR ON-LINE ENGLISH 1102

Orientation for On-line English 1102 Class

Instructor: Anita Underwood
Darton e-mail: anita.underwood@darton.edu
(However, please use WebCT e-mail after the course begins to communicate with me.)

Dear Students,

Below, I will try to give you an idea as to what to expect in my English 1102 class.

TEXTS:

(1) Literature and Society, 4th edition

(2) Prentice Hall Reference Guide to Grammar and Usage. 6th ed.

1. What you will need for this on-line course:

A reliable computer with Internet access and Microsoft WORD (Word Perfect, Microsoft Works, Microsoft Wordpad and other such documents WILL NOT BE accepted because my computer cannot read them.)
A Darton e-mail account.
Some sort of electronic storage device, such as a floppy disk, writable CD-ROM, and/or thumb drive.
The required textbooks. (See syllabus for details.)

Please note that a reliable computer is a must for this and any on-line class. You can lose valuable points and even grades if you fail to submit assignments on time because your computer acts up. When your computer and/or internet connection is acting up, remember to use the campus computer labs and/or your local library’s computers.

2. What computer skills you will need:

Ability to type, save in MSWord, and print
Ability to search the Internet
Ability to send, receive e-mails and handle attachments (This is very important. If you do not know how to send and receive attachments, you should start learning now.)

If you are not sure how to do the above, please ask for help before you begin the class. We will rely heavily on sending and receiving attachments in WebCT, creating and saving documents in MSWord, and sending and receiving e-mails, so please familiarize yourself with these processes.

3. Our general weekly SCHEDULE:

A week for our class’s purpose is from Monday morning until Sunday midnight.
Students should check into the class on Monday to read e-mails I send during the weekend and to read assignments and deadlines in the appropriate week of the “Discussions” sections of the class.
I will post a message under each and every week in the “Discussions” area. These messages contain your weekly tasks. Review these on Monday.
Students should check into the classroom at least every other day to keep up with readings, postings, and e-mails of the instructor and other students.

Once I post a note, you are responsible for knowing its content. Excuses of not checking into the classroom often will not warrant a second chance at submitting assignments.

4. What to do once you access the class for the first time:

Access, print, and carefully study the Syllabus. It contains valuable information.
Check the following areas of WebCT: Discussions, E-mail, My Grades, and Assessments. These are the most frequently used areas of the class. Their link is in the upper right-hand corner of your screen. You might have to click on “More Tools” to see all your choices. Make sure you know how to use all of these areas.
Read “Introduction” and “Tasks for Week One” in Discussions/Introductions and Week One.
If you have difficulty navigating within the classroom, you might want to seek the help of a fellow student, Writing Center staff member, computer lab staff member, or the help desk.

5. How you will succeed in this class:

Complete all reading and writing assignments on time.
Be familiar with the technology.
Learn as much and in as much detail as you need. Read carefully not only the textbooks, but also my comments at the end of your returned essays. Here is an “insider” tip: When I grade an essay of yours, I will look back at the previous essay(s) you wrote, and I will compare your mistakes. If I see the same mistakes in the new essay, I will (1) be disappointed and (2) grade your mistakes more severely than the first time.
Check in the class regularly.
Communicate with me when you have questions, concerns, and/or comments. (Very often when students do not understand something, they fail to contact me about their confusion. Guess what happens: When they get a bad grade, they tell me they did not understand the assignment. My answer is that they should have asked me as soon as they realized they did not understand something. After the fact, it will most likely be too late.)
TAKE CHARGE OF YOUR OWN LEARNING. An online learning environment functions differently from that of an in-class learning environment. Because research shows that most online students are self-motivated, learn for learning’s sake, and are independent, I hope that all of you will find the right balance of learning and navigating technology.

6. Class communication:

Our primary two-way communication will take place through the e-mail component of WebCT. You can access this feature by clicking on the Mail link on the class’s home page. (Please note that this e-mail is completely different from the Darton e-mail that ends in darton.edu.)
You may also send me e-mails to anita.underwood@darton.edu from external (not WebCT) e-mail accounts, but only if you cannot access WebCT for some reason. You can only send e-mails form WebCT within WebCT, not to outside e-mail address.
When I ask you to e-mail assignments to me, I mean for you to use the WebCT e-mail, not my Darton e-mail. Assignments that arrive on my Darton e-mail will not be accepted.
To make our lives easier, please restrict all communications to WebCT e-mails.
I will check my WebCT e-mail everyday, mostly in the evening. So, if you have any questions about anything, please send me an e-mail instead of posting questions in the Discussion Forum. I DO NOT check the Discussion Forum every day, so if you post there, I might not receive your question on time.
Students become inpatient sometimes when they do not receive an instantaneous response to their questions. However, put yourself in my shoes: I have about a hundred or more students who access WebCT at different times a day. I would have to sit in front of my computer twenty-four hours a day to be able to immediately answer all your e-mails. Of course, this is impossible. I will check my e-mails in the evening, so if you get to me by then, you will receive an answer that same day. If you send me an e-mail very late in the day, you will receive a response only the next evening. (I might not respond to you in such a timely manner on the weekends since I generally “take off” Friday and Saturday evenings as my “downtime.”)

If you have not checked your Darton e-mail account for awhile, please do so. You may find that it is full of messages from different Darton organizations. Please delete them in order to free up storage space. If your mailbox is full, you will not receive my messages.

7. TYPES AND Submission of assignments:

(1) TIMED ESSAYS (2): These essays will have to be written in 60 minutes and e-mailed to me within the next ten minutes. WebCT times students’ responses. These essays serve as a preparation for the Regents’ exam. Their topic will be unannounced but will be general Regents’ topics. (The final exam will be one of these three.)

(2) UNTIMED ESSAYS (3): These are essays you will write on literary topics which I will provide you in advance.

All the essays you will have to write in this course will follow the five-paragraph format.

(3) DISCUSSION POSTS (6): Every other week or so, you will engage in an activity whose result you will have to post in the “Discussions” area of our class. For some posts, I will prepare questions, but for some posts, the task will be different to promote collaborative learning among the students. In addition to your initial post, you will be asked to respond to two of your fellow students’ post to develop a dialogue.

(4) RESEARCH PAPER (one): You will have to compose a 5 to 10-page research paper which will be on a literary topic and will include no less than five research sources and MLA citation format.

All these assignments will be due by Saturday midnight of the week during which they are schedules.

8. How I will return your work:

I will return graded essays to you via WebCT e-mail and will post grades in “My Grades.”
I will post comments to your Discussion Posts and will post grades in “My Grades.”
Every time I finish grading an assignment for the entire class and record grades, I will send out a mass e-mail to notify you.
Here is a suggestion: CHECK YOUR GRADES FREQUENTLY to see if all of them are recorded and that they are recorded correctly. I have to enter hundreds and hundreds of grades each semester, so it happens that I make mistakes. Please take responsibility for checking on your own grades.

9. Working ahead of schedule:

Most of the time, you are able to work at your own pace. This is one of the many perks of on-line learning. You will see that I have already posted assignments for many weeks in the Discussion Board, so you can work ahead by reading and posting your responses ahead of schedule.
Disclaimer: Since our class is not static (motionless), I might feel the urge to change some of the assignments before a new week begins. Please allow me the luxury of doing so in order to better run our classroom. To avoid not noticing my updates, please read the tasks for a given week on Monday of each week.

11. Plagiarism and its consequences:

You are required to complete your written work independently. Copying each other’s work, letting a classmate copy a part or the entirety of your work, and borrowing language and ideas extensively from any outside source without proper documentation in your essays, tests, and the research papers are considered to be plagiarism. These acts of academic dishonesty will result in a zero on a particular work where such acts happen. Depending on the seriousness of the offense and the offender’s attitude, these acts may be reported to the Division Chair, the Vice President for Academic Affairs, and the Vice President of Student Affairs, who may take further disciplinary actions against the student(s) at fault.

There will be times when you are not sure whether you need to use citation or not. I advise you to always include MLA-formatted citation when in doubt. (There is a whole chapter on MLA citation in the Prentice Hall Reference Guide textbook.)

Unfortunately, there is at least one case of plagiarism every semester. The consequences are perilous, so please do you own work. It is worth it!

I most sincerely hope that you will enjoy our class because it will be challenging and engaging.

Current Students