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CAUTIONS FOR THIS COURSE
I love teaching this course, but there are challenges for folks that I like to be upfront about so that nobody finds themselves in a situation that they would prefer to avoid. Here are some cautions to think about on the first day of the class:
- This is a six-week, accelerated course. I have taken 15 weeks of content and activities and condensed it into six weeks. That means you will almost certainly need to do work for the course every day. For some of you, that will not be a problem, but for folks with a heavy work schedule, multiple courses, extensive home responsibilities, or serious challenges to your reading and writing abilities, the pace of this course may not be the best way to succeed in fulfilling this course requirement. If you are not sure you can handle the pace of the course, email me so that we can discuss it.
- This is an online course. In a face-to-face course, some students show up for class, sit passively throughout the class meetings, and then do homework. In an online course, you have to work actively and do the homework, and that can be a real challenge for both students and the instructor. While I have lots of online experience, I have never taught a course exclusively online before, and I have my own concerns about how the course will go, but for students, my cautionary statement is to be prepared to be an active participant at least every other day if you want to pass the course.
- This course is not self-paced. While many online courses are self-paced with weekly submissions of work, this section is not: I have items due at specific dates and times listed on the Daily Assignments. If you need more latitude with your assignment schedule, I completely understand and will help you find a self-paced section of the course because I do not want to see someone fail because the course design did not meet your needs.
- The assignment schedule is packed. Some folks believe online courses are easier, and perhaps some are. This course will not be. I have opted to give a daily schedule rather than a weekly schedule with key due dates throughout the semester. To me, it's important for you to see how I have paced the workload: if you keep up with the schedule, you will do well in the course even if you aren't the greatest writer in the world. If you don't keep up with the schedule, you will be overwhelmed by the end of the first major unit, and I don't want to see anyone struggle like that.
- Papers and Discussion Boards are public: when you write, you should expect that your classmates will be able to see what you are saying. For that reason, consider what information you choose to reveal about yourself carefully: confessing to illegal activities, revealing family secrets, and other potentially personal information may become public knowledge. You are not anonymous in this course, so write like your grandmother might get a phone call about what you said.
- Expect to be challenged on your ideas, beliefs, and assumptions: while we are writing about a theoretically safe issue by studying monsters, the topic will at times deal with some uncomfortable topics ranging from taboo behavior to identity politics (gender, race, religion, nationality, sexual identification, and more). If you don't have a strong reaction to the material in the course or to the ideas and comments expressed by me or your classmates, I'm not doing my job properly. I believe in Gerald Graft's admonition to "teach the conflict," primarily because I want each of you to learn to listen to your own ideas and the ideas of others so that you can persuasively argue your own position and learn to interact with conflicting positions without rancor or rudeness. Civil discourse is a dying art, but part of being an educated person is learning to confront conflicting positions in a civil manner. All ideas are welcome short of open bigotry: my goal is to teach you how to identify, develop, challenge, and defend your own ideas and beliefs. Just keep a civil tongue in your head as you engage with the class.
- DO NOT ENGAGE IN ACTS OF PLAGIARISM: This caution is the scariest part of the course. In general, I don't take anything personally that a student might say or do except for one thing: plagiarism. To me, personal integrity and the concept of personal honor are essential qualities in people. If you plagiarize in my course, you display a complete lack of integrity and honor while insulting the hard work of your peers. You also insult me personally by assuming I will not notice or that I don't deserve to read your own words and ideas. Finally, you insult the person who actually wrote the words or developed the ideas you are claiming as your own. I will not ignore plagiarism when I see it: I have helped write or revise the Academic Honesty policy at three different colleges, and I if I believe you have plagiarized, I will stop everything else that I am doing to find evidence to support that belief. If I find it, I will prosecute, and 14 students have been expelled from various schools because I caught their plagiarism.
What should you do in this course if you are tempted to plagiarize, particularly the night before a final draft is due? Send me an email with the subject line "Choosing not to plagiarize." In the email, indicate that you are choosing not to plagiarize and, as a result, you will not have the assignment completed on time. When I receive the message, you and I will have a virtual meeting as soon as I can rearrange my schedule to accommodate it. It will not be a pleasant conversation, but you will leave that meeting with a pathway to pass the course because I believe it is more important to reward someone who chooses integrity over cheating.
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Date site created: May 15, 2020