Instructors: Lesley Istead and Zille Huma Kamal
For your health and safety, this course is being offered online only. We will not have in-person office hours, lectures, or exams. This is not an ideal offering of CS 350, but we will do our best to create a positive atmosphere and a unique learning experience.
As part of the Faculty's requirements for an online offering, this course is being offered asynchronously. There will be no set times that you are required to be online to receive content or perform a specific task. We will have assignments, they will have deadlines. There will be a final assessment, it will have a deadline as well. However, you will have plenty of time to complete each task, even for those with poor internet access.
Course content is not changing from previous terms. While it was our intention to begin a more serious overhaul of the course, starting with the assignments this year, it does not make sense to start this process under these circumstances. If you have previously taken the course, the assignments have not changed.
In F19 and S20, we recorded the lectures for this course. These lectures are available online and can be an additional source of course content. However, we will be creating new lecture videos that will be posted on a weekly schedule (to be announced). These videos can be watched live (via Twitch for 14 days). The new lecture videos will be uploaded to Youtube, and, likely Learn.
Why are we not prerecording lectures and having them available from the first day? To give you something to look forward to each week and to try to create some schedule representing normalcy.
The course notes are available online — see Reading Materials.
We will not have a midterm. In its place, each module of the course will have a quiz that can be completed on Learn. You can complete these module quizzes on your own schedule, but all quizzes must be completed by Monday, December 7, 2020.
There are five assignments. They are the same assignments as in previous terms. If you are retaking the course you may use your previous solutions so long as they were not subject to a cheating penalty. If you wish to reuse in whole or part your previous assignments, please let us know by sending an email to the ISC, so we can flag it in MOSS, our anti-cheating software.
Assignments will have due dates. There is a small amount of flexibility around those due dates offered via Slip Days. You get 5 Slip Days to use through the term but can only use a maximum of 3 on any one assignment. For each unused slip day at the end of the term, you will receive a 0.4% bonus, assuming that you submitted ALL assignments and received at least 1 point on each (with the exception of assignments that have been deferred due to VIF).
Why will we have assignment deadlines in an asynchronous term? Assignments build off of each other. To get 100% on A2a, you need to have A1 working, and so on. We want to make sure that we have a chance at grading/providing you feedback on assignment Ai before you submit Ai+1. But also, because we don't want you to leave all assignments to the last minute.
There is no midterm. But there will be a final assessment. The final assessment will be an open-book, online quiz offered through Learn. You will have about a week (TBD) to complete the quiz, and we'll even give you several attempts. We will not use proctoring software — it's essentially a rootkit and an invasion of your privacy.
We are using Piazza for all questions to the instructor and course staff.