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.
In S20 and F20, 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 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 Wednesday, April 14, 2021.
There are four assignments. If you are retaking the course you may use your previous solutions so long as they were not subject to a cheating penalty. However, please note that some of the assignments are different this term. 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.
Why will we have assignment deadlines in an asynchronous term? Assignments build off of each other. To get 100% on A3, you need to have A2 working. 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 (from April 17 at 12:00 am to April 23 at 11:59 pm EDT) 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.