This is a hybrid course and so communication between students and between students and professor is all the more important. It is your responsibility to keep up with communications. You cannot wait until an assignment is due or until a F2F meeting to express a concern. The following page lays out my expectations about communications for this course.
1. Accessing and Interacting With Course Content (Requirements)
2. Communicating with Classmates
3. Communicating with the Professor
Accessing and interacting with course content:
This is a hybrid course. It is essential that you have reliable access to a computing device with working internet connections. What ever your computing device, you will need to be able:
1. access Blogs@Baruch for reading and posting
2. access Blackboard for sending group emails or accessing files that cannot be put up on the Blogs@Baruch site
3. access Vocat
4. stream videos and music
5. upload and download and read word and pdf documents
6. type relatively long passages of text (meaning you should have a standard keyboard)
7. regularly access (send and receive email from) your Baruch mail and/or a working email account.
Communicating and interacting with class mates.
Group work and online discussions are a large part of this course. In addition to being present in online discussions, you will need to be able to communicate with the members of your group more frequently. I expect that you will communicate in a timely fashion, which means that by and large you should respond to your group members roughly within 36 hours (knowing that at times depending on what your group has worked out, you may need to respond more quickly). To this end you should be able to do AT LEAST THREE of the following:
1. provide your group with a working mobile phone number for texting or calling.
2. friend the members of your group on Facebook
3. work with a GoogleDoc
4. participate in Google hangout or gchat
5. provide your group with an email address you regularly check and respond to.
Communicating with the Professor
This is a hybrid course and to that end I realize there will be more questions and more online inquiries. However I am still one persons, and I am not constantly plugged in to the internet. I will have F2F and online office hours. I will also make myself available for some time after our F2F class (please do not try to meet with me before class).
F2F Office Hours: You can drop in or make an appointment to see me during my scheduled F2F office hours. I will be in my office hours VC 7-298. If you know you want to come to office hours, it is generally good to drop me a line telling me you’re coming and what you’d like to talk about.
Online Office Hours: During Online Office hours you may communicate with me via email and/or gchat using my ascurseen@gmail account. I will be available for chat during that time and that time only. Please be aware that I will respond to people in order I receive requests, and depending on the volume of inquiries I may not get to them all in one online office hours sitting.
Reaching me Outside Office Hours: While I will try to respond within 24 hours (and at times I will respond much more quickly than that), you should allow for 48 hours for any response. This means do not wait to the last minute to contact me.
If I have not responded to your email in 48 hours, you should respectfully email me again to follow up and/or approach me AFTER class.
If you are absent, it is your job to figure out what you missed. I will not give you an individual email instruction. I do however update the syllabus, and I typically post and email the class about significant changes to assignments or due dates.