Communication
Read this guide on on-line communication. Follow every link in the section on asking good questions and giving good answers. You may be graded on the quality of your discussion. You need to communicate with clients and coworkers in the real world, you need to communicate with your fellow students here. You learn by finding the limits and holes in your knowledge. The best way for you to find them is to talk with others about the topics at hand.
Communication Methods
- Piazza
- This should be used for all questions seeking technical help, conceptual help or assignment clarification. Essentially if it is any sort of information that may benefit other students, it should be posted to Piazza. If there is a question that gets ignored for longer than 48 weekday hours you can email the instructor and TA and ask them to follow up with it. It may have just gotten missed.
- Slack
- The Slack channel CS340-400 is the primary mode of conducting office hours by the TAs unless specified. At the beginning and end of each office hour session (whether or not it is held using Slack), the TA would put up a message on the Slack channel informing so.
- Email
- Email should be used for anything that contains sensitive
information. So if you have a question about a grade or want to
request an extension, do so via email. All emails should have the
exact characters (yes, include the parantheses)
[CS340]
at the start of the subject so that they get priority in my inbox. In addition, every time you reply to an email thread it knocks it to the back of the queue because email gets processed in order of the most recent emails last. So be careful sending multiple replies as it might bump you back in the queue.
- Canvas Comments
- Canvas comments should only be used by students to add commentary prior to grading and by myself and the TAs to give feedback. If you need to communicate something to myself or the TAs after your assignment has been graded do so via Email. We will not see comments posted to your assignment submission after it has been graded.
- Canvas Mail
- The TAs and myself try the best we can to monitor Canvas email.
But there are less options to sort and filter mail via that system so
there is a much higher likely-hood that we will miss things that get
sent via Canvas mail. So I suggest you do not use it.
Communication Timelines
All emails should get a response within 48 weekday hours. So if you send an email at 8am on Monday, you should have a response by 8am on Wednesday. If you send an email at 10pm on Thursday, you should have a response by 10pm on Monday.
Do not expect communication on the weekends, though I do my best to look for urgent questions that are preventing you from making progress and answering them, even on the weekend. The more complete the question, the more likely you are to get help.
Accommodations
"Accommodations are collaborative efforts between students, faculty and Disability Access Services (DAS). Students with accommodations approved through DAS are responsible for contacting the faculty member in charge of the course prior to or during the first week of the term to discuss accommodations. Students who believe they are eligible for accommodations but who have not yet obtained approval through DAS should contact DAS immediately at 541-737-4098."
Students with documented disabilities who may need accommodations, who have any emergency medical information the instructor should be aware of, or who need special arrangements in the event of evacuation, should make an appointment with the instructor as early as possible, and no later than the first week of the term. Class materials will be made available in an accessible format upon request.
Late Policy
Requests for extensions are considered on a case by case basis.
Non-emergency requests must be submitted via email at least 60 hours
before the due date. (Not having enough time to get the assignment done
does not, by itself constitute an emergency, sorry!). If you don't know
if you will need an extension but might, you should ask for one. If no
extension is requested the below scores will be used for regular
homework assignments. This policy does not apply to exams, final
projects, how-to guides, peer reviews or project steps(Draft and Final versions). Those are not accepted past
the due date without an emergency or prior agreement. In general to
get extensions on these items you need to prove unavoidable extenuating
circumstances that arose after the add/drop period closed.
Emergency requests must include some form of documentation from a reliable 3rd party (doctors, news stories, admins of internet providers etc.).
You will lose 10% of your grade for each day past the due date.
For example, if an assignment worth 100 points was due on Sunday midnight and you turn it in on
Wednesday 0100 hrs, you will lose 20 points according to the late policy.
However, no submission will be accepted 7 days after the due date in this quarter.
Questions about grades
The TAs will grade all your submissions, unless otherwise noted.
If you have any concerns, contact them as noted in the Communication
Policy.
Any concerns about grades should be raised within 7 days of the date when
the grades were released.
Code Sharing
You will not get in trouble for sharing code on Piazza in order to solve problems. The communication guide actually mandates that you share portions of your code if you want to ask a good question. If you are worried that you are posting too much code, mark it private and ask me to review it. Note that this is a more permissive policy than the standard policy for the program.
You will get in a great deal of trouble if you copy code without
citing it. See the policy on plagiarism.
Code from lectures is not your own, code from StackOverflow is not your
own, code from the node.js documentation is not your own. If it is not your code you must cite it. If you cite it, you must provide documentation in very great detail of what it is doing so that I know you understand the code you are using.