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Syllabus - Distance Learning Structure
This class is being taught as a computer-mediated distance learning course, which offers both opportunities and challenges that may be unfamiliar to many students. First and foremost, the course has been structured to be asynchronous, which means that it is not necessary for students to come together at a particular time to hold class meetings. Instead, you will be able to log on and work on class assignments at whatever time during the week meets your needs. While this provides great flexibility, it also adds a greater burden of responsibility for everyone to work diligently and independently, and to meet all schedule deadlines.
To structure to the course, a weekly course deadline has been established, which is midnight on Thursdays. This is the time each week that all assignments for the week are due. Many assignments you submit will be used by fellow classmates to complete subsequent work, and so you must meet assignment deadlines. You will be responsible for posting many assignments to the course bulletin boards and these responses will provide materials for the next week's assignments for all students, so please be sure you are comfortable using the bulletin boards and contact your instructor right away if you have any questions. Since other students will respond to your postings, keep in mind your work is important to the success of your fellow students.
This course will be writing-intensive both for you as students and for your instructor. You should expect to complete four to six short (one- to two-page) assignments each week, in addition to drafting or redrafting your story, reading published authors, and providing commentary on other student work. This class will demand a great deal of your time--at least six hours a week (keep in mind, with a traditional course, you would ordinarily be in class for four hours each week).
The advantage provided by computer-mediation is that you as students are afforded greater flexibility in how you approach the course material. The course is broken into four broad "discussions": Fictional Narrative Basics, Getting and Giving Help, Managing Fictional Narrative Flow, and Fiction and the Real World. Where possible within these discussions, the course is structured to allow you to choose how you move through subtopics, finding your own path to a deeper understanding of fictional narrative craft.
While technology provides us the opportunity to learn in new ways, it will not be acceptable as an excuse for late work; it is each student's responsibility to ensure that they have adequate and reliable computer service available for the duration of the course.
Rules for Communication
This course is being conducted as an asynchronous distance learning course, which means that class members do not have to be logged on at the same time in order to accomplish any facet of the course work. Each of you, as well as your instructor, will be able to log on and work at whatever time is most convenient for each of your schedules. The class will be using e-mail as the primary means of communication.
Because most people are habituated to a somewhat informal use of language with e-mail and instant messaging that is not always appropriate to a learning environment, all students should adhere to a few rules when e-mailing and instant messaging one another. These are as follows:
- Always, always, always respond to e-mails, especially your instructor's. Even if you are struggling or behind in your work, keep in touch so your instructor knows what is happening.
- Please e-mail in thoughtful, coherent messages employing proper grammar and complete sentences. Please also avoid using abbreviations such as "LOL" for "laugh out loud" and emoticons such as ": )"--this is a class about using language effectively, and you should all be able to communicate your thoughts using standard English. Especially when discussing one another's work, it is important that your comments not be misinterpreted.
- Avoid using special fonts, colors, images, etc. in e-mails as they cause problems for some systems.
- As this course is asynchronous, please allow for and expect up to a 24-hour response time, both from your instructor and from other students in the class. Likewise please try to check your e-mail daily and respond in a timely fashion to your instructor and your peers.
- Refrain from the use of profanity, and use common sense with regard to other potentially offensive content.
- Please use Instant Messaging respectfully, with an understanding that students may not have much time allotted for completion of work and so may not be able to take time out to converse.
Please employ one of the two following formats for submission of assignments by e-mail:
1) Type or cut and paste your assignments and stories directly into the body of an e-mail. Do this when practical as it eliminates problems with translating files.
2) Attach assignments and stories as Microsoft Word documents.
For posting to the bulletin boards, either type directly into the posting or cut and paste.
In all cases, please try to avoid using smart quotes and apostrophes (the curly kind), ligatures (automatic linkages of letters that some word processors insert), and other special characters, as these cause problems. You can generally turn these characters off in your word processor's preferences.
For purposes of measuring assignment and story length, 300 words equals a page. This means an assignment that says "two pages" should be at least 600 words. Your story will be ten to twelve pages, so 3000 to 3600 words. In general, students may go over assigned assignment lengths if the spirit so moves.
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