Last modified: Dec 02, 2014
This course website contains many hundreds of web pages. It can be a bit daunting when you are starting out. This document explains the basic organization of the site.
When you first enter the course site, you are taken to one of several directory pages, easily recognized by the row of buttons down the left side. The directory pages serve as gateways to the various documents that make up this web site.
You will usually start at the Outline page, where you will find the outline of the course subject matter together with textbook readings, assignments, lecture notes or slides, etc.
Access to Readings.\ Readings for the course are drawn from a variety of texts. These are available on-line through the Virtual Library of Virginia (VLVA). As an ODU student, you have free access to these.
If you are a newcomer to the course, you should probably begin by checking out the documents in the Policies page. (In fact, you should probably do that right after completing this document.) Here you will find the course syllabus and other documents relating to course policies and procedures and on how to get started working in the course. There may be links to many of these documents elsewhere in the course, but the Policies page collects them all together into one
The Library page contains links to a variety of reference materials and software packages that may prove useful to you in this course.
The FAQ page contains a list of frequently asked questions about the course policies and content, the C++ programming language, etc.
The Grades page provides you with a summary of your progress through the course assignments so far.
The Search page allows you to search the course public documents, particularly the lecture notes, by supplying keywords.
The Offline page gives you access to an e-book version of the collected course lecture notes, which may be useful to those of you who like to read from a tablet or other mobile device even when not connected to the Internet.
This may not be an exhaustive list of the directory pages. Feel free to poke around the directory, getting yourself familiar with the overall structure of the website.
At the bottom of nearly every page you will find these buttons:
This takes you back to the Outline/Topics page.
This takes you to the course
BlackBoard site.
This takes you to the
course Forums, a place for open questions and discussions related to the
course material.
This opens up a window from
which you can send email to the instructor about the web page you
have just been reading.
You can, of course, send email to the instructor at any time via your “normal” email program, but this button primes the message with the name of the course and the URL and title of the page on which you clicked that button. If you prefer to initiate email by other means, make sure that you include CS330 in the subject line and the URL of the relevant page in the body.
After all, you want me to respond quickly and accurately to your message. Experience has shown that students tend, however, to omit important context info (such as what course they are in, which assignment they are working on, etc.). An instructor may be teaching several different courses in a semester. If some of these are web-courses, the instructor may have students progressing through the course at different rates, So if you send the instructor a message that omits this kind of context information, one of two things is likely to happen:
The instructor may reply to your email asking, “What course are you in, and what assignment or lecture are you talking about?” This tends to annoy students because they know that this delays their getting “real” answer by a significant amount of time.
The instructor may set your email aside in favor of answering messages from other students who provided the required information, intending to come back to it later when he/she has time to look up your email address to get your name, look you up in the course rosters to see what course you are in, then search through the course web pages for some particular phrase mentioned in your question. (Maybe that sounds to you like that’s not a big deal, 5 to 10 minutes of time at the most. But if your instructor is getting dozens of similar messages a day, that quickly adds up to hours of wasted time.)
Of course, now that your message has been set aside, there’s a much better chance that something pressing will come up before the instructor gets a chance to come back to you. So it will wait until the next time the instructor sits down to answer questions…Before you know it days have passed.
So it’s really in your own best interest to streamline the communication process as much as possible. And, while we’re on the subject, you might want to think about how to phrase your question or comment to get the quickest and most accurate response.
To the right of the buttons described above, you may see one or more of the following. Each of these takes you to a different format or version of the document that you have been viewing.
The document that you are
viewing, formatted as a single HTML-page.
The document that you are
viewing, formatted as slides for presentation by an instructor
during a lecture.
The document that you are
viewing can be found within an e-book (epub or mobi format) that
colelcts together most of the course documents into a single
package that an be read even when off-line.
As already noted, your options for communicating with the instructor include email and course forums. You also have the option, of course, of meeting with the instructor during office hours, as described further in the syllabus. It’s likely, however, that in many cases you won’t want to wait until the next block of office hours rolls around that coincides with your own free time. Email and the forums provide a way to possibly get quicker answers to any questions that you might have.
When you create a thread within the course Forum, you are opening up a discussion that can be read by everyone enrolled in the course.
In general, any conversation in which you discuss all or part of your solution to an assignment, even if you are only speculating on possible solutions, should be not be conduced in public forums.
Use email or office hours instead for those kinds of questions.
On the other hand, questions about the course subject matter or purely clarification questions about an assignment may be useful subjects for the entire class. These are good subjects for the Forum. The instructor may, if he feels it is appropriate, copy your e-mailed question to the Forum so that the answer becomes available to everyone.
Students posting in the Forum or sending email to the Forum are expected to conform to the norms for civility and respect for ones’ classmates and instructors that are common to all on-campus speech and writing.
Students are also expected to conform to the norms of “netiquette”, for example, RFC 1855: Netiquette Guidelines . In particular:
Emotions are often hard to convey and easy to misunderstand in written text. Smileys and other emoticons can help (but don’t assume that attaching a :-) to an insult will make everything OK with the people reading your post.).
DON’T WRITE IN ALL CAPITALS or in all bold or, even worse, IN ALL BOLD CAPITALS. This is considered to be shouting, and most people don’t like to be shouted at, whether in real life or on-line.
“Shooting the messenger” is seldom a good idea. In general, assume that people who take the time to reply to your posts are honestly trying to help. Getting mad at them and “flaming” back is counter-productive if you really want people to help you.
Replies to posts will often be short and to the point simply because the responder has limited time. Don’t mistake terseness for rudeness.
Many people who post questions and requests for help may have made very basic mistakes. If you omit the details of everything you thought of and checked before making your post, don’t be insulted if someone replies with a very basic suggestion or a link to something that you have already read.
Don’t “hijack” existing Forum threads to talk about a topic different from the original poster’s topic. Start your own thread instead.
In an ordinary conversation, no one appreciates the person who barges in and insists on changing the topic of dicsussion. And if two groups of people actually insist on trying to simulataneously carry on a discussion on two distinct topics within the same conversation, the result is usually confusing to everyone.
When you enter any of the course Forums in Blackboard, there is a “Subscribe” button available. Clicking on that will ask Blackboard to send you email whenever someone posts in the Forum.
Whether posted in a Forum or sent via email, a question is the beginning of a dialog. A well-prepared question will get you an informative answer quickly. A poorly-prepared one may get you irrelevant answers or may require several rounds of back-and-forth dialog, delaying your eventual answer by many hours or even days. So it’s in your own self-interest to ask your question in a way that gets you the answer you need as quickly as possible.
Who are you? : If you are sending me email, make sure your course login name or your real name appears somewhere in the message. I hate getting mail from partyAnimal@hotmail.com saying “Why did I get such a low grade on question 5?” when I have no idea who this person is!
What course is this? : Again, if you are sending me a question via email, please remember to state which course you are asking about. I teach multiple courses most semesters, and having to go look up your name to see which of my courses you are talking about is annoying. In fact, it’s a good idea to make the course number part of the subject line.
symbol
at the bottom of a page, this information is inserted automatically,
along with the URL of the page that you clicked upon, which may be
important to my interpretation of your question.Use a clear and precise subject header.: In the Forum, your subject header helps people decide if your post is worth reading. It also helps people find prior discussions that may have been relevant to later posts.
There’s nothing more frustrating than getting a question like
“When I try to compile my solution to the first assignment, I get an error message. What’s wrong?”
Grrr. What was the (exact) text of the error message? Was this on a Linux or Windows machine? What compiler were you using? What compiler options did you set? What did the code look like that was flagged by the message?
No, I’m not kidding. I get messages like this all the time. And it wastes my time as a question answerer to have to prompt for all the necessary information. It also means a significant delay to the student in getting an answer, because we have to go through multiple exchanges of messages before I even understand the question.
The single most important thing you can do to speed answers to your questions is to be specific. I’m not psychic. I can only respond to the information you provide to me.
- Never, ever paraphrase an error message (“I got a message that said something about a bad type.”)
- Never, ever paraphrase a command that you typed in that gave unexpected results (“I tried lots of different compilation options but none of them worked.”, or, my personal favorite, “I tried everything.”)
- Never, ever paraphrase your source code (“I tried adding a loop, but it didn’t help.”)
- Never, ever paraphrase your test data (“My program works perfectly when I run it.”)
All of the above are real quotes. And they are not at all rare.
The problem with all of these is that they omit the details that would let me diagnose the problem.
And it’s not all that hard to provide that info. Error messages can be copied and pasted into your message. The commands you typed and the responses you received can be copied-and-pasted from your ssh/xterm session into your message. Your source code can be copied-and-pasted or attached to the message.
Note that this information is almost always plain text. Unless you really need to show me graphics, please avoid screen shots. They are often hard to read and often do not allow me to make the fine distinctions I need to tell what is going on. Keep in mind that raster graphics formats (gif, jpg, png, etc.) often look very different when rendered on screens with different resolutions.
I often respond to a student’s question with further questions of my own.
Teachers since Socrates have always done this, and students have always been annoyed at it. But who are we to argue with history?
Sometimes I do this to get more info I need, sometimes to guide the student towards an answer I think they should be able to find for themselves.
It’s surprising how often students ignore my questions and either never respond at all, respond as if my questions were rhetorical, or, if I have asked 2 or 3 questions, pick the one that’s easiest to answer and ignore the rest.
This pretty much guarantees that the dialog will grind to a halt as I wind up repeating myself, asking the same questions as before, and some students go right on ignoring my questions, …