• Email

  • to instructor,
  • Email to the entire class should generally be avoided.

• MS Teams

  A Teams area allows for postings and chats about course-related topics.

  The Team has three channels:

  • General: This is a place for questions and discussions about the general subject area of the course.

  • Assignments: This channel would be used for asking general questions about assignments.

    Because this is a public forum, and everything that you post will be seen by your classmates, this is not the place to ask questions about how to answer/solve assignments, exam questions, or anything else you are being graded upon.

    Do not post your code, even if it is non-working code.

    Specific questions about how to solve an assignment should be directed to zeil@cs.odu.edu or asked during Office Hours.

  • Things that are broken: Use this channel to report technical problems with the Canvas area or the website: broken links, malformed HTML, etc.

• Office Hours

  Yes, given that this is a Distance Course, many of you can’t come to campus to see me face-to-face. But I also offer options of meeting by telephone or via network conferencing (Zoom).

  • You can find my office hours here.

In general, any conversation in which you discuss all or part of your solution to an individual assignment, even if you are only speculating on possible solutions, should be limited to you and the instructor. Sharing such information with other students is a violation of the course’s policy on Academic Honesty.

Use email or office hours for those kinds of questions.

• Similarly, questions about your own grade on an assignment should be limited to a private communication with the instructor. In fact, if you were to try to ask such a question in a public forum, ODU privacy policies would prohibit the instructor from replying.

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 Teams.

The instructor may, if he feels it is appropriate, copy an e-mailed question to Teams so that the answer becomes available to everyone.

• Students posting in the Teams or sending email to the instructor or to classmates are expected to conform to the norms for civility and respect for ones’ classmates and instructors that are expected 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.

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