 Greetings and welcome to Astronomy at Hack. In this video I will go through the syllabus, or at least a sample syllabus, for explaining some of the things that we will be doing in the class. Now this is a syllabus for a specific semester, in this case fall of 2018. If you're taking the class after that, then you may find some slight changes. So actually look at your syllabus that I give you for the exact details. Now some of the things would not change. My contact information is here, my name, and email address. I do give you an office phone number, but I strongly recommend that you did not use that to contact me, and that you instead use the email address. That is checked constantly. And teaching for virtual, I am not always in my office, so it may take a day or two or more to get back to you in terms of phone contact, whereas email I can generally get back to you within a couple of hours. I also give you my office hours. Again, those are very specific to this semester. Those may change for any future semester. So again, look at your syllabus for the specifics of that. And I give you the textbook that we'll be using for this class, and for the labs I use a number of online simulations. So you do not need any other purchases at this point for the labs, although you may need to install some various programs to run some of the labs. Now, below here we have the course description and some of the learning outcomes of the course, and I'm just going to skim through those really quick and show them to you, and then go on. So this is the requirements and basic descriptions and what you will learn, I hope, by the end of this class. So those are some of the things that we'll be looking at. I do give you a note there that it is possible that administrators may enter the course for evaluation purposes, and the technology personnel may have to look if there's issues. So I just keep that in mind that there's the possibility that people outside of the class may on occasion see your postings. Office hours, not so much applicable to an online class. Again, email is the best way to contact me. I get your messages immediately and try to respond as quickly as I can, depending on what else I happen to be doing at the time. You will generally find that I respond well, respond within 24 hours and actually much faster than that. So I do tell you here if you do not hear from me within 24 hours, please resend the message because something may have gotten missed or I may have missed your question or it may have accidentally gotten filed away. You can also use the class discussion boards for general questions. So if it's a question about your grading, certainly email me. If it's a question about an assignment, you may want to post on the class discussion board as that may help other students as well. Textbook editions, really we are on the first edition of the textbook and it is an online textbook which is updated so there really isn't anything applicable there. For the labs, I do use a number of simulations that might use Flash or Java, so you may have to have those installed on your computer or on a computer that you can use for those and you may need other various programs as assigned. Now for the class, in terms of breaking down the points, I break down everything here and what we have is the number of points, the assignments are based on a number of different things and there are going to be a total of 1,000 points in the class. So your exams, there are four exams and those are 40 points each and I will drop your lowest exam. So if you do poorly on one exam, you have a chance to just completely miss it. It will go away at the end of the semester. That does not include the final exam which is separate and worth 100 points in the class. In terms of the exams, they're split into two parts. There's a multiple choice part that is timed and an essay portion that is untimed. So you have those two parts for each of these exams. So exams total are worth about 22% of your grade. So it's not a large portion, a little less than a quarter is based on the exams. I try to base this primarily on other portions of the assignment and in fact labs are worth almost as much. The labs themselves are worth 20% of your grade and there are a total of nine labs. They are 25 points each and I will drop your lowest grade again. So your lowest grade will go away if you miss a lab for some reason during the semester or if you just do poorly on one, I will drop one of those. Now as we move on here in terms of labs, we also have discussions that we will be doing and there will be nine discussions very similar to the number of labs that we do and lowest grade will again be dropped. They're also worth 25 points each. Now when I do the discussions I have to set these up a little bit differently. I will give you a question for a discussion and you have to post by the assigned deadline. In that case it is not Monday, it is actually Saturday at 6 a.m. So you make your post by Saturday and then you will have 48 hours after that to post your responses. So everybody posts by Saturday morning. By Monday morning when the discussion closes you've had 48 hours to chance to read those posts and to pick the ones to which you reply. When you reply you're required to do three responses. You are required to respond to me once you make your post. You will see that I have a set of comments there and two to your classmates. So you have to respond to my post specifically and to two of your classmates. So I look at your original post, I look at your responses and I look at how many of the posts that you have read. I ask you for a minimum of 75% of all posts and responses required. So in order to do that I give you an extra time. I don't actually grade discussions until Tuesday at the earliest. So you always have the day on Monday. I don't want you to feel like you have to be up there till 6 a.m. in the morning because some people like to post in the early hours of the morning. This gives you plenty of time to be able to do this. In terms of discussions there are word count minimums. You must have a minimum of 250 words in your initial post and 75 in each response. So if you do less than that even by one word it will not be full credit. And padding, if I see note padding there or putting in extra things just to try to drag out a post or a response that would also not necessarily get you full credit. So just using 250 words doesn't guarantee you full credit but it is a minimum requirement. Now homework assignment, I should have said that is worth 20% of your grade as well. So discussions are worth 20%. Homework worth 12% of your grade. There are five of those at 30 points each and again I drop the lowest grade. So you'll see that as a common theme through a lot of these that I do drop the lowest grade. Homework assignments are going to be similar to what you'll see for the essay portions of the exam. There are short answer questions or quick calculations. I won't do the calculation ones on the exams but I do do some of the short answer ones or something very similar on the exam. They will be one assignment, one homework do right before each exam and I will post answer keys for those for you to be able to review the answers and study them. Now the article reviews worth 10% of your grade. There are three reviews. I do drop your lowest grade so you'll grade your two highest or you can skip one completely if you so choose. Those are 50 points each and I will discuss that more in another video. Quizzes are not directly graded. There are 13 points of extra credit on quizzes but they are all extra credit so there are 13 quizzes that will be there and they are untimed. They will have 10 multiple choice questions. You can take them as many times as you like. However it is your last attempt that is the grade recorded so make sure you note that that if you get a perfect score on it you've got the one point but if you take it again and get a 5 out of 10 your grade goes down to 0.5 you get half a point. So you can take them as many times for his review but it is the last attempt that I record. And then finally the solar observation project worth 16% of your grade is going to be discussed again in another video. So exams were worth about 20% of your grade. Lab work including the solar project which is kind of part of your lab grade will be worth well over a third of your grade. That is where a lot of the points come in. Some other information that I want to go through briefly first of all submitting assignments it is a requirement that all assignments be submitted through D2L. Do not email me assignments as I will not grade them. So I need to have them there. They are also due at 6am and I will discuss late assignments here in just a minute. But they are due at 6am anything after that once D2L marks them if they are not in by 6am they are marked as late. So if you submit it at 6am and it is a couple of minutes or two after it will still be marked as late and you will lose credit for that. Now I do say though I wanted to note that in an emergency if you are unable to submit through D2L do email me the assignment so that I can verify that it has been completed. Then get it submitted through D2L. This is still required for me to grade it but this will verify that it was done on time. So if in an emergency please do email me but you will get a response from me that says please submit it through D2L as soon as possible and I will actually grade it for you. In terms of late assignments I do accept late assignments up to one week after one week I do not accept an assignment for any credit. So up to 48 hours the first two days it is a 10% deduction the next two days it is a 25% deduction three days after that it is a 50% deduction and then finally no credit once it is more than 7 days late. Discussions quizzes and exams may not be made up so I do not do make-ups on any of those so if you miss them they are not eligible for the late assignments however you can do things like labs homeworks can be submitted late but the other ones cannot be you will not get credit for those if you've missed them. Grading is broken down here and I've kind of gone over that a little bit already I do grade on a straight 90, 80, 70, 60 scale so you need a minimum of 900 points for an A, 800 for a B, 704 a C and 604 a D I do not round grades at all so you will get no rounding on it if you get 899.9 points that is a B you need to break the 900 level to get the A the reason I do that is that I do give you some extra credit including the quizzes part of that and I drop some assignments so I've actually rounded your grade up several percent already and if you still did not make the next higher grade then you were really not that close in the first place so I do not do any further rounding and do assign grades exactly as they are done at the end of the semester in terms of attendance next thing I wanted to look at briefly attendance policy is a little bit different in terms of attendance I do look for that you have completed graded assignments each week if you have done so you are considered attending the class I do review that constantly and we will drop students who are consistently missing assignments and once you have missed 15% of the assignments for the course then you can be dropped from the course at any time without further warning I do consider an absence excused however in those cases I do need documentation I do not consider an absence excused unless there is documentation to verify the excuse plagiarism I do want to talk about that for things like written assignments such as your articles such as your homework assignments and essay portions of the exams it is not acceptable in any case if I do catch an example it is a first offence is a zero on the entire assignment and second offence is automatically dropped from the course with a failing grade so it is automatically failing if you have been detected to plagiarize a second time on a second assignment do note that if you are detected to have plagiarized that you are no longer eligible to withdraw from the course if you tried to drop you would still get an F so it is not limited to plagiarism there are other kinds of academic dishonesty and those are discussed here W grade policy you have the option of withdrawing before 70% of the course is done so 70% of that you still have the option to go into my hack and withdraw you can do that as long as there were no issues of academic dishonesty however if I drop you I always do it with an F if you want a W you must be the one who goes in and initiates the drop so just to verify that finally class schedule this could vary from class to class but this will tell you the starting week the day of the week starting so this class starting August 27th would cover this lesson this is the reading chapters any exams and any assignments that would be due that week you have all of those listed so you have a chance to look at what is there August 27th assignments would be due on September 3rd September 3rd on September 10th September 10th on September 17th and so on so that kind of breaks down everything that we would be doing for the semester just to skim through some other important information to review the refund schedule I give you a link for that there delayed opening schedule really does not apply to online classes so we really do not have any delays that are involved unless there is like a major storm that shuts things down for several days it will not have any impact on our class I've already gone over attendance policy excused absence these are the class college policies which mine will align with and if you note that it is important to note a couple of things here things like personal or family emergency unless they are documented are not considered excused absences you must also contact the instructor prior to or on the day of the absence in order for it to even be considered excused so I need to know before the week was over that there was an issue and I need to have documentation of what the issue was unexcused absences are also discussed here excessive absences we've talked about that I've gone over academic dishonesty these are just the details from the college portion and then finally just to end up here with the disability services if you have certain disabilities that may give you additional time to work on an exam or different other policies these are the contacts that you need to go through for the various campuses and ours for virtual learning is listed down here so you can make contact if you have concerns with that I can't actually give any accommodations myself they have to have been approved by the disability office first so they will then approve it verify any information needed and will then send that letter to me and once I get that then I can apply any of those accommodations to the to the rest of the class so that concludes this introduction of video syllabus in a way to describe a little bit about the class again go to your specific syllabus for the details this is just meant to give you a general idea so until next time have a great day everyone and I will see you in class