Registration
First Week Rule
I often have a number of students hoping to add the class during the first week or two of the semester. To make sure that those students have time to join — and to be sure that registered students don’t delay getting started — I require you to do two things by the end of the first week:
- The Syllabus Quiz
- The Canvas Message Assignment
I will drop any registered student who does not complete both of these by 11:00 p.m. on Sunday, January 28.
If that creates a problem for you, please contact me before Sunday. I am willing to consider other arrangements, but only if you contact me in advance.
Drop Dates
This semester, the deadlines for dropping the course are as follows:
- February 2, to avoid a “W” on your permanent record and to be eligible for a refund;
- April 26, to receive a “W” on your permanent record.
If you decide you need to drop, I recommend that you see a counselor to discuss what effect that might have on your educational plans.
Student Responsibility to Drop
Every term, several students disappear from the course without letting me know why. I cannot always tell if students have really left the course or have just gotten behind. That makes it hard to know whether I should drop them or not.
In the end, it is the student’s responsibility to drop by the appropriate deadlines. If you do decide you need to drop, please be sure you follow through with the Admissions Office.
That said, if you stop logging into Canvas, or stop participating in the class, I will consider dropping you, especially as we get close to the April 26 deadline; I’d rather you received a “W,” rather than an “F.” (I will try to contact you before making that decision, though I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to).
More important, though: If you find yourself tempted to quit, I encourage you to contact me first. We might be able to find a way to get you back on track.
Disability Statement
If you need special arrangements for a physical or learning disability, I encourage you to let me know, and to arrange an accommodation plan through Disabled Students Programs and Services (DSPS) as soon as you can. Working with DSPS isn’t a requirement, but they offer helpful support for both you and me.
Please visit the DSPS page to see what kind of help is officially available to you. If you’re on campus, you can drop by their office (Building 1800, at the west end of campus), or you can contact them by phone — (530) 741-6795 or email (dspsinfo@yccd.edu).
Communication
Announcements
Two or three times a week, I may post announcements for the class using (surprise!) Canvas’s Announcements. There will basically be two kinds:
- Class business: Reminders for upcoming assignments, changes to due dates, corrections, and other announcements related to the logistics of the course (how the course works);
- Instructional material: clarifications, responses to issues that come up in student work, and other items related to the content of the course (things to help you do your work).
Both kinds of announcements are important, so please check your announcements regularly. I recommend that you create a schedule for yourself — or, even better, consider setting up a “Notification” to inform you whenever an announcement appears (see the next item in this syllabus).
Notifications
Canvas has a flexible communications system. Indeed, at times, it can be too flexible, and communications can get lost in the range of possible channels.
If you haven’t yet done so, I recommend that you go to your Canvas Settings and set up Notifications in a way that works for you. You can set it up so Canvas notifies you when there’s a new announcement, as well as when I post feedback on an assignment, or someone responds to a message in the Discussion forum, etc.
I’ll walk you through that process in a video in the first week of the course — though if you’d like to do that now, go to about 3:40 in this video.
Discussions
Throughout the semester, I will assign Discussion Group Assignments (DGAs) designed to help you to work through issues and ideas we bring up in class. I will also set up specific threads that focus on specific assignments, as well as general questions.
It’s important that everyone feel comfortable participating in Discussions, so please: be respectful of your peers. You may disagree, at times, but please do so thoughtfully and politely, not with sarcasm or derogatory remarks directed at any person or group of persons. Please remember that there is a feeling human being on the other end of the computer connection. There is a lot of room for debate in this class, but not for flame wars.
On the other side of the coin: please don’t take criticism or advice personally. Love-fests don’t help anyone improve; honest suggestions do. When they’re right, we learn something new. But even when they’re wrong, we strengthen our own position by articulating why we think they’re wrong.
In short: strive both to give and to receive feedback, criticism, or advice with grace.
Canvas Messages (“Conversations”) and Personal Email
Messages to individuals (to your classmates, or to me) — Canvas calls these “Conversations” — should generally be used only for private communications. If you have any comments or questions that might be of interest to the class, please post them in an appropriate Discussion thread so others may benefit from the conversation.
For example, if you want to let me know why you haven’t turned in an assignment yet (a private issue that the rest of the class doesn’t need to know about), it would be appropriate to send me an individual Canvas message. If you are confused about the instructions on a writing assignment, though, it would be appropriate to ask that question in the Discussions area. You may fear that your question is obvious, but it’s likely that others have a similar question — and sometimes students’ answers to such questions are more helpful than my response.
For class-related issues, please contact me through Canvas when you can; it’s much easier to keep track of conversations that way. For issues not related to the class, or in case you have trouble with Canvas (if you have trouble logging into Canvas, for example), you can go ahead and contact me through my personal email address (gkemble@yccd.edu).
I will respond within two business days (though I’m usually much quicker than that).
Dead Links
Every semester, I work to improve the course, which sometimes causes unintended glitches. If you find any “dead” links (or other mistakes—inconsistent due dates, typos, whatever), please let me know so I can fix them.
I am also open to feedback, so if you have any suggestions for improvement to the course, or if you can identify areas that were confusing or not intuitive, please feel free to let me know that as well.
Standards
Using Modules
Canvas presents the course in a series of pages grouped together into “Modules.” I’ve designed the course so that you’ll encounter information — instruction, discussions, assignments, etc. — as you need them.
As a new module is released, any assignments associated with the module will also become available, in the course’s Assignments section. However, you should go directly to an assignment only as a convenience, after you have worked through the module leading up to the assignment.
Occasionally students try to skip straight to the assignment without working through the modules. In fact, I’m finding that students have been doing this more and more often lately. This is a recipe for disaster, for a number of reasons. Please work through the modules thoroughly and in order, so that you will benefit from the explanations and preparatory writing assignments.
If you’ve not worked with Canvas before, that may all have been a bit confusing. I will have a video early in the course that walks you through how to (as I put it) work through the modules.
Formatting
Your three main essays should be formatted using MLA style. We’ll talk about this during the course — I’ll even post a walk-through video about how to lay out your essay. But here’s a short version:
Essays should:
- be typed, using a standard 12-point font (e.g., Times or Times New Roman);
- be double-spaced (never single-spaced; never triple-spaced);
- have one-inch margins;
- have a correctly formatted header, title, and pagination;
- document sources correctly, using both in-text citation and a Works Cited page.
Final drafts of essays, especially, should be edited, proofread, and spell-checked.
And please give each essay a clever and informative title (“Essay 1” is neither clever nor informative….)
Submitting Essays
Unless specified otherwise, please submit assignments as a “File Upload” through the Assignments section in Canvas. (The most notable exception: Discussion Group Assignments.)
Please don’t submit work to my personal email unless it is absolutely necessary. It’s hard to keep track of work that is not submitted as instructed—especially work submitted outside Canvas.
If possible, please upload essays in Microsoft Word format (.doc, or .docx), as this format allows me to respond to your work most effectively. (Note that Google Docs can save a in Word format, under “File | Download.”)
If you do not have access to Word (or Google Docs), you may save and upload your essay as a PDF file. As I said, though, I am able to work more effectively with Word documents.
Note that Canvas won’t allow you to upload files in other formats (unless I’ve specified that other formats are acceptable).
I’ll have a video that walks you through this process as well.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined as passing others’ words or ideas off as your own. This may take many forms. Some may be accidental, such as forgetting to give credit for information you’ve cut-and-pasted from the Internet, or not realizing that you have to cite others’ work even if you don’t use their exact words.
Others are simply dishonest, such as buying a paper, having a friend of family member do an assignment, having ChatGPT write an essay, and so on. (I will say more about this last one in the next section.)
Please don’t.
Plagiarism is serious, and it carries serious consequences. At the very least, plagiarized work will receive an Incomplete or be considered Missing. That’s not a major problem for most assignments, but it is for the three major essay assignments: an Incomplete on a major essay lowers the course grade by a full letter, and a missing major essay would result in a D or F in the course (we’ll talk about my grading policies soon).
However, plagiarism — especially if there’s a pattern of it — may also result in disciplinary probation or suspension, or even expulsion. (See the Student Code of Conduct for more details.)
Most cases of plagiarism that I have encountered — and I have encountered many — have arisen from desperation. I hope that my grading policy (again, more on that soon) will help reduce desperation. But if you do find yourself growing desperate, please contact me as early as possible so that we can discuss strategies for success on the assignment.
A Word on Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)
You may have heard of so-called “Artificial Intelligence” (A.I.), especially the “large-language model” chat bots like Bing Chat or ChatGPT. These are sophisticated enough that they can actually write competent, if boring, essays — and they’re only going to get better. The social media platform TikTok shows lots of students, often high schoolers, having A.I. do their homework for them. Some of my students have been over-relying on A.I. in my courses, too.
There are many problems with relying on A.I. to do your work, but I’ll point out two.
First, as I mentioned above, having ChatGPT write an essay, and then turning it in as if it’s your own work, is clearly plagiarism.
But second, and more important, using ChatGPT to write an assignment — or even relying on it too much to brainstorm or organize a paper — hurts your ability to learn the critical thinking and expression tools that this class is intended to help you develop. For example, chat bots do a solid job creating summaries of articles, and some argue that we should just leave that to them. If we let A.I. do what it does well, they say — if, for example, we let A.I. summarize articles for us — that would free us up to do more meaningful work.
But the act of summarizing develops a wide range of skills: reading, analysis, critical thinking, writing, problem solving, and much more. And those skills are foundational to producing “more meaningful work.”
So yes, a chat bot can summarize an article faster, and maybe even more “accurately,” than you could do it on your own. But your understanding of the article would suffer, and that would limit your ability to use the article in your own argument.
I know that some teachers have banned the use of A.I. tools in their courses. I understand that policy, but it’s not the policy I’ve chosen. There are many ways that A.I. can help. And while I won’t be able to weave a lot of instruction around A.I. into this course — anything I would write could be about of date in by the time I hit “publish” — I may try to find ways to work things in throughout the semester, perhaps in discussion threads.
If you’re thinking of using A.I. to help you with your work, please let me know. A conversation would help you better use the tool, and would protect you against charges of academic dishonesty (plagiarism).
That said, I hope that my grading policies will give you the freedom to explore your own thinking and your own writing — to take risks and to use the act of writing as a tool for thinking. A.I. can be useful, but it can also undermine your ability to create something authentic and meaningful for yourself and your readers.
I will add one last thought: one of the most important insights in this class — at least, this is what many students have told me — is that your voice matters. I’m interested in things that only you can say, and in the way only you can say it. A.I. erases your voice. Please don’t let that happen.
Next up: Grading
The next section is about my grading policies.