CS 251 Fall 2020 structure

Class will mostly be asynchronous. I'll be providing a series of videos for you to watch that will replace in-class lectures. There will be brief quizzes about them afterwards. I'll have a Moodle forum to which you can post questions, and then both students and I can respond to them.

We'll do a synchronous class once a week to bring everyone together and do some group discussion on Zoom. For people who are unable to attend that class, I'll do my best to record it and make it available after the fact.

We're going to be programming with the cloud-based programming environment Repl.it. It brings up an interface with a programming editor in one pane and a terminal window in another, and you can fully collaborate with others while using it, just as you would in a Google doc. We'll have a mixture of paired and individual assignments. For the paired assignments, you can work with others remotely or nearby with Repl.it. If you're not in the same room with your collaborator, you can then use Zoom or whatever voice chat tool you prefer to use to talk with your partner while you're programming together. In some notable ways, this is better than pair programming in person, since you each have your own keyboard and mouse.

I'll be doing office hours over Zoom. Since we're using Repl.it, you'll also be able to share your work with me, and we can look at it together collaboratively.

Likewise, the course prefect as well as the course lab assistants will also be holding sessions. I suspect this will also be over Zoom, but I haven't yet discussed this with them.

I miss seeing students in-person, and I wish I were doing otherwise! There are multiple reasons why we're going online rather than meeting in-person on campus.

• Due to the new social distancing rules for campus this fall — which are important — the capacity of all classrooms has been decreased. With the new capacities, there isn't enough classroom space big enough to accommodate the high demand for our computer science courses. I could instead drop the size of the class dramatically, but then many of you wouldn't be able to take it.
• If we were in-person this fall, we would have to ensure that everyone is sits at least six feet away from each other, and that everyone (including me) wears masks. These are important rules to help keep us healthy, and I'm fully in support of them. But this would mean that for a class of our size, an in-person class would honestly be a worse experience than an online one. Group work/discussion in class, with everyone at least six feet apart, would become a cacophony where no one could hear anyone else. With a mask on my face, you wouldn't be able to read my facial expressions, and some of you might even have trouble hearing me speak. Likewise, I wouldn't be able to read your facial expressions to know when I'm not making sense, which is one of the most important advantages that lecturing in person offers over asynchronous lectures.
• Approximately 15% of Carleton students will not be on campus this fall, and will be taking courses remotely. Likewise, any students on-campus who end up in quarantine for 14 days, if we end up with COVID-19 cases on campus, will end up in the same situation. It would be very messy for all of us to manage this course with both modes simultaneously, i.e. in-person for some and remote for others. For example, if we were doing small group discussions, we would have to make sure to also somehow bring in the remote students via Zoom. Likewise, I would have to keep a camera on me while teaching, which would force me to stay in a single spot rather than use a wise blackboard plus screen – which means that I would need to project all of my materials from my laptop. Etc. We're much better off with an online experience where I optimize my efforts to make it great rather than a hybrid experience that would end up being the worst of both.

Alas, no. The world continues to change rapidly regarding how bad virus outbreaks are, what our government is doing (or isn't doing) to respond, and what we know about how to manage it. Existence is fluid these days. Anything I'm doing in the course could shift depending on what happens, so I can't promise anything above. That said, this structure is pretty flexible, so hopefully we'll be able to continue to run with it. It worked really well, under the circumstances, last spring.