Hello everyone and welcome to the week 15 announcements video. This is most likely the last announcements video I’m going to make for this semester, but there are a few things I wanted to cover before we get to the end.
First of all, we’re on week 15 so don’t forget that Module 13 on model view controller or MVC is due this Wednesday at 5:00 PM. There is also one more module in the class, Module 14 on collections and libraries. It’s going to be due the Wednesday of finals week, which is Wednesday, December 18th at 5:00 PM as well. And then finally, don’t forget that all late work in this class must be turned in by the end of Friday on finals week, which is Friday, December 20th at 11:59 PM. That is literally the last instant that I can collect work for this semester to get grades in on time for the grade deadline. Especially with Christmas being earlier this year I have to get grades turned in by December the 23rd, which is a Monday. So I’ve got to have a really quick turnaround on that over the weekends.
Also, don’t forget that as you’re starting Module 12, or if you’ve already started Module 12 and you’ll be starting Module 14 please make sure when you open up the Codio tutorials that you look and see that you have the files for those. If not, post on Piazza and let us know and we’ll reset your textbooks on Codio. As we found out, as we continue to add more content to this course, we have to go back and reset people’s textbooks so they see the new content. Don’t worry! When we do that, all of your work will be backed up. We’ll send you a zip file with everything that was in your textbook before we reset it. And also your grades will not be affected even though Codio may send you a bunch of emails saying that it has regraded stuff, just ignore that. It does not actually change your grades. So in either case, if you have trouble with the textbook, let us know via Piazza and we can fix that.
Secondly, I have updated the late penalty. I posted an announcement about that last week. Currently in the class, the late penalty is you’ll lose 30% of the possible points from the project grade only. So, if you got a score higher than 30 on that project, you’ll lose 30 points. If your score is lower than 30, you’ll just get a zero on that project. To assess the late penalty, we’ve created a new assignment on Canvas under the Projects heading that is the late penalty. It will only have a negative score. It’s the sum of all of the late penalties assessed on all of the projects in the course. When I have gone in and assessed the late penalties, I add a comment to that particular assignment noting which projects were late and what the deductions were on those projects. It is accurate as of last Monday I believe, or Tuesday when I went through and did those. I’ll make another round here later this week and I’ll probably do one final round on finals week. If you’re not sure about your grade, please post on Piazza and let us know and we will figure that out.
Also in the announcement I sent last week, I uploaded a Excel file that you can use to manually calculate your own grades. And so if you calculate your grade with Excel file and what you see there doesn’t match what you have on Canvas, let us know and we will fix that as soon as we can. Especially as we get toward the end of the semester, your grades on Canvas should start to solidify to what the final grade will be.
Lastly, I have not made any determination as far as curves in this class. I don’t expect there to be a very large curve, but there’s a chance that I may curve things downward just a little bit. Just to get people to the letter grade that I feel like they have earned throughout the semester. I do, whenever I curve the class, I curve it for everybody. So the application will be across the board. If I do curve anything. And I will usually post a message sometime on finals week if I determine what I’m going to do as far as the curve.
So, we are coming up with the end of the semester. It is just two weeks left. Everything needs to be turned in by Friday, December 20th. If you are behind in the class, please, please, please contact me and let me know what your plan is to get caught back up. I am totally willing to work with you to make some sort of a catch up plan so that you can get back on top of things and still finish this class with a passing grade. It’s not too late. We can still do that. Basically what I want to get across is I don’t want students to fail in this class just because you got behind and didn’t feel like you could catch up. I really want to help you pass by working with you to figure out a way that you can get caught up in this class. So if nothing else, please contact me and let me know what your plan is. Please work with the GTAs. They’re going to have lots of office hours the next couple of weeks and I can guarantee the students that have been working with the GTAs are getting caught up in the course. It’s really nice to see that. So don’t be afraid. It’s still not too late to get caught up. I know you’re really busy with finals and everything, but now is the time to really make that push to get things caught up at the end of the semester.
Lastly in this class, there will be teaching evaluations. They will be done completely online. So you should get an email from the teval system sometime the Monday of finals week inviting you to fill out a teval. Please, please take the time to fill out that teval. This is the very first semester we’ve taught this course. You are the first nine students to take this course, and so your input is very, very crucial to the development of these courses. We really want to know what your experience was, what you thought, what you liked, what you didn’t like. I know it takes a little time to fill out these tevals, but your feedback is very, very crucial and it’s very, very important. I can guarantee that over the years past I have made lots of changes to my courses based on teval feedback.
In addition, if you’re really interested and would like to talk to me in person and do a little debrief at the end of the course, I’m totally willing to do that. I usually save those for after finals week once grades have been posted. So, if you’re around early next semester and would like to sit down and talk with me and do a quick exit interview about the class and your thoughts, I more than welcome that. Just shoot me an email and let me know. I have done this several times in the past for students and honestly I’ve found that those discussions are some of the most informative things that really helped me shape how the classes are built in the future. For example, in the intro class that I used to teach, we had 14 blog assignments and several students talked to me in exit interviews and said that the 14 blog assignments felt like busy work. The prompts were really short and hard to understand. And so we were able to minimize that by reducing it to seven blog assignments that were a little bit more in depth, a little bit broader topic. And a lot of students really liked that, that they felt like they weren’t doing so much busy work that they were really given the encouragement to go a little bit deeper on a topic. So, what I’m trying to say is those exit interviews can be really useful for me as well.
That’s really all I’ve got. Finals week is approaching, so hopefully you’re not feeling completely overloaded, but I know how it goes this time of the semester. Please do your best to keep up with this class. If you have questions or trouble, ask me; talk to the GTAs. We’re more than willing to help. I wish you the best of luck on finals week. And the best of luck to whatever your future careers become. If you like this class and you want to know more, we are teaching the second class in this series, which is CC 310 in Spring 2020. And so if you haven’t enrolled yet, you’re more than welcome to enroll in that class. If you like it and you want to tell your friends about this class, we would love to have your friends take this course as well. We’re really trying to grow this program and it’s something new and unique at K-State, and it depends on students like you to get the word out. So, I wish you the best of luck. I wish you good luck on finals and I will hopefully see you all in the future.