ENG 122 100$ for first two weeks Start now

Summer/2013 Karen Toloui

email: [email protected] (for this course)

Syllabus – English 122 Online, Section 5005

Reading and Composition – 3 Units

This course is designed to improve your ability to read college level materials and to write essays, to apply critical thinking to reading and writing, to enhance your self-confidence as readers and writers, to study how people shape language and how language shapes culture.

Textbooks:

Rereading America, Colombo, Cullen, Lisle, 8h Edition

(you must get the 8th edition)

Online Classroom: This course will be taught completely online by means of the website Course Compass. In order to access this website, you must go to the Course Compass website (coursecompass.com)and register for this course. You must do this by the first day of class, which is June 17h. This will require that you purchase an access code at the website. The course code for this section is toloui68306 .When you register, be sure to use the email address that you will use for the entire semester, and be sure that this is your own private email address and that you will be able to access it daily for the rest of the semester. The online classroom has several parts that we will be using: the Discussion Board, the Course Documents page, and the Course Information page. (No other parts of the website will be used.)

I will be posting my notes, or lectures, on the Course Documents page each day. This will be like our classroom lectures. Read these notes the first thing each day and pay attention to what I say there!

The Course Information page will be the place where I post assignments (like handouts in a normal classroom), this syllabus, and your assignment schedule. Once I have posted a document there, you can always go back to it, or print it up for easy reference. It is extremely important that you refer to the Assignments Schedule to know what each daily assignment is, so you should print this out for easy reference when you first get onto the Course Compass website.

The Discussion Board is where we will hold discussions of the articles and readings. You must participate in these discussions; each day you need to go there and post your responses to the discussion questions I will have posted there. Then, you should return later to see what others have posted regarding your answers and respond to what others have posted. Keep going back during the week so there is a small group conversation going on about the work. Remember that this is a public forum and that whatever you say can be read by everyone in the class, including me. While I believe a little healthy disagreement is fine, please do not make any personal attacks on people on the discussion board. Discussions must be friendly. We are a learning community. Competition to be ‘right’ is not necessary. Please note that if you only post your answers to the questions and do not respond to others, your participation grade will be lowered.

My “Teacher’s Updates”

You will receive several emails from me during each week, reminding you of your assignments and giving specific information you will need to have. I expect you to read these emails and NOT delete them so that you can refer to them if necessary. You do not need to respond to these emails unless you have a question. You do, however, need to respond to any individual email I might send you. Failure to do so might end in your being dropped from the class.

Reading:

We will be reading essays, stories, and poems from the textbook and discussing them online. Since these will be the basis of our class discussions, you will be expected to have read them by the dates for which they are assigned. Additional reading materials may be assigned for your reading as well. Read the assignment schedule to know which readings you need to read. If you do not keep up with the reading and writing assignments, you can easily fall behind. Expect to spend time completing your work and turning it in on time.

In order to have the opportunity to reflect on the readings and to discover what insights you have or have not gotten from the readings, you will write one 350 word (min.) reading response for all of the essays assigned. It is to be turned in (via email) on the date specified. See “What is a Reading Response?” on the Course Information page for guidelines. All readings assigned for the course will require a reading response, unless otherwise noted.

Writing:

Your individual reading responses will not receive letter grades. However, you will receive a grade on the completeness and quality of your responses overall at the end of the semester. This grade will be worth two major essays.

Several major essays will be assigned on topics related to readings and discussions. Also, at least one major essay, as well as your final exam, will be done during a brief period of time, as if it were in a classroom situation. For all of the essays you write this semester, I expect you to employ the writing process, which, in the case of the first two essays, requires that you get feedback from fellow students on a preliminary draft before you turn in your final draft to me. To reinforce your composing and revising skills, you will be giving and getting feedback on your initial drafts in small groups. Your participation in these feedback groups will figure into the grade you receive on your essay, as will the essay’s content, organization, and facility with language, including proofreading skills. The feedback groups are not to be used for editing of errors. Instead, I will give you guidelines on what to look for in each others’ drafts.

Grading:

You will receive a letter grade for this course at the end of the semester. The letter grade you receive will be an average of the grades received on the various segments as shown below:

Written Work: 75%

Participation: 25%

Please note that I do not use the Grade Book feature of the website. I will be telling you your grades on your essays with comments. But, if you are interested about what grade you have at any time during the course, feel free to ask me. But please wait until after the second week of classes.

Online Features :

Your participation grade will be based on your online postings. You will be expected to post on the Course Compass website and check back several times during the week to further respond. I will not know you are doing this unless you actually post a response, so you must participate in the discussion to get credit for ‘being there.’

Rules of the Course:

· You must have your own viable email address which you check often, which means at least once per day. If, for any reason, you change your address, you must let me know and change it on the course website. Always include your name in the body of any emails you send me.

· If you are experiencing technical or other difficulties, you must let me know immediately. If you have not posted for several days and have not communicated with me, I will assume you have disappeared and will drop you from the class.

· Posts must be made on the dates assigned. Follow your assignment sheet carefully. You must post your responses to the questions on the Discussion Board on the day on which the reading is assigned, and no later than midnight of that date. Discussions can continue of any given reading during that week. If you send me your reading response late, you will receive credit for it, but not full credit. Please note that the website uses Eastern time. I will make allowances for that when checking on when you have responded.

· This is not a self-paced course, and all work must be done during the days when they are assigned. You cannot afford to go on vacation unless you can participate in the class during that time.

· Plagiarism will not be tolerated. Any paper or piece of writing which appears to be plagiarized will receive an F. If you plagiarize more than once, you will receive an F for the course and you will be reported to the college administration. Do keep drafts of your work in case you need to prove it is your own. If you are having trouble writing your responses or your essays, you should contact me and we can discuss it by email. Do not try to copy essays from the internet or other sources.

· Correctness. Even though your online discussions are informal, please try to use standard conventions of writing, rather than internet slanguage (‘u’ for ‘you’, etc.). These are habits that, believe it or not, can interfere with non-internet writing. Also, if your writing on the discussion board or in your reading responses shows that you have a lot of writing problems but these problems do not show up in your essays, I will begin to wonder about whether the writing in your essays is your own. So, please proofread everything you write for this class, as much as possible, including any emails you send to me.

· When you receive an email from me, I expect you to reply to it immediately, just as I will try to do when you send me one. In a course of this nature, we must maintain communication.

Summer Course Admonition:

As this is a summer course, we will be covering 18 weeks worth of work in 6 weeks. Add to this the intensity of an online class, and the need to be on the computer a lot, you need to remember that if you have a full time job or intend to go on vacation during the six week session, you must keep up with the work any way. No allowances will be made for students who have circumstances that will not allow them to use a computer on a daily basis. Because there are so many assignments to be completed, you should expect to have homework every day, including weekends. Also, since I know that many students will be taking this course while in another country, I’m sorry to say that I will not be able to allow for time differences, and all work needs to be done according to Pacific Daylight time.

Here are the intended outcomes for English 122:

The purpose of this course is to have students apply disciplined thought to language in order to comprehend and analyze college-level readings, and to compose college-level essays that are coherent, detailed, and free of serious error.

SLO#1. read a complex text, paraphrase its thesis and evaluate the support for the thesis.

SLO#2. develop an essay using multiple rhetorical strategies.

SLO#3. write paragraphs which meaningfully incorporate outside texts according to MLA conventions.

A Final Note: I am here to help you. Please let me know when you feel you need extra help.