Startup email to CSCI 3829 class
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Hello,

First of all, let me wish everyone a Happy New Year, and let us all hope that 2022 will be the year in which this pandemic finally goes from scary to just annoying!

This email is going out to all students currently enrolled in the winter, 2022 offering of CSCI 3829 at Saint Mary's University. As you know by now, the course will be offered online (virtually). My name is Porter Scobey and I will be your instructor for the course. And a warm welcome "back" to any and all of you who have taken any of my previous courses.

Saint Mary's uses Brightspace as the "starting point" for all courses, including this one, and you should go there to read the overview for the course. However, I also have a "legacy" website where most of my material is located, so you should plan to visit it most of the time for what you need (for example: links to our sample websites, grading scheme, instructor and marker contact info, office hours, and so on). The Brightspace page for this course links to that page, as well as to my home page here at Saint Mary's. Here are the links:

http://cs.smu.ca/~porter/ (direct link to my home page)
https://cs.smu.ca/~porter/csc/3829/2022/ (direct link to the course home page)

The course will be offered in "synchronous mode", which means there will be "live" Zoom sessions at the scheduled times for the class: that is, at 10:00am Halifax time every Tuesday and Thursday for lectures, and at 11:30am Halifax time every Thursday for the recitation/lab session. Each session is scheduled for 75 minutes. It's also important to remember that the plan is to record these sessions so that if the timing is not convenient for you, or if you miss one or more sessions for any reason, you should be able to watch the recording of a missed session later. All of this and more will be discussed, starting with the first session on Tuesday, January 11 at 10:00am. To "attend" that session you must go to the course page on Brightspace at that time and join the corresponding Zoom session.

Here are some other things you should know before the course begins, just to "set the scene":

We will be using a "zyBook" (an online interactive textbook) for the course, and it is required, since work done within that zyBook will count 30% toward your final grade. This is a bit unusual, but there is only one zyBook assignment, and it is a major, term-long assignment, so it will be important to keep working on it as the course progresses. You do not want to be doing it all at the end. The zyBook contains most of the material we need to cover, and is very interactive so it makes an excellent learning tool. For signup details check the "Current Course Text" menu item on the course home page whose link is given above, and you can sign up at any time from now on. If you have taken CSCI 2355 and used the zyBook for that course, be sure to read the signup information very carefully, since you may be entitled to a discount. Note as well that you will need to use your SMU email address to register for the course zyBook with zyBooks.

There are a lot of "moving parts" in this course, and it will be important that you "attend" the startup sessions, during which we will be discussing where we're going and how we'll get there. Since you'll be doing a lot of work "server-side", one of the things you will find very convenient to have is a program that allows you to edit client-side and save server-side. We do have something called HTML-Kit, of which I am a big fan, and which everyone can access via AppsAnywhere, but it is a bit long-in-the-tooth, and if you have an alternate piece of software that provides the same kinds of useful functionality, that's fine. Visual Studio Code, with appropriate plugins, might be one possibility, for example.

At the end of our time together each day we will generally have some time for a Q and A session, during which you can ask a question via the Zoom chat window and I will try to answer it in "real time". If that does not suffice, or if you think of something after class you can always send me an email with your question. That often works, but if we need more time we can always have a one-on-one Zoom "office hours" session at a mutually convenient time. An Internet connection and computer speakers are the minimal requirement to access the course material with your computer, but you will also need a microphone if you wish to have voice interaction during a Zoom session, and a web cam might also be useful.

Finally, you will be getting an account with user name "u##" for use on the ps.cs.smu.ca server during the course, and that will be sent out to you shortly before the course begins, to your SMU email address, so you should monitor that email address around that time to look for your account.

Stay safe, Happy New Year once again, and I look forward to "meeting" you all online as the term begins on Tuesday, January 11.

Best regards,
Porter Scobey
Your CSCI 1227 instructor