Attendance for WRIT 121 Online

Online Attendance

Let me start out by saying that some students--certainly not you!--have approached an online course with the idea that they do not have to come to class so that means they have four more hours a week to do whatever they want.

Wrong.

This is not a correspondence course where you read stuff from me, then send me homework, and I grade it and send it back to you.

Nor is it a self-paced course where you can work as quickly or as slowly as you feel like.

This class is a fully participatory course where you will be working with me and each other, like a regular face-to-face (f2f) course.

Like a f2f course, we will have discussions where we talk about writing, toys, music, TV, movies--all toward the goal of making you more competent writers in an academic environment. However, the difference will be that this discussion will take place in Angel.

The Department of Communication has an attendance policy for all of its courses. It goes like this:

Attendance

Students are responsible for all of the work of the class, whether they are present at class meetings or not. The instructor is not obligated to re-present the instruction which a student has missed.

Week 1: A student who misses the entire first week of class may be administratively withdrawn.

Weeks 1-14: A student who misses two weeks of instructional time for any reason during the first fourteen weeks of the semester will be administratively withdrawn from the class.

"Two weeks" is defined as 6 hours for 3 credit classes, 8 hours for 4 credit classes.

Students who change sections will not be penalized if they have been attending another class in the same program.

Instructors may count late arrivals or early departures from class as partial absences.

Missed conferences may count as full absences.

Students who audit are exempt from this policy.

Week 1 instructions are self evident: if you do no work in the first week, I will drop you. For the rest of the semester, what this basically means is that for a f2f WRIT 121 class of four hours a week, I must drop you from the course if you miss 8 hours or more of class for any reason.

So how can we count attendance?

By your participation in online activities.

In other words, instead of meeting together four hours a week, we are going to be meeting online through Angel.

Through the discussion forums and chat, we will have our virtual conversations,

where I will

bring up topics,
point out aspects of writing that you need to consider,
ask what you think about what an author says,
- and for feedback about how things are going,
- and what's working for you;

where you will

share your writing with each other to get audience feedback,
discuss the articles, essays and rhetoric that we read each week,
ask questions of me or each other.

The point is that we are a writing community in cyberspace that learns from each other.

If you don't participate fully, then you don't gain from the full experience of the course, and we lose out from what we can learn from you.

Do recall my point about the time this class will take.

And do recall the statistics I mentioned earlier--the more fully you participate, the higher the likelihood you will pass the course.

Therefore, again, attendance will be based on your participation in online activities.

If you miss a scheduled chat and/or minimum participation in the Writer's Café, then you will be considered "absent" for the week.

There will be no excuses accepted.

And this includes technical problems: breakdown of equipment, failure of software, lack of a computer at home. These will not be excused. If your computer crashes, find another, or come to campus. Review "Comparing with a traditional class" in the syllabus.

If you miss two weeks total of absences, then I will withdraw you from the course. And if you are not passing at the time of withdrawal (from week 9 on), you will receive a 0.0.

I may make exceptions for catastrophic situations, like life-sustaining surgery, an incapacitating accident or such. But only if we're reasonably sure you can complete the course work and you supply documented evidence.

I'm not being hardnosed here. I just know the time commitment needed to complete this course successfully.

If something prevents you from completing, it's happened to the best of us. Just take it the next semester you can.

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Created by Dan Holt 29 July 1997
Revised: 08 September 2009 04:39:40 PM -0400