Saturday, January 10, 2009

Syllabus time!

Monday starts spring semester. It amazes me the amount of academic change that can happen in a single month. My schedule has completely changed with the exception of Gaming I and Gaming II. I finally finished my syllabi for this semester, all 7 of them! I revised my Gaming I syllabus with a couple of old rules and a few new ones as well. First and foremost, the attendance policy is alive and well again. My attrition rate was horrible last semester, and I blame poor attendance not negatively affecting student's grades as a contributing factor. When you miss work enough times, you are either reprimanded or fired. I believe that a similar negative effect should occur if you miss too much class time. We are supposed to be instilling in students ethics that employers are going to expect, and I feel this is a major one. Last semester I had found it frustrating when I had to "hunt down" student work on the wiki, so another revision to my syllabus mentions that work is expected to be organized and posted in the proper section of the student's project page, both SWF and FLA files. If this is not followed, the work will be viewed as incomplete and not graded. For each 24 hour period the work is incomplete, 10 percent will be deducted from the possible final grade for that project. Having 32 students this semester in Gaming I will require organization from everyone, and I wanted to make sure that was understood on Day 1.

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