We will meet as a class in F343 four times this semester: 18 January, 25 January, 07 March, and 16 May 2000. On-campus sessions in January and May will meet in room F343 and will meet from 6:35-9:15 p.m. The session in March will meet in the library. These are mandatory on-campus sessions.

The first two on-campus sessions will include an introduction to the course material, a discussion of the technology that we'll use to pursue the coursework, and exercises to assess students' writing abilities and familiarity with Internet technology. The session in March will be a library orientation session. The session in May will be the final exam. (Click here for exam details.)

There will be two types of reading assignments for this class: readings in the textbooks, and peer readings of your classmates' essay drafts. The readings from the textbooks will help you understand the demands of a particular type of writing. The peer response exercises will both help you become a sensitive reader of your peers' writing and help you reflect upon your own approaches to a writing situation.

There will be two primary types of writing assignments in this course:

1. Four draft essays with peer reading comments, revised versions, and postscript comments
• observation essay
• investigative essay
• evaluation essay
• problem-solving or argumentaion essay
2. Focused writings written as class preparation for writing and for discussion, and that will include summaries and responses to essays, and online discussions

Since this is an online course, I hope that we can use both the technology and online instruction themselves as topics for the essays. Many of you, if not most, have not taken an online course before, so examining the course itself and the effectiveness of the technology used to deliver the course can be very useful for assessing your experiences in the class and planning for future online courses.

For each draft of the four required essays, you will be a peer reader for two of your classmates' essays. That is, you will read and respond in writing to eight of your classmates' essays during the semester. We will follow a peer reading and response protocol that is discussed in the Prentice Hall Guide for College Writers. We will use both Nicenet and e-mail to exchange essays for the peer readings. As you become familiar with the technology and the peer reading protocol, you are welcome to work out the methods of communicating with your partners that suits all of you the best. The important thing to remember is that you need to make sure that you have two peer readers for your essay and that you respond in detail to two of your classmates' essays. Copies of peer reading comments should be e-mailed to the instructors as well as to the student writers. Also, one of the policies of this course is that if you do not post an essay rough draft for peer response by your classmates, then you will not be eligible for the peer response points yourself.

Individual and collaborative activities will include on-line discussion.

There will be a final exam for which you will be asked to write at least one short essay.

• Final Exam: 16 May 2000, F343, 6:35-9:15 p.m.

There are two types of online discussion, synchronous and asynchronous. The former means discussing in real time. Examples of synchronous discussion are chat rooms and MOOs. The latter means discussing not in real time. Examples of asynchronous discussion are e-mail, bulletin boards, and Usenet newsgroups. We will use both synchronous and asynchronous discussion during the semester.

Primarily, though, as a class we will use asynchronous discussion in the form of the Nicenet conference utility and our course web site's bulletin board. We will set up discussion topics dealing with class assignments, essays in progress, and the like. There will also be a forum for more informal discussion.

You should expect to spend nearly five hours online per week. This is not all the time that you will spend doing your classwork; much of the work, such as writing essays, composing peer responses, and the like can be done offline. Online work will consist of using e-mail, Nicenet, and the class web site. You will spend time online posting essays and peer responses, sending e-mail to your classmates and your instructors, and participating in synchronous and asynchronous discussion.

Students should also keep an informal, personal log on their writing experiences on-line. You might just want to create an electronic file named "classlog" on your class disk. That way, you could add something to it whenever you're at the computer doing classwork. This log can be informal, rambling, disjointed, and so on. I am particularly interested in reading about those times when you were frustrated with either the class content or the technology; and those times when things were (perhaps unexpectedly) successful for you. I will assign points to the online log based on its completeness and thoughfulness. I would also like you to keep the log as preparation for the final. I will collect the logs at the end of the semester. In addition to assigning points to them, I will use them as preparation for 3-5 minute interview session with each of you after the final exam.

Nicenet is a course management tool provided courtesy of Northwestern University that we will use in the English classes. Like all programs it has advantages and disadvantages. The main advantages are (1) that it is free; (2) that it provides an easy way to communicate with other students and teachers; (3) that it allows users to saves copies of messages and to easily send messages to other members of the class; and most importantly, (4) that it expands the usual syllabus by offering immediate access to updated assignments.

In general, we will use Nicenet to share documents, primarily essays and peer readings of those essays. At first it will require time for everyone to learn to use Nicenet, but it will quickly become routine. Students have found the process of posting and responding to essay drafts easy to accomplish once they gain familiarity with Nicenet.

Click here to go to the instructions for logging into and using Nicenet.