Attendance is mandatory at the on-campus orientation session on 01 September 2007. We will meet as a class in a computer-equipped classroom. The mandatory on-campus orientation session 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. Any student who does not attend the mandatory orientation session will be dropped from the class. Any tuition refund for which such a student might be eligible is the responsibility of the student.

There will be two types of reading assignments for this class: readings in the textbook, readings of your classmates' work, and reading research material online. The readings from the textbook will help you understand the demands of a particular type of writing. Reading your classmates' work will both help you become a sensitive reader of your peers' writing and help you reflect upon your own approaches to a writing situation. Reading online materials will be part of the preparation process for class discussion and part of the research process for certain projects.

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Writing Assignments There will be two primary types of writing assignments in this course: Drafts and revisions of written projects Focused writings written as class preparation for writing and for discussion, and that will include summaries and responses to sample documents, and online discussions As you might expect with a writing class, the written projects will be the focus of the class. Students in English 103 are expected to produce documents that range from one to eight pages long. Some of these projects will involve some research from outside sources. Since this is an online course, I hope that we can use both the technology and use of the Internet for technical communication themselves as topics for some of the projects. Many of you, if not most, use the Internet at work or use the Internet at home for communication purposes. Examining those purposes and the types of communication in which Internet users engage, particularly technical writers, can be very useful for future activities in industry or even in another online course.

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Document Design Written and visual conventions are fundamental aspects of technical documents. For instance, because of written as well as visual conventions we can tell that a particular document is a installation guide and not an informal report. And while most technical communication students feel that they can recognize "technical writing style and tone"--whatever that means--the visual aspects of a document's design are just as readily apparent and definable once we know what to look for. So, the formatting and design of your documents will be an important consideration in this class. Your work will be evaluated according to both the writing and the visual presentation. This means that you should be sure to save your work, especially your revised projects, in Rich Text Format so that formatting will be preserved when you e-mail it to me.

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Online Discussion 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 mainly asynchronous discussion during the semester. We will use asynchronous discussion in the form of our course web site's bulletin board. We will set up discussion topics dealing with class assignments, projects in progress, and the like. There will also be a forum for more informal discussion. As a class we will discuss using AOL's Instant Messenger (AIM) for synchronous discussion.

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Time Online 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 drafting and revising documents, composing discussion responses, and the like can be done offline. Online work will consist of using e-mail and the class web site. You will spend time online posting discussion responses, researching, sending e-mail to your classmates and your instructors, and participating in asynchronous discussion.

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