About summer courses

Logistics

This is a purely web course which means that your presence on campus is never required to complete the course. As an exclusively web course, reading assignments, instructional assistance, graded examinations, exercises, essays, class discussions and the rest will be delivered electronically. Without discounting the serious obligations students and I have to contribute three credits of effort to the course, I recognize that we all have other things to do in this first summer term, and so effective participation in the class does not require that you devote any particular hours (such as 2-4 pm each day) to the course. Instead, there will be windows during which time particular tasks must be completed. For example, you will be required to complete several (timed) examinations. In each case, the exam will be available to you for a 23.75 hour period, and you may start the exam at any time within the time period I specify and have, say, 35 minutes to complete it. To give another example, I will on occasion post some issue I want all members of the class to discuss through Blackboard (about which more later). I will announce the issue and you will be asked, for a grade, to participate (several times) over a two or three day period in a back and forth exchange with other class members. In other cases, there will be various types of exercises which you are to complete, for a grade, over a one- or two-day period. You cannot begin a task until the window is opened and once the scheduled window has shut you will have no more opportunities to earn points on that task.

The timing of course events is based on a Monday through Thursday schedule. This does not mean that you may not be well-advised to spend time over the weekend reading, researching, reviewing and writing for the course, but it is to say that students will not be expected to submit work on Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays.

Platforms

I will lead this class using with different mechanisms. The first is my website, specifically this course's basecamp.. All of the materials specific to this class have links from this page, but there are other pages on my website which may prove useful to you, and you are encouraged to look around. Note that, in the case of almost all if not all chapters, I have prepared a webpage to supplement the textbook and to provide useful links; associated assignments are also posted on the relevant pages.  Based on the overall class schedule, I will post announcements when each particular webpage is ready for final use in the term.  As you proceed through the term, you should master those webpages as well as the assigned textbook reading.  I am still building these pages and reserve the right to make changes in course requirements until 2 June and the right to make changes in other materials past that time, but you are free to look at what has been posted thus far. (Whenever you look at my webpages, you should hit refresh to catch any changes I may have made since you last looked at a particular page.)

The second platform for this course is Blackboard, more precisely Blackboard8. You will be automatically enrolled in the Blackboard section for this course. At Blackboard you will find announcements, course information and Word documents which I may post from time to time, assignments, and the Discussion Board in which you will be engaged periodically in on-line exchanges with other students and me (simulating the kinds of class discussion one would find in a traditional course though, in this case, the conversation is not synchronized and takes place over a day or two). In another use of the technology, you will complete the multiple choice parts of your exams through Blackboard. Blackboard also has a "digital drop box" into which you will submit examination essays and other writing assignments, works I will evaluate and return with comments through the same facility.  (I give specific instructions for how you name the file you send to the Digital Drop Box and following these instructions carefully will guarantee that your work is credited to you and returned and will save me aggravation, a very important thing.) All writing must be submitted in MS Word which is a available for free download from ITS.  

Obviously, I will be available through e-mail and may contact you individually the same way. For all contacts, in particular for Blackboard, you must use your ASU student account (smail.astate.edu). Once the class begins on 2 June, all general communications to the class will be made through Blackboard. You should also log into Blackboard to check for announcements at least once a day; at the same time, you should also check your smail account for e-mail messages I may have sent. You will have at least 24 hours advance notice of assignments and such, but you may not be excused from anything because you did not make yourself aware of a posting.

To keep costs down and, even more, to cut down on the hassles of "telephone tag," I discourage efforts to reach me by telephone. E-mail is the way to go.

Required reading

Information on the required text is at the course webpage. You will need to have the book in hand by 2 June when the term begins. Books are available from the ASU Bookstore and there may also be copies in stock at Wolf Bookstore (870.935.2325). You can also order a text on-line (note the title is hotlinked to the publisher’s site). In any event, you should make sure that you get the correct edition/version. Earlier editions may be out there (and there is a new edition coming out) but you run the risk that these editions do not correspond with the material that I am using to teach and test you.

It only makes sense that a course in political science is made more meaningful by reference to current goings-on in government and politics, and so students are expected to be up on the daily news. Probably better than the local newspaper are on-line versions of national newspapers, notably the New York Times and the Washington Post, Other resources are at my "goodies" page. Note, too, that a tremendous amount of library material--including LexisNexis which accesses newspapers and other materials, other search databases, and a bounty of social science literature--is available on-line from ASU’s Dean B. Ellis Library; you can enter the site from anywhere in the world using your student number (note that it must be preceded by the number ‘7’).

Words to the wise

There are at least two unusual qualities to this course. The first is that it is a summer term course which necessarily moves quickly. If one follows the old rule of thumb, that one should expect to do three hours of work out of class for every hour in class, a three credit course should consume about twelve hours a week during a fall or spring semester. In the summer, this is compressed from about fourteen weeks to just over four weeks, which means that a summer class might well consume more than 35 hours of your time each week. Faster does not mean less.

The second unusual feature is that this class has no class, or at least no class meetings. Where a traditional course requires your time and effort to complete reading assignments and to attend class with three hours of contact to amplify what you have learned by reading, the balance in a web course shifts to the reading. While I will be presenting materials on-line to facilitate your learning, I cannot duplicate electronically what I present in the classroom. Diligence in reading the assigned text and other assigned readings—reading continuously and carefully—is critical for a traditionally taught class, and there is a price to be paid by students who fail to do the reading in those classes, but the failure to do all of the reading and to do it well is fatal in web courses.

Working at a distance, it is important for your success in this class that you read instructions carefully and that you save and appropriately organize class materials. Moreover, I am going to be rather testy if students repeat a question that has already been asked and answered. While I am certainly happy, more than just obliged, to be of assistance, I don’t think it reasonable to expect me to answer individually each person who inquires about something already covered.

I want to be of help to you as you proceed to learn in this course. I am opening a "forum" at Blackboard called "questions on my orientation message" where you can post any questions you may have about the course. Please ask away.