
Meaningful interactions among students and instructors are the hallmark of any successful online class. The two learning environments used in the Penn State courses that use this text—Canvas and Drupal—support several kinds of communication, as described below.
Communications in Canvas
- We will hold a number of discussions about astronomy content and teaching practice in many of the lessons. The discussions are asynchronous, but are "threaded" and allow you to both create new discussion topics or respond to one created by a classmate. These are hosted in Canvas and will be graded.
- In general, questions and comments about project assignments, and about topics in the course text that pertain to more than a single page, should be shared with the entire class via the Piazza discussion forums. This could be done in Canvas but you will hopefully find that Piazza facilitates this type of discussion more easily. It is best to use a discussion forum instead of email, though, so everyone can benefit from the discussion.
- Penn State email
- The World Campus, Penn State, and I will all contact you using your PSU email (e.g., abc123@psu.edu) for official communications. If you want to have your PSU email forwarded to another email account, please visit work.psu.edu. Note that this is not the same as specifying your email address in your Canvas system settings! If you set your PSU email to forward to another email address, then of course any email that is sent to your PSU address will go to the address you specify, but if you just set an address to forward to from Canvas then only emails originating inside Canvas will go to that other address. If you have questions about this, please post them in Piazza!
- Instructor email
- I will respond to email to my Penn State address (cxp137@psu.edu) sent outside of Canvas, but it is best to use the Canvas inbox as that gets flagged as coming from our course and is harder for me to miss. I will mostly use Piazza for general announcements and question responses that benefit everyone, so personal email is best for questions that only pertain to your situation.
Communications via this website
Many of the pages in this website include the option of allowing registered students to post comments, questions, and responses directly on the page. You can also request to be notified of subsequent posts by "subscribing" to these pages. Comments to pages of the course text are preferred for observations, anecdotes, questions, and responses to other comments and questions that pertain to one or a few pages of the course text.
Activity
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