Welcome to the Class

Hello everyone. My name is Gregory Allen and I'll be your instructor for this section of MAT144, College Mathematics. I wanted to take a minute and welcome everyone personally to the class and to make sure everyone is up to speed on the course expectations. I know there's a lot of information here but, here at the beginning of the class, there's always a lot of questions about things like the discussions, late work and how to get a hold of me so I've tried to include all of that stuff here in one place. I promise I won't make a habit of bombarding everyone with this much content on a weekly basis but a lot of what's here is important to getting off on the right foot so please take a few minutes to go over it and let me know if you have any questions.

Most of the weekly discussion questions involve creating an Excel spreadsheet that does automatic calculations. If you aren't familiar with Excel, the Media resources that you can access through the eText in ALEKS have content specific to each assignment that students find helpful. There will also be some videos on working with Excel in the lectures posted in the individual week announcements.

In addition to your responses to your two assigned questions, Grand Canyon's expectation is that students will participate by making a minimum of six additional, substantive posts and that students should make those posts on three different days. Your two responses to the assigned discussion questions don't count toward either of those requirements.

I'll post several additional topics in both discussions over the course of the week to give everyone additional opportunities to meet the posting requirement. Be on the lookout for posts that start, "QUESTION FOR THE CLASS". (You can search for that phrase since it will be the first thing in any post where it's included.) Those are follow up questions where I'm looking for the whole class to respond rather than just the person I responded to.

Quality of Posts

This is a college level class so I'm looking for college level content. Remember that these are graded assignments so your goal should be to be demonstrate your understanding of the material. Before posting, ask yourself, "Did I say something interesting? Is what I wrote impressive?" I know this may sound intimidating in a college level math class but I guarantee everyone here is capable of rising to this level.

Things to Avoid

There are some specific things you should always avoid:

• Complementing Posts If a sentence starts with "I enjoyed", "I appreciated", "I really liked/loved" or something similar, I'll literally jump ahead to the next sentence since I know that one is very unlikely to say anything substantive.
• Agreeing with Posts If a sentence starts with, "I agree", "That was a good point" or something similar, I'll jump ahead again.
• Asking Questions It's okay to ask questions but, by itself, that usually doesn't go deep enough to be impressive. If you have a question that you think is interesting, ask it and then post your answer. Other students will still have plenty of opportunity to follow up as well.
• Generalities General statements are easy. To be impressive you need to go into detail. For example, don't just say, "I think there are a lot of applications of this." You could start there but follow up with some specific examples. Dig deeper into the topic and show off your understanding.

When you first go to the ALEKS website, it's going to have you do an "Initial Knowledge Check". That's a short assessment that asks questions about topics that students should already be familiar with and some topics that we're going to be covering in this class that you probably don't.

You will probably not know the answers to a large percentage of these questions. ALEKS does this to get an idea of what you know already so it can tell if you need to do some review first and so that it doesn't waste your time asking you about material that you already know. As a bonus, you'll even get points on future homework assignments if there are a few things that you're already familiar with.

As you start to get into the material, I'm sure you're going to come up with questions you need answered so I wanted to go over all the ways to contact me in one place so you've got them to refer back to.

Phone: I can be reached by phone at 813.995.8622 but this is generally going to be the worst way to get a hold of me. You'll often have to leave a message and it's easy to get stuck in an endless game of phone tag. Also, please keep in mind that this is a Skype number, not a cell phone number so, while I can receive texts on it, it won't let me reply to them.

Email: Email is a much better choice. You can send me a message through the email system here in Canvas or directly to my Baker email address at gregory.allen@my.gcu.edu. I usually check in at least a couple of times a day so that's generally going to be the quickest way to get a response.

Live Tutoring: If you're really stuck on something and would like to have a live conversation then you can always schedule an appointment with me at https://na3234.setmore.com/services. I'm available almost 40 hours a week including afternoons, evenings, late nights and for a few hours on Saturday afternoons.

Days Off: I do, however, try to take Fridays and Sundays off. I usually still check my email on Friday but I try to be pretty firm about Sundays so, if you send me something on those days, you might not get a response until the following day.

Technical Issues: If you have questions about the material or the class, you should definitely reach out to me. Technical issues, e.g. with Halo or ALEKS, however, aren't something I can usually solve. You're welcome to send me an email letting me know there's an issue but you should also reach out to the Helpdesk. They can help you get those kinds of things resolved.

Meeting deadlines and communicating when problems occur are important parts of both academic and professional life. Assignments can be submitted up to seven days after their due dates for partial credit and I'm very reluctant to authorize exceptions to this. If you have emergency circumstances that prevent you from completing an assignment within that time, you can still get credit for your work if you do two things:

1. Send me an email letting me know the work will be late within 24 hours of the due date. It's been my experience that it's very rare for a student to be so completely incapacitated that they can't take 30 seconds to send out a quick notification email. I'll send a reply with a new due date for any affected assignments.
2. Send me a follow up email when the assignment has been completed and is ready to be graded.

Emergency circumstances include things like hospitalizations, deaths and weather events. I generally won't authorize exceptions for incidents like non-emergency medical problems or technology issues (except ones that occur on the college or MyMathLab website). I'm also very reluctant to authorize extensions for situations that last more than a week. At that point, it becomes increasingly difficult to realistically be able to get caught up. If you find yourself in that kind of situation, your best course forward will be to reach out to your academic adviser to discuss your options.

If you need additional time with the ALEKS assignments, you'll have to send me a private message in Halo so I can create an extension. The discussion/participation assignments can't be made up under any circumstances.

All assignments are due exactly at midnight on their due date. Assignments submitted after that time will be considered late. I won't may any allowances for assignments that are submitted "just a little" after the deadline.

Late work will not be accepted after the last day of class without my prior approval.

Email: gregory.allen@my.gcu.edu
Website: www.whitecraneeducation.com
Location: Skype: prof.gregory.allen
Phone: 813.995.8622