Communication

Meaningful interactions among students and instructors are the hallmark of a successful online class. The learning environments used in this Penn State course support several kinds of communication, as described below.

Communications in Canvas

• I use Canvas in this course to give you feedback and grades on your assignments.
• I also use Canvas to post announcements.
• The calendar in Canvas is populated with due dates.
• The discussion forums in Canvas are where we will "talk" asynchronously about a scientific paper pertaining to the lesson topic or about teaching/learning strategies that go along with the lesson topic. These discussion forums are accessed from the "Discussions" link in Canvas and also from the "Modules" page.

Communications via your PSU e-mail account

The World Campus and Penn State will both use your PSU email account (e.g. abc123@psu.edu [1]) for official communications. If you want to have your PSU email forwarded to another email account, please visit the ITS Secure Server [2]. I will also use your PSU email account to send out course announcements in case you are not adept at checking the announcements page in Canvas.

Other communications

You can e-mail me directly if you need to talk about something you don't want the whole class to know (eliza@psu.edu [3]). If you have a question about how to proceed on a problem set, or you want clarification of due dates, or something like that, it is better to post that to the Questions? Discussion Forum because then the whole class can profit from finding out the answer.

Have questions? Need help?

There are many ways to get the help you need. See the Help! link in the "Resources" menu to learn more about the people and resources available to you.