Dear Students,
Greetings from virtual space! I’m Dr. MacDougall, your professor for Ethics (PHIL 2103). I hate that we have to meet like this—do you? Perhaps we can all agree that it is different and interesting and convenient. I’d still much rather be in a real classroom with real faces.
There are three things that I want you to know before our first day of class.
1. This will be a (mostly) synchronous class. That means you will need to plan on being logged in to Zoom between 4-5:15pm on class days. To be successful in this class, it will be extremely important to log into the Zoom sessions during class time and to participate fully in class. Classes will not be recorded and I do not post notes or slides, in part because I want to encourage classroom participation. Please do not schedule work or other commitments during our scheduled class time. If you have a special circumstance, you will need to discuss it with me in advance. Our first class will take place Thursday, August 26, at 6pm. I will call roll during the class. The Zoom invitation can be found in Blackboard.
2. Most of our written interactions, class updates and materials, are available on our OpenLab site. Please join our OpenLab section as soon as possible. You will be required to join in order to participate in online discussions. You can also see the schedule and assignments there.
3. This class is an Open Educational Resource (OER) course. That means there is no textbook, and all readings are freely available online. This saves you money and means you can store all our readings on your hard drive, indefinitely! You can find links to class readings on the OpenLab Schedule page.
Let me know if you have any questions. I’m looking forward to meeting you.
Dr. MacDougall
