Email has gone from a convenience to a stressor and a burden, and potential email substitutes don't help and may be worse. These guidelines are aimed at reducing everyone's stress and improving the quality of our communications as a group.
The forum for this course is hosted on Ed Discussion (henceforth Ed). Our Ed forum is also linked from Canvas.
Posts can be set to public or private. A private post will only be seen by the poster and the course staff. Use private posts for non-urgent messages that should be accessible to myself and the TA. Email, rather than private posts, is best for messages that must be kept private between you and either myself or the TA.
You can also post anonymously (though instructional staff can see the name of anonymous posters).
Please reserve email for confidential or urgent messages. Overuse of email has been linked to increased stress, which should be avoided as much as possible, and other students may be able to benefit from a public Ed post. Adherence to this policy will make sure that the TA and I can immediately recognize an email as something that should be read and acted on ASAP; otherwise, messages can be lost in the shuffle.
Class announcements will be posted on Ed. Important announcements (that I want to make sure you do not miss) will also be sent out to your emails. I will reserve these for urgent messages (class cancellations, changes to deadlines, etc), so make sure you check Ed for important but non-urgent messages (which will be pinned).
In general, the Monday class will be a lecture, while the Wednesday class will be some combination of a discussion and a lab session. Prior to Wednesdays, please download relevant materials (such as notebooks) ahead of time; relevant GitHub repositories will be linked from the course schedule page. Discussions can include questions about the lecture material and will require active discussion of the reading for the week.
I will do my best to post lecture notes on the course schedule ahead of the lecture.
Each lecture will start with a poll for questions that you'd like me to answer at the start of class. I will give you time at the beginning of class to pose questions, but if something comes to mind ahead of lecture or you don't intend to bring your laptop to class, use the link or QR code at the beginning of the notes to access the poll and ask your question.
Assignments count as 25% of your grade. There will be roughly one assignment corresponding to each course "module". Students are encouraged to collaborate on assignments, but all consulted sources (including peers) should be referenced and given credit.
In this class, we will use GitHub Classroom to distribute assignments and manage code. You should use git and GitHub to maintain your assignment and project codes.
When we release an assignment, you will receive an email from GitHub Classroom containing an invitation link. This link will also be provided in a pinned post in the relevant Ed Discussion forum. When you click on this link, GitHub Classroom will ask you if you want to accept the invitation. If you answer "yes," a new repository will be created for you containing the repository template.
One advantage of using GitHub Classroom is that each of you will have your own repository; please use this to share code that you have questions about, rather than emailing notebooks or pasting code snippets to Ed. Ed code snippets are ok for general questions about Julia code, but debugging assignments can be difficult without the full view.
Reports will be written as Jupyter Notebooks; a starter notebook will be provided as part of your GitHub repository, along with relevant environment files and instructions.
Assignments are due at 9pm on the assigned due date. Submit your assignment as a PDF to Gradescope with the pages for the solution for each question tagged. We will discuss how to export Jupyter Notebooks to PDF for submission. Failure to tag the questions will result in a 10% penalty.
Late submissions will be penalized at a rate of 10% per day after the due date. You have the option of using a report from your latest GitHub commit if you think it's close to complete. If you want to do this, let us know.
The participation grade, which is 15% of the final grade, involves my assessment of how actively you contribute to both in-class and online discussions.
Each week, a specific reading will be assigned. This reading (typically a journal article) will be made available in Canvas under Library Resources and Files. Assessment of reading engagement will involve two components: annotation and a written response. In total, these are 20% of your grade. There is an Ed subforum for readings, as well, for further discussions or questions about the readings.
Social annotation of readings is an important part of the course. Social annotations allow us to highlight sections of interest or which we would like to discuss further and for us to engage with each other's annotations as we read through the text.
We will use Hypothesis to socially annotate readings (this will be demonstrated in class). Hypothesis is fully integrated within Canvas, so there's no need to downlaod or install anything. Annotation assignments will be provided in Canvas, including the Hypothesis interface. Canvas will automatically document your annotations and highlighting; no additional submissions are required.
Your grade for the annotation does not depend on any specific number of annotations, but rather that the sum total reflects an engagement with the reading. This grade will just be a checkmark to reflect whether appropriate annotations were done or not. Annotations for grade should be completed prior to Wednesday's class (so they can inform the discussion), but feel free to revisit the annotations later as well.
You are also required to submit a (no more than one-page) written "response" to the weekly reading. This should reflect your thoughts on the reading: for example, what were key takeaways, or what are open questions or could have been improved? This should be a PDF submitted to Gradescope. As with the annotations, these will only be graded based on completion.
The major assessment for this class is a final project, which counts as 40% of your grade. Students will work in groups of 2 to analyze a climate risk problem of their choosing. This project will involve identifying a problem of interest and analyzing it using the methods from this class as a starting point. Groups will submit a one-page proposal (not including references or relevant diagrams) and a final poster, which can be accompanied by a supplemental PDF.
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Last modified: May 01, 2023. Website built with Franklin.jl and the Julia programming language.
