HomeGetting Started

Getting Started

Getting Started in CIS 771

Attending The First Lecture

All on-campus students should attend the first lecture. The lecture slides and video are posted on the Lectures page for off-campus students to view.

Initial Instructor Contact for Off-Campus Students

During the first week of classes, the instructors will be arranging telephone calls to off-campus students. The purpose of these phone calls is to answer any questions off-campus students may have after they have watched the initial lecture on course administration and have read all the information in the Course Syllabus and Advice & History sections.

Course Communication and E-Mail Lists

The primary means of communicating announcements from instructors to student will be via email. Initial announcements will be sent through K-State Online's course roster email facility. Thus, initial announcements will arrive at whatever email address you have registered with K-State Online. Shortly after the course begins, instructions will be given for registering for a more featureful email list facility.

Online Lecture Technology

As this course has evolved, KSU's support for video recording has moved through several different tools. The earliest recording system was Tegrity. Currently, we use Screenflow. As a result, we ended up with lectures in a variety of encoding formats. We have tried to simplify things and have ended up with a flash browser-based format (identified as "Flash" on the lecture page), mpeg-4 format (".mp4" on the lecture page), and QuickTime video (".mov" on the lecture page). Here's an overview of the ways that we recommend viewing these files.

  • Flash: can be viewed directly in browser once the flash plug-in from Adobe is installed. In the plug-in is not installed, your browser should guide you through the process of installing.

  • .mp4, .mov: both of these can be viewed in the free QuickTime player for Windows or the Mac (as well as in other media players). While these file formats also play in some browsers, some of our particular recordings have glitches that cause them not to play in a browser, or cause them to play at the wrong size, etc. Therefore, we recommend that you always download files in these formats before playing in QuickTime or other media player.