There are many types of help that students may need throughout the semester. Students who understand who is responsible for what, will spend less time getting their problems resolved. This topic in intended to help students understand the various people and groups involved in providing students access to course information. It is important to learn this information now, before you need it since in the event you need help, you may not be able to access this page.
Much of your work will be done on computers in this course. Knowing who is responsible for maintaining each computer will help the student contact the right person or group the first time.
Students who choose to work on personal computers are responsible for keeping their own computers working.
If you work on your own computer and the problem is not with accessing a specific page or tool, most likely you will need to figure it out yourself or contact the DoIT Help Desk. If the problem, is with accessing a specific tool, program, or web page, see comments below.
These computers are maintained by the Computer Aided Engineering group.
If a machine is down, or you have problems logging into one of the machines in the labs, contact the CAE helpdesk@cae.wisc.edu and tell them your username, the machine name, and what the problem is.
If the problem, is with logging into Learn@UW, contact the DoIT Help Desk.
If the problem, is with accessing course materials via Learn@UW, contact the course coordinator. Find the email for the course coordinator on the course syllabus that you were provided with at the beginning of the semester.
We will use many tools in this course. Specifically, programming and problem-solving programs. If you have problems starting one of the programs on your lab computer, contact the CAE helpdesk@cae.wisc.edu
Tethered Software is when students chose to use the course tools (programs) on their home computers via the CAE's tethered software library. Students are required to read and follow the instructions on the CAE's tethered software web site, if they wish to use tethered software. If a student is unable to understand or follow the instructions, they may contact the CAE helpdesk@cae.wisc.edu for help or work from one of the lab computers.
Learn@UW is a course administration tool that the course coordinator uses to provide information to students and teaching assistants about the course. It provides a way to offer grade information, links to problems and course modules, exam and grading information among other things. If Learn@UW is down, contact DoIt to determine if it is only yourself, or if there is some other problem with logging into Learn@UW.
If Learn@UW is down, try accessing the course via the alternate web site URL you were given on your course syllabus. This is a back up web server where information will be posted in the event that the Learn@UW web servers are unavailable.
If you are able to login to your computer, login to Learn@UW, but you are not able to access the course web site, try accessing the alternate course web site as listed on your course syllabus.
If the alternate course website, is also unavailable, contact the course coordinator.
If you find a broken link on the course web site, or an error in the content of any of the course pages, send email to the course coordinator. We have created a form to make this more convenient for students.
The best way to get help on your homework is to compose (write down) your question first and then contact an Instructor or TA during individual lab times or scheduled office hours. These are the times that each TA has set aside to assist students individually. If you're getting help, bring hardcopies (printouts) of your work for the instructor or TA to review. This allows us to help more students during the allotted time period since we do not need to spend time waiting for programs to launch, files to open and navigating to a particular line.
Note: Homework assignments are due prior to the start of the next lecture after the lecture in which it was assigned. Start your homework problem sets early to avoid the rush the nights before the assignments are due. Even if you don't expect to have questions, complete your homework early to have ample time to work on the presentation of your solution. This will also allow you to avoid the long printer queues and other equipment failures that are often the result of high demand of the resources in the last few hours. In other words, START EARLY!
Many students find it convenient to ask questions regarding their homework via email. Pedagogically, there are a couple of problems with this approach. Rarely will an instructor want to simply answer a question or debug your code. Why? because our real goal is to teach you how to learn, not just to teach a particular fact. As instructors, we want to help students learn how to find the answers for themselves and learn how to debug their own work. In this course, the answer itself is rarely as important as the process used to determine or discover the answer. Email has proven to be very inefficient and ineffective in this process as it requires a great deal of time to compose responses to lengthy questions and often requires many exchanges for us to ask the questions that must be asked for us to lead you to your own solution. A conversation in person is much more effective and efficient as it allows us to learn exactly what your current understanding is and thus guide you from that point. That is why... We request that you refrain from asking homework questions via email. Instead, please start your homework early and ask questions during individual lab or office hours if you get stuck.
However, if you believe that there is an error in the problem or notice something that would be of interest to all students in the course, please do not hesitate to report it via the Errata form or just email the Course Coordinator as soon as possible so that it may be resolved. Also, be sure that you include your name in your email so that we may known to whom we are conversing should we require more information about the issue.