None of the courses offered by the COGS programme in the Fall semester of the 2020/21 academic year will involve any in-person teaching or assessment. These courses can therefore be completed without you needing to be present on campus. In each course there will be some times at which you need to be online, in order to participate in synchronous class or group activities or assessments. You should ensure that your internet access is reliable enough to allow for this. You may also want to invest in earphones, with a microphone, and webcam, if your computer doesn’t have these built in.
Although you’ll be taught through the medium of a webbrowser, please don’t regard class attendance in the way that you’d regard the watching of cat videos, or the reading of social media: make sure you have time and space free from other online and offline distractions, in which you can focus single-mindedly on material that you are being taught.
We will give consideration to time zones when scheduling teaching and assessments, but—since our students are currently distributed all around the world—it is inevitable that students in remote locations may sometimes need to be online at inconvenient times. Definitive information about the scheduling requirements of our courses will be available once their syllabuses are finalized. We recommend that you contact your instructor as soon as possible if you think those requirements are likely to create a problem for you.
For information about completion of the programme’s COGS 402 research course, see that course’s public website.
Other departments that teach courses required for the COGS majors have also moved the teaching of these courses online for the Fall semester.
For the Spring semester, we do not yet know which modes of instruction will be available. We therefore discourage students from making any assumptions about those modes of instruction when making decisions about which courses to take in which term.
The university’s Keep Learning page provides a comprehensive range of information about the transition to online learning. The Philosophy Department has also created a Guide to Online Learning, which you may helpful.