Course Collaboration
Overview
Nearly every large programming project is developed by multiple people working together. Because of this, companies have invested huge budgets into helping their employees collaborate effectively. In addition, one of the institutional learning outcomes at BYU-Idaho is to become Skilled Collaborators.
In this course, your section of classmates will work through the material together. And, as a community, you'll be able to lift and help one another to become more than you could on your own. This is one of the great blessings of learning at BYU-Idaho.
Two very popular collaboration applications used by major companies in the software industry are Slack and Microsoft Teams. Your instructor will set up one of these for you to use throughout the semester and provide information about how to join your class's community.
Once you are signed up, you should consider downloading the app for your computer or phone so that you can communicate more easily.
Channels
These communication tools are divided up into channels. Most of the course-wide discussion will happen in the #general channel. Once teams have been established, private team channels will be created for each team to use.
By posting questions to the general channel instead of emailing the instructor, you can often get help from other students in a very timely manner, and that way, others can benefit from the conversation as well.
In addition, if something is more private, you can send direct messages to your instructor (or to other students). In fact, if you have a pressing question about something, you can often get a response faster by sending a direct message to the instructor than by emailing.
Posting Good Questions
In order to make it easier for people to help you, it's important to learn how to ask good programming questions. Here are some general tips:
Make sure to indicate your specific problem or question. It's much more helpful to say, "I'm not sure how to capitalize this text. Here is what I've been trying." than to say, "My program doesn't work, can someone fix it."
If you are including code, copy and paste it directly--don't paste a picture of your code (for example from your camera or a screenshot). These pictures are often not high quality, but even more importantly, if you post a picture people cannot copy and paste your code to try to help.
Include only the portion of code that is directly involved. It's can be hard to look through a whole program.
Help people understand the things you've already tried and the general direction where you think the problem might be.
If you're not sure about something in this list, that's ok, we are all here to help and everyone will be patient. Do your best and don't be afraid to ask for help!
Etiquette
It's important to be professional in your online communications. Aside from the standard guidelines of not using ALL-CAPS TO COMMUNICATE and speaking respectfully, you should be aware of etiquette specific to these kinds of collaboration applications.