Supporting the Rules, Expectations, and Activities in Online Courses

In order to ensure that quality, honesty, civility and participation continue to be systemic to all online courses at SPC, the institution has crafted or is using materials adapted from others to set forth common practices, guidelines, expectation and rules. These criteria are primarily codified in Board Rule 6Hx23-4.461, Academic Honesty Guidelines, Online Student Participation and Conduct Guidelines and Expectations and Performance Targets. Links to these are available on the Project Eagle web site at www.spcollege.edu/eagle/

Increasingly, both faculty and students are expressing concern about incivility, dishonesty (including plagiarism), or failure to meet agreed-upon participation guidelines. Some of these concerns rise to the level of formal grievances. To address these issues proactively, the following processes are standard for all eCampus faculty and courses.

1. Course and Instructor Pages - Updates to the Course and Instructor Page willl be performed by instructors prior to the beginning of registration for the following term. This includes, but is not limited to:
   complete list of courses taught by the instructor
   syllabus (or sample syllabus) for each course taught by the instructor
   
   
2. Instructor Engagement - Instructors will have their courses updated and enabled by the first day of the term at 8AM and will not disable the courses before the last day of the term at the specified time grades are due. Instructors are expected to continue to answer emails and otherwise be engaged in the class throughout out the term as detailed in the eCampus Instructional Performance Targets.
   
   
3. Required Language in Syllabi - The following statement will be placed in every eCampus class syllabus:
   All students, including online students, are required to follow the college rules regarding academic honesty, civility, participation and other expectations as explained in the Academic Honesty Guidelines, Board Rule 6Hx23-4.461 and the Expectations and Performance Targets (http://www.spjc.edu/eagle/administration/forms_procedures/expectations.shtml) . Enrolling in this class constitutes agreement that you have read, understand and agree to abide by these rules and guidelines.
   
   
4. Use of Turnitin/Google - Instructors are strongly encouraged to use Turnitin.com and/or Google in an effort to uphold the Academic Honesty Policy and to prevent plagiarism by students in courses requiring written papers, such as Gordon Rule courses. The Limited Copyright Permission and FERPA Disclosure Consent must be collected by the instructor prior to submitting a student's work to Turnitin.com and the following statement must be in the syllabus when Turnitin is used.
   
   As a condition of taking this course, all required papers may be subject to submission for review to Turnitin.com for the detection of plagiarism. All submitted papers will be included as source documents in the Turnitin.com reference database solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism of such papers. No student papers will be submitted to Turnitin.com without a student's written consent and permission. If a student does not provide such written consent and permission, the instructor may: (i) require a short reflection paper on research methodology; (ii) require an annotated bibliography prior to submission of the final paper; and/or (iii) require photocopies of some or all of the reference sources to be submitted with the final paper.” http://www.spcollege.edu/central/libonline/services/turnitin_rev.pdf
   
   
5. College Email - St. Petersburg College Outlook email allows employees to keep abreast of college announcements and to receive communication from potential students, program directors and other college employees.  Every SPC employee has a responsibility to stay current with incoming email.  As a quality initiative all online instructors, both full-time and adjunct, are expected to check their college email at least 5 days a week, and to respond as needed within 48 hours. Use of a personal email account or an account in ANGEL does not replace the official St. Petersburg College Outlook email account.
   
   
6. Monitoring Activities -When a concern is raised about any of these issues, administrators will monitor course/instructor pages, syllabi and class activities to assist in determining the facts. These monitoring activities will be instituted when a concern is raised, not as part of a random or routine system of review.
   
   
7. Logging Off - To better measure the extent of student and faculty participation, every effort will be made (in course materials, in the syllabi, via email, etc.) to get students and faculty to “log-off” when exiting their ANGEL session for accurate record keeping.