ESCI N160 (Syllabus)

Course Introduction

Beginning English for Writing in Science and Industry (ESCI N160) is the first of two courses in an online, non-credit certificate program in English for Writing in Science and Industry. This course is designed to provide international professionals with an opportunity to improve their English language ability as they write technical documents.

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Course Objectives

These are the specific goals of Beginning English for Writing in Science and Industry:

1. Improve students' ability to write technical definitions, procedures, and presentations of data.
2. Improve students' understanding of appropriate design and writing style for English science and industry contexts.
3. Improve students' ability to edit their own work for grammar, vocabulary, and style problems.

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Materials

All course materials are presented on the Internet. Students must have e-mail and Internet access through Netscape 4.0 or Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher to do these courses.

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Instructor

Your instructor is an experienced English Language professional at the University of Washington, and will be available to answer your questions and check your work via email.

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Course Length

Beginning English for Writing in Science and Industry is a ten-week online course (9 weeks in Summer Quarter) offered via the Internet. It constitutes 50 contact hours of instruction. It should take you about 80 hours to complete the lessons and the final project.

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Course Activities and Assignments

You will do the following in this course:

1. Work through online interactive exercises to practice writing, style, and editing techniques.
2. Submit and revise short writing assignments sent via e-mail to the instructor.
3. Complete a final writing project that is relevant to their work or field of interest.

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Evaluation

Beginning English for Writing in Science and Industry is not a credit course, but it is a graded course. If you pass the course, you will receive five Continuing Education Units (CEUs). In order to pass, you must successfully complete at least 80% of the course work, and the final project.

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Advice

A major challenge in distance learning courses is the lack of a regular class session. It is easy to get behind without a class meeting each day. For this reason, it's a good idea to set aside a time each day to log on and work on the course. From the beginning, establish a dialogue with your instructor via email. Ask questions about sentences that you don't understand. Think of this dialogue as your opportunity to have more personalized help with your English than a regular class would provide.

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Academic Honesty

Students enrolled in University of Washington Distance Learning courses are expected to observe the same code of academic honesty required of other University of Washington students. Violation of this code can result in academic penalties, such as receiving a failing grade in the course and other disciplinary actions. Academic dishonesty includes, but is not limited to, cheating on examinations and plagiarism, the latter meaning offering the language or ideas of someone else as one's own. Plagiarism may range from failure to credit isolated formulas, sentences, paragraphs, or ideas to entire articles copied from books, periodicals, speeches, or the writings of other students.

Situations involving academic misconduct for noncredit courses will be reviewed by a UW Educational Outreach Committee on Academic Conduct. This committee is composed of advisory board members for the certificate program in which the student is enrolled. If evidence of academic misconduct is established, students will be given a failing grade for the course and any refund of tuition fees will be denied.

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Course Schedule

Here is the schedule of assignments for the quarter. Print this document so you can keep a record of your progress through the tasks.

The exercises listed are those that you must type in a response box while you are in UW Online and send to your instructor. If they arrive on time, in ascending numerical order, and you have successfully completed them, you will receive full credit.

NOTE: It is a good idea to keep a copy of your work in case there are technical problems. To keep a copy, you can (1) print a copy when you type your response in UW Online, or (2) save your work in a word processing program and then copy and paste into the UW Online response box.

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