| INSTRUCTOR: Bruce Mork | Office: Cina 203 |
| Phone: (218) 726-6369 | E-mail: bmork@d.umn.edu |
Timing of Lessons: You must submit an exercise or exam each week of the semester in order to finish the course on time. A late exercise will receive a maximum of 5/10 and a late exam will get a maximum of 50/100. You may certainly work ahead, and in fact, you can even complete the first two lessons and exercises before the course begins, because those two lessons are not password protected.
Text: Steven Barkan, Criminology: A Sociological Understanding, 3rd edition (Be sure to look for Sociology 1301: Section 200, in the UMD bookstore)
Videos: This course makes plentiful use of videotapes. I see these as a way to make the course "come alive" and pose many of the issues having to do with crime and criminal justice in a particularly vivid way. The following videotapes are on 2-hour reserve in the UMD library and there are video players available there for your use (check out a headphone when you get the video at the Reserve desk). All but one of them are also available via streaming video from PBS, but you probably need a broadband connection to the internet (not just a modem). You can try out your connection by going to the Frontline home page for streaming video( http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/view/) and try the first one: "The O.J. Verdict." . The other video, Crash, is available at almost any video rental store.
Let me know if you run
into any difficulties in getting access to these videos. .
1: The O.J. Verdict
2. Crash - 2 hour
3. The New Asylums
4. The Meth Epidemic
5. A Dangerous Business
6. Ghosts of Rwanda- 2 hours
7. The Plea (or you can watch the somewhat older Frontline, Real Justice, part II, but it isn't available in streaming video).
Liberal Education Program: This course meets the requirements for Category 8: Contemporary Social Issues and Analysis in UMD's Liberal Education Program.
Web Crossing forum . (Access to this part of the course won't be activated until the second week (or if you add the course later in the semester, you need to let me know so I can add you to this forum.) This course includes an internet discussion forum which you can log into by going to http://www.d.umn.edu/webx and using your UMD username and the password, "webx" Then click on "log-in." Then click on my name (Bruce Mork) and this class (Sociology 1301). Click on a week and then on one of the questions listed under that week. If other people have already responded to that question, read through at least some of their ideas. Then at the bottom, click on "Post Message." Type your ideas and at the bottom, click on "Post my message. You must post at least five entries during the term, with no more than one per week. This is a place for you to exchange ideas with others in the course. Your entries will be graded when you finish the rest of the course, with each entry worth up to 10 points (50 total).
Course Description:
This is a course that introduces the strategies sociologists use to study the causes and effects of crime, as well as the way those causes and effects interact with trends in the criminal justice system.It fulfills category 8, Contemporary Social Issues and Analysis, in UMD's Liberal Education Program. It is also one of four courses that must be completed with a minimum grade of C by pre-Criminology majors. (Other requirements of being admitted to the Criminology major are linked to the Sociology/Anthropology home page under "Criminology" and then "Major." )
Course Objectives: By the end of this course, you should be able:
1. Know three ways in which criminologists measure crime, including the strengths and weaknesses of each method.
2. Be able to identify the major patters and varieties of crime in the United States, including current trends and limited cross-cultural comparisons.
3. Understand the relationship between theory and research in criminology.
4. Be able to define the key concepts that criminologists use in understanding crime and constructing theories.
5. Be able to describe the development, as well as the strengths and weaknesses, of various sociological theories of crime.
6. Be able to identify the unique features of the American criminal justice system, along with the strengths and weaknesses of our police, courts, and corrections systems.
7. Understand the relationship between the criminal justice system and minority communities in the United States.
8. Know how criminologists study the criminal justice system and evaluate its results.
9. Understand how the needs of the mass media and the political system affect popular understandings of the criminal justice system.
10. Re-evaluate your own perspective on crime and criminal justice, in relation to what you have learned in the course, including your priorities about resource allocation in the criminal justice system.
Grading: Your grade will be based on 13 exercises linked to each lesson, as well asthree exams, each covering about 1/3 of the course, and your entries in a web crossing forum, as follows:
| Exam One | 100 points |
| Exam Two | 100 points |
| Exam Three | 100 points |
| Web Crossing forum | 50 points |
| Instructor's Exercises | 120 points |
Grades will be calculated based on the percentage of total points, as follows: A, 93-100; A-, 90-92; B+, 87-89; B, 83-87; B-, 80-82; C+, 77-79; C, 73-77; C-, 70-72; D, 60-69; F, below 60.
Incompletes: The only incompletes will be for people with true emergencies that were until then up-to-date on the tests and exercises, or for people who start the course later in the semester. You are supposed to have 16 weeks to finish, so that if you start in week 8 and have finished the exercises or exams associated with the first 7-8 lessons, I will give an incomplete. The same thing applies to people who take the course during the summer term, which is only eight weeks long. (On the other hand, you can always finish more quickly, and many people finish the whole course during those 8 weeks of the summer term.)
Extra Credit: Extra credit is not available in this online class. This recognizes the fact that with open-book exams and other exercises, your academic destiny is already in your own hands, and rather than put time into extra credit, I'd rather just see you doing the best possible job with course materials.
Academic Honesty: Honesty is one of the central values of academic life, and there is an extra element of trust inherent in the structure of this kind of an on-line course. It's okay (and indeed, expected) that you draw on the text, on my lesson comments and on the readings, as you carry out the coursework, including the exams. But be sure you give credit where credit is due. Whenever your ideas or your phrasing comes from somebody else's work, credit that person appropriately. Here is a link to a more general discussion of plagiarism. In instances of academic dishonesty, your grade will be reduced, up to and including an F for the course. Copying someone else's exercise or test or allowing your exercises or tests to be copied is a very serious offense against academic honesty and will result in an F for the course.