Weekly check-in

Every week, after you finish working through the content, I want to hear about what you learned and what questions you still have. To facilitate this, and to encourage engagement with the course content, you’ll need to fill out a short response on iCollege. This should be ≈150 words. That’s fairly short: there are ≈250 words on a typical double-spaced page in Microsoft Word (500 when single-spaced).

You should answer these two questions each week:

  1. What was the most exciting thing you learned from the session? Why?
  2. What was the muddiest thing from the session this week? What are you still wondering about?

I will grade these check-ins using a check system:

  • ✔+: (11.5 points (115%) in gradebook) Response shows phenomenal thought and engagement with the course content. I will not assign these often.
  • ✔: (10 points (100%) in gradebook) Response is thoughtful, well-written, and shows engagement with the course content. This is the expected level of performance.
  • ✔−: (5 points (50%) in gradebook) Response is hastily composed, too short, and/or only cursorily engages with the course content. This grade signals that you need to improve next time. I will hopefully not assign these often.

Notice that is essentially a pass/fail or completion-based system. I’m not grading your writing ability, I’m not counting the exact number of words you’re writing, and I’m not looking for encyclopedic citations of every single reading to prove that you did indeed read everything. I’m looking for thoughtful engagement, that’s all. Do good work and you’ll get a ✓.

You will submit these responses via iCollege.