3.6: Course Format
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The class met twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays. The instructors lectured on Thursday and devote Monday to laboratory work, where students complete assignments, held discussions, and conducted collaborative research for their group projects. The labs were supervised by the course assistants—Kaelan Wong at the KUC site, Patrick Kuti at UGL, and Sandy Hirtz at a “virtual site.”
Exams covered class lectures and discussions, assigned readings, and audio-visual presentations. There were two take-home exams —a mid-term and a final.
Three quizzes were given over the course of the semester. The quizzes were short tests that primarily evaluated students’ retention of readings. Students took the quizzes online in the course of the day, in their free time. The quizzes were activated from 08:00 A.M. until 23:55 P.M. (PT). The quizzes, which comprised multiplechoice and true-or-false questions and short questions, were for only the Kwantlen University College students. Dr. Darkwah gave her graduate students replacement assignments, commensurate with their level.
WEEKLY ELECTRONIC (E-) ESSAYS AND CHAPTER SUMMARIES : Each student was required to provide a summary/synopsis of a chapter from the course main text (G & L), in no more than 300 words, and write a 200-word reaction essay of the week’s assigned reading/chapter, for a total of 500 words or roughly one-and-a-half single-spaced page. Each essay was to begin with a brief synopsis (summary) of the central assumptions and premises of the reading followed by the student’s answer to the chapter issue question. For example, the issue question for chapter five is “To what extent did early globalization affect peoples of the world?”
Students were encouraged to react to the lectures, class discussions, the readings, videos, other students’ essays, and the course as a whole. Meaningful reactions could be used as bonus points. I examined each student’s reaction to determine whether or not it merited a bonus point. Students earned up to 10 bonus points, i.e., 10 reaction submissions. All reactions were posted at OUR GLBAL VILLAGE.
On the first day of class, each student was asked to post a brief background and a photo at the course website. This was to give instructors an opportunity to know the students and indeed also for the students to know one another, particular students in the remote sites.