Storybook Schedule and the Free Passes

In last weekend's post, I promised something about Storybook scheduling and free passes, so here it is! I probably need to break this up into separate posts, but this will do for now. The Storybook is really the heart of my classes, so please forgive the long post. You can find related posts also with the Storybook label. Starting in Fall 2014, there is an alternative semester-long project, the Portfolio.


BRIEF DESCRIPTION. A completed Storybook website has a coverpage, introduction, and four stories — but it is also entirely possible to have a nice little Storybook with three or even just two stories. The Storybook schedule is flexible enough to accommodate these possibilities, and it also includes two "free passes" for students to choose when they need them. There is an archive of Storybooks for both classes, and the schedule I will be discussing in detail below is here: Storybook Schedule.


DETAILS. This is really nitty-gritty detail that pertains to this specific way of approaching a semester-long project. What I'm describing here is probably not directly transferrable to anybody else's classes, but the general principles involved — starting early in the semester, weekly additions to the project, and flexible scheduling — are general principles that can be applied to very different types of projects. Here's the Storybook Schedule page for the students, and I've commented on the weekly assignments below:

Week 1. Storybook Favorites. Students browse the archives of past projects and start to think about something they might want to do as their class project. Seeing what other students have done is so much more effective — and inspiring — than just reading instructions from me! It also gives them a sense of how important the Storybooks are not just now, but in the future. Next semester, after all, future students could be looking at the Storybooks they will now write and choosing them as favorites.

Week 2. Brainstorm Topics: Myth-Folklore - Indian Epics. This is a really fun assignment for me to read and reply to because it gives me a sense of just what the students are really interested in! One of my favorite parts of the whole semester, in fact, is reading and replying to this assignment, giving students lots (and lots and lots) of suggestions about online resources to use for the topics they are considering.

Week 3. Brainstorm Storytelling Styles. For this assignment, students choose their topic and start thinking about possible storytelling styles. While I written up some information about the wide range of possible styles, the most valuable resource here is the archive of past Storybooks, where students can see how different students have developed different storytelling styles in the past.

Week 4. Storybook Introduction. This is also the first piece of writing that students do for the class which will be revised; they receive detailed comments back from me to use in revising for Week 5. For some students, that comes as a real surprise; it is often the case that they have never, literally never, revised a piece of writing for a class since Freshman Comp.

Week 5. Revise and Publish Introduction. This is a really exciting week because the Storybook websites really start to take shape, having both a coverpage and a separate page for the Introduction.

Weeks 6-8-10-12. New Story. After the Introduction is published (and students get comments back from me on the revised version in order to do more revision if needed), it's time for the first story in Week 6, with new stories in alternating weeks: write-revise-write-revise, etc. If a student stays on the regular schedule, they turn in new stories during Weeks 6, 8, 10, and 12.

Weeks 7-9-11-13. Revisions. I've written another post about the revising process and the importance of feedback and revision in the overall flow of the class: Writing - Feedback - Revision. The feedback and revision process is an essential part of the Storybook projects, and the same weekly cycle is also how the Portfolio project works, too: write-revise-(revise)-write-revise-(revise)-and so on.

As you can see, the Storybook project is over in Week 13, two weeks before the end of the semester: students on the regular schedule add their last story in Week 12 and revise it in Week 13. There are no Storybook assignments for Weeks 14 and 15, and that's where the flexible schedule and the free passes come in!

Free Passes and Alternate Schedules. For students who complete the Storybook on schedule, there is no Storybook work in Week 14 or Week 15. I call those "free passes" because they get credit for a Storybook assignment in those weeks, although there is nothing they need to turn in. Those two weeks off are compensation for the fact that the Storybook is extra work compared to the Portfolio since the Portfolio contains stories that come from the weekly storytelling blog posts, while the Storybook stories are written in addition to the weekly blog post assignments.

Instead of staying on track and taking Weeks 14-15 off, though, most students end up going on an alternate schedule, missing a week or two (or more) earlier in the semester. The first two times that they miss turning in a Storybook assignment, the free pass covers the gap in points, and the schedule just moves up to adapt. That sounds kind of confusing, but in practice it's very simple. If a student doesn't get their Introduction turned in during Week 4, they turn it in during Week 5 and remain on the "one-week-off" schedule. Similarly, if a student stays on schedule up until Week 10 when the third story is due, but they don't get the third story turned in that week, they turn it in during Week 11 and remain on the "one-week-off" schedule. If you look at that schedule - One-Week-Off Schedule - you will see that there is no free pass anymore in Week 14, because the student has used those points to cover an earlier missing week.
If they are on the Two-Week-Off Schedule, that means they have used both free passes, and they have Storybook assignments still due in Week 14 and in Week 15.

The way I accommodate the flexible scheduling and free passes in the Desire2Learn Gradebook is by creating a Gradebook item called "Free Passes" and by using a text item which reminds students of what they have due that week for their project. Here's a screenshot of what that text item looks like at the end of Week 10:

As you can see, most students actually end up on an alternate schedule (one or two or more weeks off the regular schedule) by the time the semester reaches the end. And that's great: the whole idea of the flexible schedule is that it is something students really need to accommodate their complicated lives! The Portfolio also has a flexible schedule, but it does not have the free passes. Instead, students can use extra credit to make up for any missing Portfolio assignments.


HISTORY. The flexible Storybook schedule is something I have had in place since the first year or so that I started teaching online. I noticed that sometimes students got confused about just what they had due, so starting in about 2010 or so, I began using the text field in the D2L Gradebook to give students a reminder about what schedule they are on. The free passes are something new for Fall 2014, which is also the first semester that there was a Portfolio option; the free passes are my way of compensating students for the extra work involved in the Storybook compared to the Portfolio. I always had what were essentially "freebie" Storybook assignments in Weeks 14 and 15, just revising the Introduction and then doing a final revision check. Now, though, it is so much more useful to really acknowledge them as freebies and let students take advantage of that when they really need them, rather than just getting a break at the end of the semester. So, I've folded those final revisions into the process of adding the last story, and now the students have the free passes for whenever they need them during the semester.


GOALS. My overarching goal is for the students who choose the Storybook option to end up with a project that they are proud of. The flexible schedule is designed to keep the students always moving forward so that in any given week they can make progress on their project without worrying about a lack of progress in the previous week(s).


GENERAL THOUGHTS

Overall, I am extremely happy with how the Storybooks are working. Adding in the Portfolio option was clearly a good choice, both for students who are looking for a semester project that requires less time than a Storybook project and also for those students who, for whatever reasons, are not ready to commit to a Storybook project topic by the time Week 4 of the semester rolls around. Because of the success of the Portfolios this semester, I am hoping that more students will choose the Portfolio option in the future. Exactly because it is different from the Storybook project, it offers the students some really good opportunities.

Even with the Portfolio option in place, I am seeing some students this semester whose Storybooks have gotten stalled out. It's not a widespread problem, but I think those few students might have been happier with the Portfolio option and would have ended up with something more satisfying than what they have with the stalled Storybook. One student switched over to the Portfolio even after she already had her Storybook up with one story in it (an excellent story... but her topic was indeed a lot of work!), and she ended up with a wonderful Portfolio. So, that was something I did not anticipate but was really glad to see, and I would like to promote that option in the future, especially for students who feel stuck with their Storybooks.

So, one thing I am thinking about doing next semester is to build in the Portfolio option as a choice right from the very start, so that students who want to commit to the Portfolio already in Week 3 or 4 can do so. If they do not find a Storybook topic that really interests them, the Portfolio should be an option they can choose already in Week 3. Another thing I need to do is improve my communication with people who are falling behind on their Storybooks. In the past, when the Storybook was the only option, it made sense to let people fall behind provided that they ended up with at least two stories in their project by the end of the semester. I did not really have an alternative to offer, after all! Now, though, the students who get four or five weeks behind on their Storybooks are not doing themselves a favor. They probably should switch over to the Portfolio so that they can still come up with a good writing project for the class, as opposed to the real risk of not ending up with even two stories in their Storybook. So, I am going to focus on the two free passes next time, and when people fall more than two weeks behind on the Storybook (the two weeks covered by the free passes), I will urge them to consider the Portfolio. I won't require the switch... but I'm guessing it would help the students to see the Portfolio as an option if they are feeling stuck with their Storybook.

One fun thing from this semester has been pinning new stories from the Storybooks to a special Pinterest Board for each class: Indian Epics and Myth-Folklore, so here is a screenshot of the current Indian Epics Board below. I like being able to keep track of the individual stories by pinning them this way, in addition to the class Storybook lists.

Safety Nets

As we get near the end of the semester, I can tell that students are more and more stressed out, and so I am very glad that my courses have a lot of "safety nets" built in. I do have high expectations for my students and the work they will do, but I also know that life can be kind of overwhelming sometimes, so safety nets are important... vitally important in fact!


BRIEF DESCRIPTION. There are a variety of strategies I use that fall into the category of "safety nets" to help students cope when things don't go according to plan. These include both time scheduling strategies (Grace Period, Alternate Project Schedules, Late Projects) and flexible assignments (Half-Reading, Portfolio Option, Storybook Free Passes, and Extra Credit). It is my goal that every student should pass the class, and these strategies are designed to help them bounce back from anything that goes wrong and to keep on moving forward.


DETAILS.

Grace Period. I've written a post about the Grace Period, which is an automatic no-questions-asked extension for assignment deadlines.

Alternate Project Schedules. I need to write up a post about this, but the basic idea is that students can miss and/or repeat a given week in the Storybook or Portfolio schedule and still carry on using an alternate schedule. No backtracking, no making up missed work; instead, the schedule adjusts to the fact that they missed a week for whatever reason, and they carry on from there. You can see the alternate schedules for the Storybooks and the Portfolios here: Storybooks and Portfolios - see bottom of page for alternate schedules. I also have an FAQ about that for the students: Alternate Project Schedules.

Late Projects. The Storybook/Portfolio assignment is due at the end of each week, with a Grace Period that extends until Monday at noon. After this, students can turn in the project assignment for partial credit: later on Monday, 8 points (out of the 10 possible); Tuesday, 7 points; Wednesday, 6 points; by Thursday noon, 5 points. The hard deadline of Thursday noon allows me to still get comments back to the students by the end of the week. Admittedly, I do not always apply the late penalty. If I know that a student is struggling with something, I often tell them to turn in the assignment by Thursday noon and just to remind me not to count it late. Also, if someone turns in something late, but it is really excellent work, I don't apply the penalty, and I make a point of explaining that in the comments I send back. If, however, something comes in late and shows signs of having been done in haste, I apply the penalty and I do so without hesitation. The students can always make up the missing points with extra credit (see below), but I am frustrated when I see haste and sloppiness, and this is one way that I do indeed try to counter that sloppiness. Having students revise the work is, of course, the important way to counter that sloppiness, but I would rather put a stop to it earlier than the actual revision assignment!

Half-Reading Option. Each week the reading is split into two halves, with specific accommodation for students who end up only having time to do one half. I've written a post about the half-reading option here.

Portfolio Option. I've written a post about the Portfolio alternative to the Storybook; it's a new experiment for Fall 2014, and I would say it has been a big success.

Storybook Free Pass. This is something I have done in response to a student last semester who, when commenting on my idea for the Portfolio, suggested that I do something extra for the students choosing the Storybook since it is indeed more work than the Portfolio. I thought about that a lot, and it was pretty tricky because I absolutely did not want the people doing the Portfolio to feel penalized in any way for their choice. In the end, I came up with something I am calling a "free pass," and Storybooks have two free passes built into their schedule that the Portfolios do not. I need to write up a separate post about this because it is a little weird, but it has worked out wonderfully! Most of all, it has been a big help for the students who start out struggling a bit at first with the Storybook (which is admittedly more complex than a Portfolio), so that the free passes allow me to help students to really slow down and think about the organizational aspects of their projects without any points penalty. I need to write up a post about this. It's kind of complicated, but it has been a really great thing, both to create a sense of equity between the two different project options, but also as a way to help people do a better job with the Storybooks overall.

Extra Credit. I need to write up a long post about my whole philosophy of extra credit, but basically it is this: I can only ask students to do 6-8 hours of work per week... but there is so much more that I would like for them to do, especially on the interactive side of the class, reading and responding to other students. So, I have no problem at all of thinking up lots of great extra credit assignments, because they are exactly the assignments I would require of the students IF we had more time together. In that sense, there is really no difference at all between "required" and "extra credit" ... all points go into the same pot, and I consider all the assignments to be of equal value in terms of the overall learning experience and success of the class. They are "extra" only because I am asking the students for extra time. I do need to write up a post about this approach in general; it is one that is really important to how I see the overall course design and how, ultimately, student choice is the single most important factor in that design. To see how extra credit works now, check out the Myth Assignments and Indian Epics Assignments pages.


HISTORY.

I've always let students work ahead, and I still consider that the single best safety net of all: if they can work ahead, instead of waiting for the deadline, then they have a built-in cushion to accommodate anything unexpected. When I first started teaching online, I was very naive about that: I assumed that all the students would work a day or two ahead, and maybe a week or two, and that would be all the safety net I would need. Unfortunately, that proved not to be the case. Even when given the opportunity to work ahead, most students wait for the deadlines; I'll blame the schooling environment for that bad habit. Given that students are rarely given the opportunity to set their own schedules and work ahead, it's not surprising that the habit is hard to adopt at this late date in their school careers.

So, as a result, I've added in these different safety nets over time. I'll try to list them here in the order that I have added them over time.

Extra Credit. This is something I also had from the start. I originally intended it as a way for students to build up credit in advance, but it quickly became obvious that they also needed extra credit options to make up for missed work.

Alternate Project Schedules. I probably started this a year or so into my online teaching career since it was a natural feature of the Storybook project. There's no specific reason why a Storybook has to have four stories total in the end — three stories or even just two stories can make for a good project. As a result, I early on decided to make it easy for students either to miss a week and/or spend an extra week on revisions, with the alternate schedules showing how they would then proceed to the end of the semester.

Late Projects. This is something I started doing around 2005 or so. I originally accepted late projects without penalty up until Thursday noon, but this became so onerous for me in terms of the workload I had at the end of the week, trying to get comments return to everyone by the end of the day Friday, that I had to institute the partial-credit policy.   I feel badly about how that works (I don't like the idea of penalties at all, and I do call it "partial credit"), but so many students are oriented towards the deadline for an assignment that, without a real distinction between the soft deadline and the hard deadline, they will indeed wait for the hard deadline.

Grace Period. This is one of the single best things I ever came up with, and I guess it dates to around 2007. The students certainly did not enjoy writing me to ask for extensions (and I had students writing me basically every day), and I certainly did not enjoy hearing about whatever particular problem it was that prevented them from completing an assignment before midnight. I realized that of course it didn't matter to me whether an assignment was done at midnight or 3AM or 10AM for that matter, as long as it did not affect the overall workflow of the class. I wish I had thought of this sooner: it's been great for both the students and for me, given me a chance to send out a reminder email each morning that really is a big help to some students who do just need a last-minute nudge. They do their work mostly in the evenings and at night; I do most of my schoolwork during the day. The Grace Period is a perfect way to take advantage of that fact!

New for Fall 2014: This semester has been a time of all kinds of changes in my classes, and I am so happy with how those changes are going! In terms of safety nets, these three are new in Fall 2014: Half-Reading, Portfolio Option and Storybook Free Passes.


GOALS. Quite simply, my goal is for every student to pass the class. If a student fails a class simply because of poor time management skills or poor workload management skills, that seems to me a very bad business indeed. It means the student has lost out on the money they have paid for the class, and they have an "F" on their record which really does not indicate engagement with the course material one way or other other; instead, it usually just represents a failure to engage at all as a result of poor time management and workload management skills.


GENERAL THOUGHTS

I really believe that addressing the issues of time management and workload management head-on are is an incredibly important aspect both of course design and also of our day-to-day interactions with students. Some people might say that in a college course, it should be all about the content and it should be left entirely up to the students to do their own time management and workload management; to design a course with these factors in mind is considered by some of my colleagues to be "pandering to the students" or "dumbing down" of the class. I disagree. If the end result of these strategies is to increase the OVERALL level of student engagement with the coursework, then the exact opposite is true: by strategizing about time management and workload management, I am "smarting up" the class rather than dumbing it down!

(GrammarCatz)

The Half-Reading Option

A general strategy I've been trying to use in my classes is making things more explicit and transparent so that the assumptions I have about learning which are obvious to me can be more obvious to the students too. The "half-reading option" in both my classes is one of my new experiments along those lines this semester, and I am really happy with the results so far! Because of exams in other classes around this time of the semester, this is a week when I would expect to see lowered participation in my classes, but when I just checked for this week's reading, every single student in both classes had done at least half the reading, so nobody is blocked from the storytelling post this week! I'm really happy to see that, and it prompted me to write about that aspect of my class for today's post.


BRIEF DESCRIPTION. There are two roughly equal reading assignments in each of my classes each week. For students to do the storytelling post, they need to have done at least half of the reading because the story is based on that reading. In addition to the regular reminders I send out about pending assignments, I have a special reminder that alerts people explicitly that they need to do at least half of the reading if they want to do the storytelling blog post for the week.


DETAILS. This works slightly differently in my two classes because of the nature of the reading.

In Myth-Folklore, students choose a new reading unit each week from the UnTextbook. Those reading units are divided in half. Ideally, they start a reading diary post for the first half which they complete on Monday (Tuesday morning grace period), and then they add to that post as they do the second half of the reading on Tuesday (Wednesday morning grace period), followed by a storytelling blog post on Wednesday (Thursday morning grace period), with blog comments starting on Friday. If students miss the first half of the reading, I remind them that they can still make a reading choice and do half the reading; the only limitation is that they should choose a reading unit where the storytelling arc does not require reading the full unit. They can see when they make their choice in the UnTextbook just which units are not suited to half-reading. Here are the specific assignment instructions: Myth-Folklore Reading Diary.

In the Indian Epics class, the reading consists of epics that do carry on from week to week, so students cannot just skip the reading. To fill in the gap if they do miss a portion of the reading, I have Reading Guides for them to use. Those Reading Guides actually serve many purposes, but one important purpose is to cover a missed assignment. Because the reading is more substantial in this class, students complete two Reading Diary posts each week: Reading A due Monday (Tuesday morning grace period) and Reading B due Tuesday (Wednesday morning grace period), following by storytelling and then blog comments, just like in Myth-Folklore You can see the instructions here: Indian Epics Reading Diary. If a student misses the A portion in a given week, I send a special reminder to let them know that they need to read through the Reading Guide for that missed portion so that they can be caught up and ready to read and complete Reading Diary B. Reading the Reading Guides is an assignment that is already part of the class at the end of the week (Reading Review assignment), so the students who do use the Reading Guide for this purpose are making headway on that assignment too!

I am incredibly pleased at how well this working. I was worried that students might find it confusing, but that has not been the case. I've gotten a few emails from students just checking to make sure they have understood the situation correctly, and in every case they have. Sometimes they choose to do half the reading because they are swamped (I know that because they sometimes comment about their choice in their Reading Diary), and in other cases they just run out of time. Either way, the half-option serves its purpose. I would rather have people do half the reading than none at all, especially because they need to do at least some reading to be able to do the storytelling post. That storytelling post is really the most important assignment of the week, providing the basis for the blog comments at the end of the week. It is also, I suspect, the real locus of learning: students probably won't remember much of what they read... but they might indeed remember the part of the reading that they worked with to create their own story!


HISTORY. There is a somewhat different history here for each class.

In Myth-Folklore, I made no half-way mark distinction with regard to the reading. It was all-or-nothing. If students did the reading, they could do the storytelling post; if they did not do the reading, they could not. Every week there were students who were shut out of doing the storytelling posts as a result of the all-or-nothing approach to the reading, and I suspect that there were many students who skimmed the whole reading way too quickly in order to avoid being blocked, so they actually got less out of trying to do the whole thing than they can now get out of concentrating just on half.

In Indian Epics, the readings were always divided into two halves (it's a more substantial amount of reading, so it really needed to be divided up), and I also supplied Reading Guides. But here is what I did not do: I was not explicit about what students should do if they missed part of the reading. I assumed they would realize they could use the Reading Guides to fill in the gaps, but occasional remarks by students in their blogs made me realize that they were not doing that. So, I have now made explicit what was just implicit before: the Reading Guides are an important part of the class; everybody needs to read the Guides and, in particular, people who miss a portion of the reading should use the Reading Guide to fill in the gap before they move on to the next portion of assigned reading.


GOALS. As often, there are several goals at work here:

• Self-Awareness. I want students to be aware of the choices they are making as they do the work for the class, taking responsibility for their choices.
• Flexibility. This flexible workload allows students to make choices that accommodate their own interests and priorities.
• Quality over Quantity. I want students to know that choosing to do half the reading well is, for the purposes of this class, better than skimming through the whole thing in a rush.

GENERAL THOUGHTS

As far as Indian Epics is concerned, this is a change I should have made ages ago, and I am kicking myself for not having seen that earlier. It's actually not even a change at all — rather, it is just making something explicit that I had wrongly expected would be obvious to the students, even when it clearly was not obvious at all.

As far as Myth-Folklore, I am really glad that I had the realization about reading-in-halves in the Indian Epics class so that I was able to take that factor into account as I built the UnTextbook this past summer and designed the reading and writing assignments to go with it, making the two-halves distinction very clear.

This system is working incredibly well and, at least right now in the midst of Week 5, I don't see any reason to change this strategy for next semester. So far, so good! I might tally up some stats at the end of the semester just to see what the patterns of half-reading were like. I'll be curious if I can detect a bump because of midterm season for example, and also how levels of reading participation by a given student might correlate with other aspects of the class. Once again, of course, D2L BS gives me no help in doing that kind of data analysis, but I can gather the data on my own and see what I learn!

Better half an egg than an empty shell.

(English proverb)

Sample Assignment Schedules

One of my students wrote me today to ask just how exactly she could turn the class into a Tuesday-Thursday class, so I wrote up a few sample schedules to share.


BRIEF DESCRIPTION. As a way to encourage students to work ahead, I've created three sample schedules that simulate a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, a Tuesday-Thursday schedule, and a weekend-only schedule. You can see the schedules here: Designing Your Class Schedule.


DETAILS. As I explained in another post, the class is self-scheduled. Ideally, I wish students would be working a week or more ahead of schedule, and that way they are really ready for anything that comes up, able to just take time off from this class to handle anything that might happen unexpectedly, good or bad. At the same time, I am very aware that a lot of students just default into letting the daily deadlines dictate their schedule, which is certainly not going to be especially convenient for anybody. I'm not entirely sure that these schedules which I've created will be a perfect fit, but maybe just seeing the examples will inspire people to come up with the schedule that really does suit them best.


HISTORY. This is something brand-new as of September 2014; I am glad that I will have it ready in time for next semester where I can do a better job of promoting it right from the very start of the semester.


GOAL. My goal here is very simple: I would really like for every student to arrange the weekly schedule of assignments so that it fits conveniently into their other obligations!


GENERAL THOUGHTS

I am so glad that this student wrote and asked me. From her email, I could tell that she really was stumped about how it would be possible to re-arrange the assignments. So, for sure these sample schedules can answer her question. Now I am hoping that maybe there are other students who might have the same question but who had not written to ask me. As always, it's really great when someone asks! Clearly it was something I would not have figured out to do on my own, and it will be great to have this in place next semester.

LatinLOLCat:

Aliud agendi tempus, aliud quiescendi.

There's a time for working and a time for resting.

The Grace Period

I've mentioned the "grace period" in a few posts so far, so I definitely need to explain what that is all about!

Brief Description: The grace period is a no-questions-asked extension for any due date that lasts until noon of the following day. So, for example, if the Storybook blog post is due "on Wednesday," then there is a grace period on Thursday morning until noon for anybody who did not get that in on time. Accordingly, the first thing I do when I get to work on Thursday morning is to send an email to all the students who have not done the Storytelling assignment, reminding them that the grace period lasts until noon.

Details: The Orientation Week for the class begins with students reading this page: Assignments, Due Dates, and Declarations. There is also a page specifically dedicated to the grace period: Making Good Use of the Grace Period.

Of course, the "grace period" is really just a kind of gimmick, something to encourage students not to put off the assignments until literally the last minute, as so many people are prone to do. In terms of the Desire2Learn, the end of the grace period is the only deadline that there is; unlike other course management systems, there is no accommodation in D2L for a "soft deadline" and a "hard deadline" (which is I think how this system is referred to in other systems - Moodle? I'm not sure). So, I make sure to include the due date in the title of the assignment, even though that due date does not match the D2L deadline. Here's a screenshot:

The essay blog post that is "due Thursday" has a deadline of September 12, which is actually a Friday. Luckily for me, Desire2Learn does not display the day of the week with the calendar date. Of course, D2L absolutely SHOULD display the day of the week (just another communication failure by D2L, one of many) . . . but it works to my advantage that the only reference to the day of the week that my students see here is the due date, with the actual D2L deadline being the end of the grace period.

Some students, unfortunately, realize this right away and simply ignore the due date, treating the grace period as the only deadline, turning in every assignment during the grace period. It's a bad strategy, of course, because when they actually DO need an extension as a result of something unexpected (and life is full of unexpected surprises, both good and bad), they have no room to maneuver.

At the other end of the spectrum, some students have taken the "ask for an extension" culture so much to heart that they write to ask me for permission to use the grace period and/or they write me to apologize for using the grace period. I always make sure to write them back and explain that there is no need to ask and certainly no need to apologize: they are using the grace period exactly as it was intended!

History: I used to have midnight deadlines, and that clearly did not work well because pretty much every morning I would come to work to find two or three (or more) emails from students explaining about how they had to stay at work late, or how there had been a problem with their computer, etc. etc. — a whole litany of excuses that I really didn't need or want to know about. Plus, there are plenty of students just hitting their stride right at midnight, so the midnight deadline was a bad choice that reason too. I pondered the problem and came up with the grace period solution maybe five or six years ago. It's worked out great; I just wish I had thought of it sooner!

Goals: Some of these goals are for me; some are for my students!

• Better time management. I want to encourage my students not to put their work off until literally the last minute.
• Fair accommodation. I also want to accommodate the unexpected problems that can come up beyond anyone's control; the grace period is one way to do that, and extra credit is another.
• Reduce email and increase autonomy. I don't want students to have to ask for this extension. It is available to all, no questions asked, and no email required.

General Thoughts

This is just one of the various time management strategies I rely on for my classes. For a general discussion, see this post: Self-Scheduled, Not Self-Paced.

I am happy with how the grace period works, but I am discouraged that the students who are really struggling are often the same students who quickly get in the habit of turning in every assignment during the grace period. D2L, unfortunately, does not give me an easy way to track that, but my anecdotal impression is that I send grace period reminders to the same people constantly. I was going to set up a tracking system for that this semester, but with all the other changes I've made to the class this semester, I decided to wait. Next semester, though, I want to do a better job of tracking just who gets repeated grace period emails so that I can think of some additional intervention to do in order to try to help students from falling into that last-minute trap. People do not do their best work at the last minute, and it adds unnecessary stress to the class. So, that is on the agenda for next semester; I will need to be consistent in the subject lines I use for the grace period emails, and then I should be able to harvest the names as needed and throw them in a spreadsheet without too much trouble (but, I hasten to point out, I will be doing that data collection with absolutely no help from D2L, despite its grandiose claims to big data — more on the absurd hyperbole of D2L in a separate post).

~ ~ ~

Of course, we are all procrastinators in one way or another... so we all need some procrastination humor too! For a full-size view of Sylvia Liu's flowchart, visit her blog: SylviaLiuLand:

Self-Scheduled, Not Self-Paced

When the College of Arts & Sciences at my school started the online course program back in 2002, the director of the program made a very useful distinction between "self-paced courses" and "self-scheduled courses." I took that very much to heart, so today I am going to explain how I use due dates and self-scheduling in my courses.

Brief Description: Both my courses follow a weekly module format, with the same assignments each week. Each assignment has a due date, but students can and should (!!!) work ahead; they can work as far ahead as they want. In other words: self-scheduled, but not self-paced. There is abundant extra credit to make up for missed assignments; students can also complete extra credit in advance.

Details: One of the things I value most about online courses is the flexible scheduling. Many of my students have mind-boggling personal schedules as a result of their many other commitments, and they often have very chaotic lives with unexpected events that can derail their normal schedule. Luckily, all of that is easy to handle in an online course, especially if students work ahead. As advice from past students shows, the number one recommendation students have for each other is: work ahead and do the extra credit. You can see that advice from other students here: Insider Tips for Online Courses.

So, I always encourage students to work ahead, and also to do extra credit in advance. That way, they are ready for anything that comes up, and they can take a week or even two weeks off in this class when they have other demands on their time. Obviously, it's much better to work ahead and build up a cushion of extra credit in advance, but it is also possible to use extra credit after the fact to make up for missing assignments. I need to post in detail about grading in the class, but it is on a points-based grading system, based on 30 points of regular work each week, with 8-14 points of extra credit available in any given week.

Yes, that's a lot of extra credit... but that's because my courses have so much potential for reading, writing, reflecting, and interacting that there is a TON of stuff that I would for students to be doing for the class, so the extra credit opportunities are just as useful and important as any of the regular class activities. You can see a typical week's worth of assignments here: Myth-Folklore Weekly Assignments.

Another reason for the extra credit is that there are two assignments each week which have a more limited timeframe. The blog commenting has a 72-hour time frame each week, since it only becomes available after the due date for the blog posts: the Storytelling blog posts are due on Wednesday (with grace period on Thursday morning), so the blog commenting opens on Friday and runs through the weekend (with its grace period on Monday morning). The project commenting window is wider: students publish their project webpage at the end of each week, with a grace period on Monday morning, so the project commenting then opens on Tuesday and runs for the following week. Very few students have any trouble with these windows, but that's another reason why it is imperative for me to offer extra credit: if students do miss those windows for reasons beyond their control, I do not want them to be penalized. They can easily make up the missing points with extra credit.

History: I am very lucky that the online course program I work for embraced this notion of the "self-scheduled" class when I first designed my classes. In recent years, I have heard rumors that the online course program office has since backed away from this philosophy and no longer encourages the notion of students working ahead, although I that is just second-hand information; I do not know what the official policy is at this time. Luckily for me, my classes were created at a time when we were all being encouraged promote time flexibility in our course design, and I would find it very hard to teach a course with a rigid time schedule that every student had to follow.

Goals. These are some of the goals related to this course design strategy:

• High performance. By letting students set their own schedule, I hope to see high performance, high engagement, and high completion rates. And that is exactly what I see!
• Improved time management skills. By being able to make their own schedule week by week, students can practice their time management skills.
• Student choice. As a general course design principle, I try to maximize student choice; a self-scheduled course with optional assignments gives the students lots of choices.
• Flexible accommodations. Over the years I have seen all kinds of complications happen in students' lives, both good and bad, and the flexible scheduling of these courses has made it possible to accommodate basically anything and everything.

General Thoughts

Why not self-paced...? Well, there are two reasons. One good, one not-so-good.

The good reason is that the weekly schedule of due dates helps keep the class moving together even while some students are moving on ahead. So, there is still the sense in Indian Epics that "this week we are reading Narayan's Ramayana" for example, or "this week in Myth-Folklore, we are looking at Native American storytelling," with a collective sense of engagement and accomplishment. I don't want anybody to be held back by those constraints, but I also want to create a sense of togetherness too.

The not-so-good reason is that students have learned (not surprisingly) that the teacher is "in charge" and sets the deadlines, etc. Presented with the opportunity to set their own schedule, they instead go for the default, doing the work on the due dates that I have set, no matter how inconvenient those due dates may be for their own schedule. Even with all this opportunity to work ahead, very few students actually do so (for more on that, see my post about Sunday reminders). Self-paced would, I expect, be a disaster for many students. Given the opportunity to put things off for weeks at a time, they would end up with an unmanageable load of work at the end of the semester . . . as often happens in their regular classroom-based classes, of course. The dilemma of pacing and scheduling is one that pertains to all classes, not just online.

So, time management and personal planning is something I try hard to work on with the students, constantly reminding them that they really can work ahead, that they can create a schedule that suits their own needs, that the class will be less stressful if they are not working to beat the clock, etc. It's an important lesson to learn, and if that were the one lesson they take away from this class, that would be okay with me. Learning how to manage time, instead of letting time manage you, is an incredibly valuable life skill to have! If only the dinosaurs had figured that out . . .

(2010 cartoon by Dan Regan)

Sunday Email Reminder

I just sent around a note to students who still have assignments pending for Week 2, which is something I do on Sunday morning, so I thought I would write up something here about the email reminders I send. As you can see, this blog is going to evolve in a higgledy-piggledy way because I am writing up these posts prompted by whatever I happen to be doing at the time... but in the end I'll be able to rearrange, fill in the gaps, etc. I've never really documented my classes in this kind of detail before, so I am excited to be doing this!

Brief Description. On Sunday mornings, I send out an email to students who have not completed the week's work.

Details. My classes have a strictly week by week design (schedules here: Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics). There is a cluster of assignments that I list as due on "Friday/weekend." Most students put them off until the weekend. I'm always glad when I see students getting those out of the way on Friday or on Saturday, but most students put the work off until Sunday, and on Sunday morning I send out a reminder to the people who have assignments pending. I send the same email to all the students with work pending, although some of them may have done at least part of the work. Here is the text of the email:

This is just a reminder that if you did not finish the remaining Week 2 assignments on Friday (or if you forgot to do a Declaration), you need to do that this weekend. For more information, see the announcements:
http://ouclassannouncements.blogspot.com/

Plus, I occasionally add a message that varies from week to week. This week, for example, I included happy thoughts for the 3-day weekend; otherwise, I would have put "BOOMER SOONER" for our football victory yesterday, and so on. It's never more than just a sentence that I add, though, since my goal is to keep this absolutely short and sweet, the idea being that the focus is really on getting them to go look at the announcements.

History. Over the 10+ years that I have been teaching these classes, I have made increasing use of these types of emails. This is my Sunday-morning end-of-week email, but I have some kind of email that goes out to stragglers on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings; I'll say more about those other emails in another post. It takes very little of my time and the emails are clearly a big boost to the students. Admittedly, though, I was surprised when I first started teaching at how few students take the opportunity to create their own schedule for the class and instead depend on me to set the deadlines. More on that below.

Goals. I have several goals for this simple little activity:

• Alert students. This is obviously the main goal: alert students to work they need to do OR Declarations they need to complete (sometimes they have done the work but have forgotten to do the Declaration; more on that in a separate post).
• Link to announcements. The daily announcements are an incredibly important part of the class, and this is one of my best opportunities to share the announcements link with students who most need to be reading those announcements.
• Update Storybook in Gradebook. I won't go into the nitty-gritty of this now, but the one item in the Gradebook which is not under the student's control is the Storybook item, and I use the D2L flags to let me know which students have turned in that assignment even though it is not recorded yet (more on that in a separate post). In order to know which students need this email, I have to update the Storybook Stack and the Gradebook records.
• Show commitment. I want every student to realize that I am committed to their success in the class. Sending out the email is a way to let them know that I am keeping an eye on everyone's progress and that I want everyone to do well! 

General Thoughts

These daily reminders (I'll explain how the others work in a separate post) are an important part of the class, and I don't think I would even want to automate them (not that D2L even makes such a thing possible, sad to say). By doing the reminders every morning, I get an anecdotal impression of how many students are working ahead of the due date and, unfortunately, only a very few students work ahead. The majority of students rely on the due dates set by me, which obviously has all kinds of disadvantages: those due dates are not necessarily convenient for their own personal schedules, they are not likely to do their best work when under time pressure, and they might even run out of time and not be able to complete the assignment.

Because this a topic of great concern to me, I did a whole series of posts at G+ on time scarcity last semester, looking at my classes week by week in the Spring 2014 semester. You can see the final post in that series here, and it contains links to all the prior posts: Time Scarcity Report for Spring 2014.

As you can see in that post from last spring, I am going to try tracking the grace period emails that I send out this semester; that is a separate kind of email than this Sunday reminder, though, so I will explain about the grace period in another post.

For the diligent, a week has seven days;
for the slothful, seven tomorrows.

(German proverb)