Each module comes with assessments. Those are things you need to do that will be graded. In general, expect that each module contains a Quiz, an Exercise, and a Discussion. Sometimes there are additional/alternative components, such as submission of project parts.
Due dates are usually Friday 5 pm the week of the module. Some might be at other times, e.g., the beginning or middle of the week. See the schedule or the module specific assessment document. If unclear, ask.
The assessments, especially the exercises, are the main way of learning the material. There are therefore meant as a help for you, giving you incentives to work through and learn the course material. It is very easy to take shortcuts (cheat) for any of the assessments. Of course, our academic honesty policy prohibits you from doing so. But more importantly, I assume you want to learn the material. And if you take shortcuts by getting answers from a classmate, you are only hurting your own learning. That said, I encourage getting help from any source you can, including your classmates. I let you decide how much helping each other is acceptable and at what point it turns into having someone else do the work for you that you should be doing yourself.
The quizzes cover the basics and ensure that you have gone through some of the material. Each quiz consists of around 10-20 short questions. Not all answers to the quiz questions are directly found in the materials, sometimes you need to do a - hopefully straightforward - online search.
Quizzes are auto-graded on submission based on a simple counting of the right answers. At the end, I’ll average across all quizzes. Note that since there are >10 quizzes and all quizzes together count for only a fraction of the total grade, each quiz counts for a small part of your grade. So try to get them as correct and complete as possible, but don’t stress out about missing a question here and there.
The link to the website for quiz submission is pinned to the announcements Discord channel. Before submitting any quizzes, you need to set up a password by filling the Google Form that was shared with you in the welcome email.
Unless otherwise specified, you can submit each quiz once, and it needs to be submitted by the deadline (generally Fridays), otherwise the system will not take your submission.
For each module, you are asked to fill out an Excel sheet with
questions related to the course material. Download the quiz files from
the links below, fill in the Answer” column, and submit to
the online quiz submission system by the deadline specified in the
Schedule document.
You can expand and resize the columns/rows of the Excel file so you can make sure to see all content. Other than that, please only fill in the Answer column and don’t make other changes (e.g. don’t rename or delete rows/columns). If you do make changes, submission might fail. If that happens and you get an error message during submission, simply come back here, download a fresh sheet and copy and paste your answers into it, making sure to not change any other part of the sheet.
Quizzes will become available here as the course progresses. Once a quiz is available, you should be able to submit it at any time before the deadline.
The exercises are the most important component of the course! The material we cover in this class can only be learned by doing it yourself. As such, the focus is really on the exercises (i.e. the homework), with the readings and videos mainly meant to help you find and learn the material you need to do the exercises.
Because the exercises are so important, they are usually quite in-depth and also often time-consuming. Plan accordingly. For each exercise, I will provide detailed instructions that hopefully make it clear what you need to do.
If you get stuck during the exercises (quite possible), feel free to ask for help. Use the various course materials, the course discussion board as well as outside resources. But do try to do as much as possible yourself (of course with the help of Google).
Unless otherwise specified, exercises are due by Friday. Quite often, some part of the exercise needs to be done before that deadline to allow for group work.
I grade the exercises based on 4 categories:
At my discretion, I might consider assignments even if they are submitted after the deadline. In that case, I might take off a point for lateness.
Don’t interpret these scores as grades, I just use them to differentiate, then I’ll adjust at the end when I compute the overall project score.
For exercises that include multiple parts (e.g., you start something, then your colleague takes over), each part will be assigned a score.
We can’t have in-class discussions in an online course, but hopefully we can still have robust discussions as part of the course. I hope that lively online discussions will allow us to create a sense of class community that usually comes more naturally in an in-class course. I want everyone to feel like they are part of a class, a community of students learning together, instead of just being on their own interacting with the course in front of a computer screen. To achieve that, having a lot of discussion activity is vital.
You will be asked to participate in discussions throughout the course, and discussion participation is part of the grade. The discussions are meant to connect the module content to the broader context and hopefully will spark interesting further thoughts and insights.
Unless otherwise specified, the first posting of the discussion is due by Wednesday, the discussion replies are due by Friday. Post to the discussion channel for the applicable module (e.g. module2_discussion, module3_discussion).
To make sure discussions work well for everyone, here are some general guidelines.
For most modules, you’ll have to do the following (unless specifically directed otherwise):
See the Projects section on the website for more information.