Final Blog Post
For this final blog post, I will be doing a Williamson-like critique of the class, focusing specifically on two points: the lack of attendance policy and the soft deadlines for class assignments. Attendance policy is something I have a love and hate relationship with. Not having to go to class is nice but I fail to learn much. While I know I should go, I am not responsible or motivated enough to get out of bed at 9:00 AM to go to class, which is an awful thing to say. While I do not know the attendance numbers, I'm sure this is the case for others too due to the posts on the website near the beginning of the semester that discussed this. In my personal opinion, attendance should count for a grade and students should have a number of excused absences. With this system in place, students will be held accountable to come to class and learn the material. The excused absences are for any situations that arise such as an illness that would hinder a student's attendance. I think this will keep students engaged in the material. In addition, I would prefer this system as it gives easy points to the students but that is more of a personal point and is not much of an argument.
My opinion on the other point is a bit different. I am actually quite in favor of soft deadlines over hard deadlines for a couple of reasons, especially in this class. Soft deadlines allow for less responsible students to still go over and absorb the material even if the assignment is late. With hard deadlines, a missed assignment will never be done and as a result, the student will never learn the material missed in that assignment. This blog post is actually an example of this. With a hard deadline, this post would never be made and I would most likely never consider the ideas that I am writing about in this post. This is very applicable to the blog posts. The blog posts are actually very tedious to write and six hundred words is a hefty amount. This compounded with the fact that the blog posts are due on a Friday makes them somewhat easy to miss. The soft deadline gives students in this class time over the weekend in order to finish. I would keep this policy as it is.
These ideals I believe point towards a bigger idea. Learning should be the prioritization in college and with these policies, it helps those students who struggle with responsibility in college. Attendance policy forces them to come to class or at least incentivizes it. This way they are somewhat encouraged to be engaged and absorb the material. The soft deadlines also doest this as long as the students who are struggling care about their grade. It can be argued that responsibility is a vital skill to have not only in college but in the real world as well. Because of this, students should be expected to be responsible at this time in their lives. Lack of responsibility should not be accommodated and students should be in charge of their own education. In response to this, I say that this is true but that professors should be responsible to encourage a learning environment regardless of how committed the student is. The professors to some extent are paid to teach, students pay to be there; what they do with their money is up to them. This is why I encourage implementing an attendance policy to this class and keeping the soft deadline for assignments.
My opinion on the other point is a bit different. I am actually quite in favor of soft deadlines over hard deadlines for a couple of reasons, especially in this class. Soft deadlines allow for less responsible students to still go over and absorb the material even if the assignment is late. With hard deadlines, a missed assignment will never be done and as a result, the student will never learn the material missed in that assignment. This blog post is actually an example of this. With a hard deadline, this post would never be made and I would most likely never consider the ideas that I am writing about in this post. This is very applicable to the blog posts. The blog posts are actually very tedious to write and six hundred words is a hefty amount. This compounded with the fact that the blog posts are due on a Friday makes them somewhat easy to miss. The soft deadline gives students in this class time over the weekend in order to finish. I would keep this policy as it is.
These ideals I believe point towards a bigger idea. Learning should be the prioritization in college and with these policies, it helps those students who struggle with responsibility in college. Attendance policy forces them to come to class or at least incentivizes it. This way they are somewhat encouraged to be engaged and absorb the material. The soft deadlines also doest this as long as the students who are struggling care about their grade. It can be argued that responsibility is a vital skill to have not only in college but in the real world as well. Because of this, students should be expected to be responsible at this time in their lives. Lack of responsibility should not be accommodated and students should be in charge of their own education. In response to this, I say that this is true but that professors should be responsible to encourage a learning environment regardless of how committed the student is. The professors to some extent are paid to teach, students pay to be there; what they do with their money is up to them. This is why I encourage implementing an attendance policy to this class and keeping the soft deadline for assignments.
How soft should the deadlines be? A couple of days might seem reasonable. That's what it used to be before this year. Your post is testing this. It is more than a week late and I'm seeing it after I've uploaded the grades into Moodle. What explains that?
ReplyDeleteI wrote on somebody else's post that I can only accommodate these later posts because I'm retired. Otherwise, I simply wouldn't have the time for this. So, in that sense, extending the deadline beyond the first weekend after the post is due is a gift to the students. As you'll recall we talked about Gift Exchange a fair amount in this class. I agree that learning should be the priority. So I'm asking here, did you learn that concept in our class in some experiential way?
It is better to give than to receive.