Your assignments
Your ten assignments for the course are all contained in the workbook. The score and feedback listing (see below) lists all of them and their location in the workbook by page number. Here is a graphic chart of these assignments and how each contributes to the computation of your course grade:
Submitting your work
You submit your work for this course by e-mailing it to a dedicated e-mail address* established for the course, in the general format:
gph205----@gmail.com
where the "----" is the word that matches the term, such as "summer", "autumn", "december", "winter", or "spring", for example gph205winter@gmail.com. A dedicated e-mail address in this format exists for GPH-205 for each of DePaul's terms. One of your first required actions in the term will be to use the e-mail address for the term in which you are enrolled to send me a confirmation of participation form with your self-chosen work completion schedule. You download that confirmation form from the course web site home page.
Everything in this course is submitted electronically. The written homework is "fill in" documents that are represented in your workbook for note-taking with a link provided to download each so you can prepare it as a word-processed file. You submit the file, not a scanned copy of handwritten work! For projects involving hands-on work where you create a drawing or object you send in a picture of you and the product--a cell phone snapshot or webcam image is fine. It's best to submit your work as you complete it, don't hold onto it to send it in for a unit all at once. This way you can get feedback from me more quickly and you have a better opportunity to revise work based on my feedback, and resubmit it.
Lateness? Every student gets seven "grace" days on lateness that I apply as needed to cover small sins of lateness. After that I may impose a lateness penalty. You can re-plan your due dates up to twice during the term until the withdrawal date but it's not wise to waste your opportunities to do that. If you are more than a little late, re-plan all of your remaining dates to make them realistic. It's wisest to plan your due dates with care and treat them as serious deadlines. To do otherwise almost certainly results in trying to cram the work out, and the work is not very receptive to being crammed. And 10 week quarters don't provide a lot of wiggle room.
How you get your grades
I e-mail a consolidated score and feedback listing to you to give you both grades and detailed feedback. I don't post grades, you don't have to look for them; your individualized grade sheet accumulates as the term progresses and contains everything your course grade is based on. You'll receive your first copy of this either when I grade your first submitted work or by the end of the second week of the term, whichever happens sooner. It becomes your "course transcript" that includes all feedback from me to you in one accumulative document. Want to see a sample of a grade listing as it typically looks at the end of a term? CLICK HERE and you can download a full length sample of the pattern document that your score listing starts with. My feedback to you starts with the first submission you make, and I try to keep to less than a 48-hour turnaround on grading your work submissions.
Revising work and re-submitting it
I teach using a "mentoring" pedagogy, which means I see myself as your "tutor" in the sense of your individual instructor at a British university like Cambridge or Oxford. I have laid out your work to lead you to a learning experience where you discover knowledge. You submit your work and I grade it but I also give you detailed feedback on how to make it better if it doesn't score perfectly. You then have the opportunity to revise it and re-submit it and I will grade it again. This way you can learn more from each assignment and from my individualized feedback; in addition, you need not be "stuck" with early poor scores that hinder you from earning a top course grade. Grades are not "curved" and your grade is not based on anything but your own accomplishment. Everyone can earn an "A" (but that has never happened yet; it seems some students are just too busy or they procrastinate too much).
Every assignment in this course is this kind of "mentoring" learning experience, including the reflective essay and conclusions work. Of course, the work has to come to me in a timely way; if you wait to submit a lot of work close to the end of the term I can't give you feedback in time for you to turn the work around and you thereby shoot yourself in the foot (so to speak) in terms of learning and possibly your potential course score and letter grade. Keep this in mind as you work toward your proposed due dates. You can still get an "A" even if you mess up at the beginning of the term. But I don't "give" grades, you earn them, and the numbers on your grade listing add up to produce the score that determines your grade. I will help you earn a top grade but it's up to you to earn it.
Getting help from me
If you have any questions or need help with the coursework please contact me at (872) 205-0642 any day of the week from 9 AM to 9 PM, text or voice, or e-mail using the dedicated course gmail address! I send out broadcast e-mail announcements and information to all students from time to time, especially as the term starts. So check your e-mail often!
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* Why do I use a dedicated gmail address for student work submission instead of a learning management system such as D2L? For one thing, this is much more flexible and tolerant of work re-submissions, which I encourage students to do in response to my feedback. My feedback is a part of mentoring; you can revise your work based on my feedback and resubmit it to gain a higher score; every assignment is a learning opportunity, not an "assessment!" But another advantage also exists: gmail opens most document formats for me--the only exception being Apple's ".pages" documents (if you use a Mac and Pages, please output your work as .docx or .pdf format). So it gives you the freedom to use whatever word processor you wish. All things considered, I (and my prior students) have found that a dedicated e-mail account is a much more capable and productive way to submit work than a system like D2L, which take a lot of setup, limits re-submissions, and just conveys files without being smart enough to open a variety of document formats!
