Public:Grading and assessment

Your final grade for the course will consist of five components. You will receive points for each individual component that will be added together to make up your final grade according to the following scale:

• 100–87 points : 1
• 86–75 points : 2
• 74–63 points : 3
• 62–50 points : 4
• 49–0 points : 5 (fail)

How many points you can get for which part and the criteria for its assessment are described in the following sections.

Attendance & participation (20 points – assessed individually)

Participation can take different forms: it doesn’t mean being the first to answer every question. We understand that some people are more extroverted than others, and that some need to spend time working out their exact words before they feel comfortable speaking. We are not looking to grade your personalities; much rather, we simply ask you to come in with an attentive attitude that makes you open to and ready for interaction. That means that in order to receive these 20 points, it is sufficient to attend the sessions regularly.

You can miss 1 full session without any negative repercussions. You don’t need to give any reasons for why you’re missing the class, but we ask you to please send us an email ahead of time so we have an idea of how many students will be in class.

Participation in preparatory activities (20 points – assessed individually)

Sessions 2–5 have required prep activities (you can find out what they are in the course outline). They are intended to engage you with the topics of the sessions ahead of time and give all of us a common experience base from which to start our discussions.

In order to demonstrate that you have engaged with the prep activities for a session, please post at least two responses (thoughts, questions, ideas, reactions, photos, …) per session on the corresponding Moodle forum thread. These responses can also be a reply to somebody else’s post.

Completing the prep activities counts for 5 points per session. (If you miss a session, you still need to do the prep activities in order to receive the corresponding 5 points.) In order to receive the full points, you need to post your reactions before the corresponding session. Reactions posted up to 30 days after a session still count for half the points.

Session reviews (5 points – assessed individually)

Every student has to write a short review of one of the four topical sessions and post it to the Moodle forum thread of the corresponding session. We will coordinate who is reviewing which sessions in our first session.

The session review contains the following sections:

• What did I enjoy most in this session?
• What was new to me in this session, or what do I think was most important?
• About which of this sessions aspects will I continue to ponder?
• What was not so well implemented in this session or what did cause some discomfort?
• Which aspects of this session got to little focus?
• (optional:) Is there anything else I find particularly noteworthy about this section?

A few sentences per section are sufficient, or even a few keywords, if they speak for themselves. Maybe you can think about each section of the review like a social media post on something like Mastodon or other federated micro-blogging services (or even such proprietary one as Twitter).

Peer teaching (25 points – assessed as a group)

There will be four groups, one each for sessions 2–5. Each group will be responsible for preparing and implementing part of the corresponding session (about 50 minutes).

Peer teaching? Peer teaching means that each group will address a facet of our course topics. The group members will do some background research on their topic and design ways of engaging with that topic with the other participants during their session. In principle, it is up to you which methods you want to use, but they should go beyond a one-way presentation and instead also include creative/interactive elements. We will support you in planning your peer teaching (e.g. with ideas, teaching methods, etc.).

Topic: We have included suggestions for topics that you might want to work on as well as literature on these in the course outline. However, in principle, you can choose your topic freely, as long as it fits into the overarching theme of the corresponding session. Please talk to us about the topic you would like to work on.

Planning and preparation: You have to send us a short concept of what you will be doing at least 7 days before your session. We will then provide you with feedback and suggestions. You also have the opportunity to schedule a video conference with one or both of us - if you want to take up on this, please let us know in your concept or before.

Time and format: Each group gets 50 minutes for their peer teaching. These 50 minutes should not only be one long presentation, but include interactive elements or be primarily interactive. We are also happy for you to use creative methods. You can find links to methods that you might want to use on the page Teaching Methods.

Grading: Save for exceptional cases, group work will be marked as a whole, not individually.

The groups will be formed in the introductory session. Further documentation and coordination takes place on Moodle (or whatever the group chooses to be adequate for their purposes).

The final project (30 points – assessed as a group or individually)

For your final project, we ask you to engage with one of the topics of the course in more depth. You can use the list of possible topics and materials supplied with this handout as a source of inspiration, but we encourage you to find a topic that you personally are interested in. Whether you choose one of the suggested topics or come up with your own, please send us an email with a short description of the work that you plan to do before starting so we can give you some feedback on your project. It is also possible to take part in a collective project which we will suggest in session 6. Or you could also suggest a collective project on you own in which others take part. If you take part in a collective project you don’t have to come up with a full project of your own and your “final project” will consist of contributions to the collective project. In any case the following paragraphs describe how your project or project contributions could look like and what the criteria are on which we base our final assessment.

Format: While you can write a traditional academic essay, we encourage you to freely choose the medium of your project and to experiment with different approaches and skills. We are not looking to grade the technicalities of your execution, but the concept that underpins the project – this means that we won’t mark you down because your rhymes, brushstrokes, or knitting don’t look ‘perfect’, but instead look at how your poem, painting, or scarf fits into the whole of your project.

Approach: We would like you to take a critical, evaluative stance towards the topic of your project. This means that you should not simply reproduce others’ ideas, but actively engage with them. In case you choose to take part in the collective project suggested by us, this means to find your own way of hacking things and to share it with others. Other than that, your project or participation in a collective project can take a wide variety of forms, for example drawings, films, material for activist efforts, or traditional academic formats such as research proposals or essays.

Referencing: Referencing is important, regardless of whether your project takes a more traditional academic form or not. Please supply us with a list of at least six sources that you consulted in the process of creating your project (for example, texts, videos, interviews, music, art, literature, websites, museum exhibitions, etc.). Again, please try to seek out academic as well as non-academic sources of inspiration. You can use whichever referencing style you like, as long as it is consistent. (See http://www.open.ac.uk/libraryservices/documents/Harvard_citation_hlp.pdf for a suggestion.)

Scope: As we do not wish to limit you in terms of the format that your project can take, we cannot offer clear word limits. Instead we suggest that you aim to spend about 20 hours on your project. This includes any background, literature or empirical research that you will do for it. Please include some thoughts on the time requirements of your project in the email (see above).

Reflection: We will also ask you to hand in a short written reflection (300–500 words) as part of your final project. In this reflection, we would like you to, well, reflect on your experience with the course and with developing your project. The goal is not so much for you to give us feedback, but rather to think about what you ‘took home’ with you from the course. We’d therefore like you to use the reflection to think about the things we did in the course, and think about what among them was most relevant to you personally, and why. The reflection isn’t graded separately, but submitting it counts for 10 of the 30 points for the final project.

Mode: You can either create the final project as part of a group, or by yourself. If you decide to complete it as a group, you will all receive the same grade, save for exceptional circumstances. Please note that if it’s a group project, each of you should aim to invest about 20 hours in it. You would also have to write a short reflection each.

Submission: Your final project should be finished and available to us by 31 August. For individual final projects, we can discuss how you can make them available to us once you have decided on a topic and medium.