home & schedule | syllabus | contact | grades

You will add value to your peers' experience by contributing in class and within the Sakai space for comments.

Value Added

You will add value by enhancing the learning environment for your fellow students

You all start out with an assumed passing score for involvement. It's up to you to determine if that score increases or decreases.

Adding Value includes asking questions about topics in such a way that your question and the answer also help your fellow classmates. You can ask questions in class, or by using the chat function in Sakai. Your instructors will respond directly to each question asked. Also, if they think the rest of the class can benefit from the question and answer, they will reformat the question to preserve the anonymity of the asker and post both question and response Sakai, so that everyone can benefit.

Condition

Adding Value includes posting comments to the Forums tool in Sakai. You don't have to do this each day, but

• you will have to post a note introducing yourselves after the first session,
• you will have to post a note about starters you present in class on the Sakai forum,
• and you will surely have something to say about one or more of the other starters or forum postings presented to you weekly.

When you do a posting in Sakai, be sure to use a label to identify yourself. At the end of the semester, your instructors will look through your postings and if they are not labeled, they might be missed and thus you might not receive credit for them.

Each of you is expected to do at least one starter,
to post information about your starter to the Sakai forum,
to comment at least once on a classmate's posting.
and to create a posting for your peers to read about once every two weeks.

One should expect to see at least one posting from each of you all every four class sessions, whether you have done a starter or not. It's reasonable to expect everyone to have something to add to the forum conversations.

Standard

There is no doubt that everyone in the class will be an expert in at least one area and Adding Value also includes offering to display your skills in an area related to the topic under discussion so that we may all learn from and with you.

Be active and involved, but remember: quality of input far outweighs quantity.
During class, you will want to respect your fellow students by paying more attention to the class topics, and less to what is happening on social networking sites.

Attendance is a key indicator of your participation

A roll will not be taken daily, but your absences will be noted. It is very important that you do not miss classes. If you do miss classes, you would be wise to talk to your instructors about it, either before or after the session you miss.

The amount of points earned for Adding Value is a subjective judgment and your instructors will be making the subjective call, at the end of the semester. Therefore, you will see part of your Adding Value increase as your instructors notice that you have done the expected components . You should have a feel for how well you are doing in this area if you follow the advice on this page.