• Apologies from Lucy
• Agenda:
  • 5 minutes – feedback about meetings with people about proposal to become honors course
  • 15 minutes – get into smaller groups to talk about how next year’s course will look
  • Get back into a bigger group to discuss
  • Talk about proposal that the class next year would be 3 hours
  • 15 minutes – talk about commitments we made at the beginning of the year and passing/failing
  • Break
  • 10-15 minutes – discuss combining occupation anniversary with things from this course
  • Finish session with thinking about wrapping up the course
  • Discuss the next 2 sessions of the course
• Met last week w/ people from undergraduate board of studies, who thought the proposal was okay but were concerned about assessment – how it would happen, what form it would take – will discuss later
• They also discussed at the meetings whether or not there should be a student quota for the course next year (possibly 30)
• There would be 2 courses running simultaneously: one for honors and one for pre-honors that would be run in the same way
• We go over options for the proposal related to the form assessment will take
• Discussion on assessment scheme
  • Group 1
    • Veered toward Option 3, but the main issue would be the difficulty of working out the peer marking scheme and what counts as participation (participation could be a weekly assignment? Or maybe you choose your best piece of work as evidence of participation to submit for assessment)
    • Option 4 also viable, but would be a shame to not build this more from last year
  • Group 2
    • Had an issue with Option 3 – does the math work out
    • Some people liked option 2 better, but the issue is that it’s all based on the final project
    • Each individual student could design their own individual weighting (?)
    • Option 4 viable
    • Could also do small reflective pieces throughout to be assessed (every 2 weeks or so?)
    • On peer assessment: some had a problem with spending time having students trained to do assessment and how it could impact group dynamics (whether it would be anonymized)
    • Self-assessment: questions about whether people will be fair
    • Blend of assessed pieces of work
  • Group 3
    • Favored option 3 initially, but thought that you could combine Option 1 and Option 3: group assessment of participation (automatic 65) and additional optional aspect would be to be assessed on a final project
    • Thus, students who just wanted to do participation would get a 65 and those who were interested in doing more could go for a higher grade with a final project
    • Give next year’s students a guide for how participation could be marked
    • If you don’t do the peer assessment you cannot pass
    • Difficult to put a structure forward for next year’s course without telling them what to do
  • Group 4
    • Talked about what participation would entail – would need to be defined clearly
    • For people who fail the participation grade – could get 40 or 35 so that they don’t completely fail the whole course if they fail that aspect
    • That would mean you’d have to do a really good project at the end
    • Question: since the course is so participatory, do we want people to be able to not participate but still pass?
    • Some answers: there are other ways to participate besides being in class every week; we should be open to different types of learning
    • Let the students next year decide how to define participation
  • is the course inherently participatory? Some say yes, some say no
  • We could put in: “this is not a course for everybody and saying that you can drop the class halfway through” in the proposal
  • A possible issue with putting something in the proposal defining the course as definitively being one way with the implication that people who do not want to take that kind of course shouldn’t come, because might filter out people who might not think they would like the class even if they would
  • Talked about the group project getting a 65 mark and then other individual work would be assessed as well
  • Maybe we’re jumping ahead to the nitty-gritty of assessment when we’re not ready for that discussion
  • The assessment plan we decide:
    • 2 components: Participation part and piece of work
      • Pass 65 / Fail 0 (meaning, participation is mandatory)
      • Group project component is also mandatory and will be graded
    • Worry about making it mandatory: the peer assessment question returns
    • Are we asking the people next year to do more than we’ve been willing to do?

We also would have loved to have done more but didn’t have that structure in pla

Week 20 minutes (semester 2, week 9) / The future of our university by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0