The activities, questions, challenges, and assignments associated with WGS 270 and completed for credit will be managed through the University of Alberta’s eClass online learning system. This page offers you some general information about the types of activities that might be assigned for this course, although the precise nature of the assignments varies from year to year, semester to semester, so it is essential that you consult the syllabus on eClass for more precise information about assignments in your course.
CHALLENGES: Each module includes 1-2 challenges in the Summary section. Registered students are asked to choose and undertake two challenges at some point in the semester. You can choose the challenges that are most interesting to you, or that are associated with topics in the course that you are most excited about. You may also choose challenges that fall at a point in the semester when you have time to take on the activities. Though the challenges are all very different from one another, their goal is to develop the vital skill of applying your learning. In the challenges, you’ll be asked to apply a Big Idea from the course to something out in the world. Many of the challenges are activities that require you to look at the world in new and exciting ways—think of the challenge exercise as experiments or field trips! After you’ve completed your challenge activity, you’ll be asked to share what you’ve learned in the Challenge Sharing Forum. For details about the specific parameters of this assignment, and due dates, see eClass.
CHALLENGE SHARING FORUM: There will be a Challenge Sharing Forum on eClass that students should engage with in the form of five posts providing supportive responses to the Challenge assignments of their peers over the course of the semester. This component of the course will give you a sense of what your classmates are thinking and doing in response to the course materials, and it will give you an opportunity to engage with each others’ ideas and work. This is also where you will get feedback on your own Challenge(s)!
RHETORICAL SUMMARY: Sometimes described as a précis, this is a highly structured writing assignment about an article that you’ve read as part of the course material for this class. In order to prepare a rhetorical summary, you will need to closely read the article that you’ve selected for the assignment (from a list of eligible articles) so that you can summarize it succinctly in four sentences. The goal of the assignment is to develop reading and comprehension skills that will prepare you for using source materials in advanced academic writing. Your rhetorical summary will begin with a 4-sentence summary of the article: one sentence explains the major claim of the work, a second sentence describes how an author supports that claim, a third sentence identifies what is at stake in the article, and the last sentence describes the intended audience and tone of the piece of writing. This is followed by your careful reflection about how the arguments in the reading relate to larger themes of the course. Students will submit a rhetorical summary on the article of their choice at a fixed point during the semester. For details about assessment of the rhetorical summaries, examples of “A” assignments, a rubric, and for due dates, see the syllabus on eClass.
EXAMINATION: There will be a 2-question midterm and a 3-question final exam that will test your learning for this course. Since this course has been developed in an online environment, your midterm and final exam will also be online and can be done at home. These will be open book exams and you will have a 24-hour period in which to answer the questions. You can spend as much time as you like answering the questions within that period. The final exam will be cumulative – that is, anything we have seen over the course of the semester may be on the exam. The goal of the examination assignments is to encourage you to to approach the course material in a summative way. The questions on the midterm and final exam will allow you to show your instructor what you’ve learned. For more details about the final exam format and date, consult eClass.