Results and Grading of W1P1

The first half-week was done pretty well. Most of the students did a great job in understanding the tasks and way of doing them. These students got highest possible grade for all three tasks.

Yet some students didn't read the tasks carefully and missed some requirements, like sharing blog authorship with me, replying to other blogs in their blog spaces (not in the blog address forum), and not describing the min required components of the discussed systems (input, feedback, processing, output).
The lesson – please read the tasks carefully in check if ALL required parts were done before posting the results.

Another lesson – read all Q&A posts of the week before staring the task and before posting it (since new important notes might come up focusing your attention on something that might be missing as well as responding to some unclear/difficult parts in tasks).

Two students have been sent warnings about potential failing the course sine not all tasks were done. This is the most important lesson – not to work hard and yet fail just because you totally missed the task (reminding you that 3 not completed tasks will automatically lead to failing the course). One person due to circumstances started late but was motivated and energetic enough to complete ALL tasks (although with some point losses but without missing any).

I also noticed attendance problem with some of the students that do not log into Moodle daily (as required). The site is dynamic and new things periodically arrive: my or students' replies/questions, new explanations, reaction to your and other student posts (read my comments to other students' posts since I assume that you saw it and ignored if they are not followed through). Although it is not a class attendance but the system gives me statistics of all visits, views, parts of your work online, and online presence, reading all parts of the course communications and participating in them is your attendance. In addition it is a part of your mandatory experiential learning as having experience in the collaborative online environments that are becoming the major part at work. Also those who do the tasks early score merit points (to be considered at the end) and have a chance of getting a feedback (no last day feedback will be provided) and correct problems.

This half-week was the easiest designed to let you understand how the course works, get orientation in your learning environment, and learn on first mistakes/shortcomings. Use the lessons to avoid point loss since quite a number of students are very effective and it will be hard to climb the grade curve after point losses when many of you will collect max points for all tasks in a form of internal competition.