Overview of English 102
This is a sample of my work as a Composition professor at the college level. Specifically, it is an overview of English 102 C2 at Wilbur Wright College, one of the seven City Colleges of Chicago, from the Fall 2023 semester.
Here are some links to move around this overview:
1: Brightspace Front Page
The following screenshots are taken from Brightspace, the learning management system (LMS) used by City Colleges of Chicago in 2023. How much or how little to use Brightspace was largely left up to the professor, but I adopted LMSs early in my teaching career. This had many advantages for the people I now come to understand were my “users”—my students. Namely, there was no more paper or printers involved, everything could be accessed or submitted by computer or phone away from class times, and missing class for any reason was not as detrimental as before. I made this change before the Covid-19 crisis, but it fit in perfectly when students regularly had to miss class because of illness and quarantine periods.
Using an LMS was not just beneficial for my students, as I will hopefully show below. Except for the human interaction of my lectures and the resulting class participation, everything in my classes was “on” Brightspace. This includes the syllabus, the schedule, and all handouts and readings. Also, all assignments and activities were posted, submitted, graded, and commented upon using the software. Having everything online allowed me to be better organized, made grading easier, and overall, made me a better teacher.
For a detailed presentation of how I used Brightspace with a particular assignment, check out my presentation on the Annotated Bibliography assignment!
Everything you see below was created and in place before the beginning of the semester. With very few exceptions, I did this for all of my classes. Obviously, disruptions can happen because of bad weather or illness, and there are times when plans need to be altered on the fly. But overall, I found that both user experience and my own productivity were aided by doing the work of mapping out and creating an entire class beforehand.
The following screenshot is the “student view,” or what students saw, of the front page of the English 102 C2 Brightspace page.
2: Syllabus
When receiving my training for teaching at the college level, I was taught to see the syllabus as a contract, a business document that students agree to by taking the course. This may sound very one-sided, but it carries a lot of responsibility with it. In preparing the syllabus, professors need to clearly define the parameters of what is expected and how assessment will be carried out—both for the students and themselves.
As such, writing a successful syllabus, one that is clear enough to understand yet detailed enough to envision every eventuality, is a bit of an art form. And it should be mentioned that each syllabus needs to satisfy the third group involved in any college class. Joining the teacher and students is the department, an entity that receives each syllabus and ensures that the contents meet the specifications and responsibilities of the school district.
3: Schedule
Here is the complete 17 week schedule of the Fall 2023 semester for English 102 C2. (Semesters are usually 16 weeks, but Fall 2023 was an aberration.) This is a schedule of required readings and approximate dates for assignments.
Obviously, since the schedule was made available at the beginning of class, it needed to be planned and created beforehand. This takes experience in knowing how long subject areas should be taught and how long students will need to fully absorb and complete assignments. Experience in any field will also teach the unknown can change any meticulous timetable, and flexibility is required should the need arise. Still, I felt my students always benefited from knowing there was a plan in place of what was required from them and that they could access that plan at any time.
4: Content
Let us go back to the front page. Content, along with Assessments, was really the backbone of the class. Clicking on Content brought up a Table of Contents, and the action buttons on the left brought up the contents on the right.
To be clear, some of the structures mentioned above were already present before I worked on Brightspace. But everything in Content, including the structure and how documents were organized, presented, and linked to, was my own work.
In Content, we find subfolders for Syllabus and Schedule, Course Resources, Assignment Sheets, and every week of the semester. The latter were clearly labeled with their dates and contained the readings and assignments that students were responsible for that week.
5: Course Resources
Course Resources was the place to post everything that was to be read or referenced in class. For a Composition class, that covers quite a lot! I always strove to make all of the documents well organized and easy to find.
This class focused on Creative Nonfiction for the first module of the class, or roughly the first five weeks of the schedule. Students learned about the genre before writing their own Creative Nonfiction essay. The following screenshot shows the readings that I created and posted to present the Creative Nonfiction genre.
6: Assessments
Assessments, or the assignments and activities that were graded in the class, were another vital aspect of the Brightspace page. It was another one of the drop down menus on the front page, as we can see below.
In that menu, students accessed the links to submit Word documents or PDFs in Assignments. They could also see how each assignment was to be graded in Rubrics and what their assessments were in Grades. This particular class did not have any Quizzes, but there were two discussion forum assignments, assessed in Discussions.
For each assignment, I strove to create an assignment sheet that was clear and contained appropriate detail. It needed to highlight what was to be expected from the assignment, when it was due, and how much it was worth. (An example of an assignment sheet can be found below.)
My assignment sheets were collected in the Content folder Assignment Sheets, as shown below.
7: Assignments
As you may notice, I collected all of the sheets in one place, but they were made available to students at different times. This was done to prevent student confusion or anxiety about upcoming assignments. The above is the student view of the folder—the teacher view was similar but had access to everything from the beginning.
Going back to the actual assignment links themselves, here is the Assignments folder in Assessments.
Here, students could see what each assignment was, when it became available, when it was due, and how many points it was worth.
8: Creating New Assignment Links
Here is the first “teacher view” of the Brightspace page: the form for creating a new assignment.
On the left side, I built what students would see on their ends of the LMS. Names, dates, and points needed to be consistent what was imagined and advertised in the syllabus, and links to the detailed assignment sheet needed to be created.
On the right side, we can find drop down menus for options on how the assignment was to be presented and graded. Availability Dates & Conditions, pictured below, set dates and conditions for the assignment.
Turnitin is an app that can detect and highlight plagiarism and A.I. usage in student work. There are many options (and other services) with Turnitin, but I used it to check the honesty and veracity of student work.
Viewing the class from a little further back, here is an overview of what was often the most important part of the class for students: their grades. In setting up the grades for the class, I first had to decide what was going to be assigned and how much weight each assignment had. This work is demonstrated in the Grades Breakdown section of the syllabus.
Another option in creating a new assignment was Evaluation & Feedback. Here, professors could create and attach rubrics, or tables of how an assignment is to be created. This also led to Turnitin Integration, pictured below.
9: Grades Breakdown
Viewing the class from a little further back, here is an overview of what was often the most important part of the class for students: their grades. In setting up the grades for the class, I first had to decided what was going to be assigned and how much weight each assignment had. This work is demonstrated in the Grades Breakdown section of the syllabus.
Because grades are important to both students and the department, great care needed to be taken with the Grades section. Like the rest of the syllabus, the explanation of my assignments and grades strove to be clear, logical, detailed without being overwhelming, and above all else, satisfying the requirements of what the English, Language, and Reading Department expected from English 102.
To end this presentation, here is a peek behind the scenes of how I set up my grades using the learning management system. Using the planning demonstrated in the Grades Breakdown in the syllabus, I used Manage Grades to populate the assignments in each student’s online grade book.
This page allowed for a particular advantage of using the LMS that I have not touched on yet: students could access their overall grades at any time. Brightspace did not label this very clearly—in fact, it is a little misleading—but enabling “Calculated Final Grade” and “Automatically release final grade” allowed teachers and students to see exactly how well a student is doing in the class in real time. This seems like an obvious thing that every college class should have in 2023, and while many do, it is far from universal. There were still some professor scribbling grades on students’ paper and in their own cramped gradebooks!
Brightspace had a Setup Wizard that made some of this easy, especially the broad strokes.
10: Setting up Final Grades
Lastly, here is a view of my online gradebook for the entire English 102 class. Obviously, names and other identifying elements are redacted.
This shows the value of careful planning and setting up grades beforehand: being able to see how every student is doing at a glance.
I see this screenshot as the culmination of the work done in the beginning to plan and set up the class. If we can think of a college class as a project, a completed gradebook at the end of the semester could be as satisfying as looking at the finished product in any other realm.
Thanks for taking this trip through my overview of English 102!