Creating Assignments to Promote Reflection and Authenticity
Stressing Reflection
One of the key roles of assignments is to encourage students to reflect in-depth on course content or current issues important to the course.
The questions that you pose in an assignment need to has a close tie to the learning objectives that you put forth in the weekly overview page. Meanwhile, it's a good idea to spell out explicitly in the assignment prompts how you want students to demonstrate their reflections. You can ask students to submit a paper that summarizes their reflections on a current issue regarding a number of aspects. Or, you can be creative by requesting students to submit other evidence showing off their reflection, such as a screenshot of their research, or a audio/video presentation of their reflection.
Here's an example where instructor ask the students to submit their reflection on their personal exploration of the ZOO interaction as well as a screenshot of the results of their exploration.
Promoting Authenticity with Turnitin
It goes without saying how important it is for your students to demonstrate academic honesty in all of their course work. Turnitin is a tool that can deter students from plagiarizing and help you quickly identify plagiarism. The tool is fully integrated in WorldClassRoom, so that you do not have to go outside of WorldClassRoom to set it up or view the originality report. Therefore, we encourage you and all of our online instructors to take advantage of this nice tool.
For those of you who are new to Turnitin or want to review how to use Turnitin, please click the links below, or you can go to http://olc.webster.edu/faq and search with the keyword "Turnitin"