Category Archives: Feedback

Wikipedia for Chemistry – Jeff Byers

What: Authoring and editing Wikipedia entries as an assignment in a senior elective course

Who: Jeff Byers, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Class: CHEM0442, Advanced Organic Chemistry.  This is a special topics course taken mostly by seniors, with some juniors, most of whom are chemistry or biochemistry majors.

Number of students: 9

Reason for using the technology: Most Senior Elective courses in the sciences culminate with some sort of final paper or project.  This project typically involves each student writing a detailed review paper on an interesting and advanced topic of their choice.  This is a worthwhile exercise, as each student learns an astonishing amount of detail on one specific topic.  These papers do not, in any way, reflect the important collaborative nature of science.  Jeff also believes that a senior elective course should also generate content of use to the entire chemistry community, unlike research papers which, after grading, rarely surface again. Continue reading

Moving Away from Paper: Annotating and Grading Digital Documents – Jason Mittell & James Morrison

Jason Mittell (Film & Media Culture) and James Morrison (Political Science) are faculty at Middlebury who are moving towards completely paperless teaching and research.  Both cite similar reasons for preferring electronic versions of papers, articles and even books.  Digital documents are simply easier to organize and access when everything else you do is on your laptop.  Having your students submit electronic versions of their assignments means that you can retain a definitive copy of all your students’ work which is handy when you need to write references, find model essays from past classes to guide your current students or search for evidence of plagiarism.  This case study will focus on receiving and grading electronic versions of student papers.

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