PrintRegistered Students
As a registered student, your role is to read chapters, complete activities and quizzes, produce and submit original project reports, respond to surveys, and complete a final exam on schedule. The schedule of assignment due dates is published to the Calendar in Canvas. In addition, you should read and participate in discussions that take place in Canvas discussion forums. Students who contribute to discussions and help other students out are the ones who gain the most from the class experience. The amount of time you invest in your course will vary depending on the number of academic credits you will earn. At Penn State, one academic credit is equivalent to approximately 40 hours of student activity. Thus, a student in a 3-credit, 15-week class should plan to invest about eight hours of study each week. In this program, courses are run in compressed 10-week semesters, so you can expect to invest more time in a given week for each credit earned. Time needed to cover assigned reading material and to complete assigned exercises will also vary depending upon the background and experience you bring to the course. Although there are weekly assignment deadlines, you are typically free to study at places and times that are most convenient to you.
Instructors
Instructors may include a lead instructor and one or more grading assistants. Lead instructors follow all course communications, including course mail and discussion forums in Canvas. Lead instructors reply to most communications within 24 hours. (Some questions are purposefully left for responses by fellow students. Also, instructor responses may be delayed during announced absences.) They correct and revise courseware as needed. They assess student attitudes at the beginning and midway through the course, and share interpretations of those assessments with students. Finally, lead instructors oversee grading/teaching assistants' evaluation of student work, check and upload project scores to the Canvas gradebook, calculate final course grades, and submit grades to the University registrar.
Grading Assistants evaluate student project reports. They prepare detailed critiques and itemized scores in response to every individual report. Grading assistants may also propose revisions to the scoring rubrics which guide evaluation of each project assignment.