Considering Contract Grading and the Class Blog

In the Spring Semester I used class blogs to foster class discussion in my online classes (see Feedback Loops). I was fairly happy with that assignment but I’m thinking about kicking the assignment up another level by adding contract grading into the mix.

During the spring semester, students were expected to post to the class blog once a week for 14 weeks and then comment on at least three of their classmate’s blog posts. I did not comment on every blog post (at least not every week) but I did post a weekly prompt to jumpstart the conversation and would then add comments where I felt the inspiration or need to respond. This is essentially how I told students to choose which blog posts to respond to as well.

Read the full “Considering Contract Grading and the Class Blog” post on my Metawriting blog at: http://metawriting.deannamascle.com/considering-contract-grading-and-the-class-blog