The Weekly Reports were intended to help students see connections between a module's assignments in order to increase their performance on the Capstone assignments.
I have intentionally set up my course modules to include a variety of types of assignments -- quizzes, videos, discussions, papers, presentations, etc. -- to insure that students have a variety of ways to interact with the course materials and contents. This has been successful, but an unfortunate side effect has been that some students have been treating each assignment as if it were a standalone activity and not part of a coordinated module.
To combat this, I developed Weekly Reports, which allow students to collect their reports (informal writing) and their Capstone activities together in one Weekly Report. The Report does not include any quizzes or their Discussion Posts, but it does include their Learning Reports, their Discussion Reports, their Application Reports, their Capstone Activities, and their Applications/Reflections. I altered the various assignments, many of which are now Pages, with due dates, that include instructions about the material they will need to include in the Weekly Report as well as explicit connections between the various assignments to show how all the work in the module is intended to lead them to and through their Capstone Activity.
My secondary reason for moving to Weekly Reports was to make it easier to use the AI Detector that's available in Canvas. Short assignments won't work, and it's annoying to have to click on it for multiple small assignments.
--- Yes, I understand that the AI Detector isn't infallible, but I find that if I let students know that I use it and will ask for clarification about submissions that trigger a warning that I tend to get a lot less "suspicious" work!
NOTE: I teach my Humanities classes in an 8-week format, so my modules last for one week. In a 16-week course, you'd probably want to find a name other than Weekly Report.
I worked this approach in over a Summer session in just one class, a HUM class that was already pretty tightly developed. I worked closely with those students to see how they were reacting to the instructions as well as to the overall approach. I did have to make some changes to make the approach work and to finetune it, including:
- Revising Module 2, which helps them develop the skills and acquire the knowledge they will need in the course. By focusing on how assignments work together to build the Weekly Report there, I think it made the later modules work better.
- Getting Jake at the CTL to make me a new banner. In my classes, students know that when they see the purple Assignment banner that they will then see what they need to turn in. Jake made me a similar-looking green Banner that says Work on your Weekly Report. Student quickly adapted to the change.
- Turning Assignments into Page with Due Dates. I have due dates for each assignment to encourage students not to wait until the weekly extension deadline to start working, and I didn't want to lose that reminder. But Canvas now lets you attach a due date to a Page so it pops up in students To Do lists on the appropriate date.
- Developing clear instructions for the Weekly Report assignments to let students know what they need to submit and to let them see the rubric for how each part will be graded.
From the beginning, there has been both challenges and successes, but overall I have found the approach to be worthwhile and have built it into most of my ENH and HUM classes. Students who try to take the class entirely on their phone react the worst because they find it challenging to compile the assignments into a single document, but I don't think that's enough of an issue to change the approach. Some students forget a part or put things out of order, so they can be a bit challenging to grade, but it's still much, much easier for me than dealing with all the small assignments throughout the week.
My main goal was to help students see confections between the work they were doing on the various parts of the module and the work they need to do to produce a good Capstone assignment. Obviously, this is not an assessment where I can definitely prove results, but I can point to differences I have seen over the last two years.
- Some students would have probably done equally well under either approach. I do think that the Weekly Reports helped these students see connections from the beginning based on Canvas conversations and their comments in the various course assessments. In other words, I believe some students have avoided a challenge or roadblock.
- The Weekly Report approach encourage students to see the value of the individual assignments. I used to regularly see students avoiding some of the activities; at the end of the semester, many of these students would then complain bitterly over how this had impacted their grade. Now, most students turn in all the parts of the Weekly Report even though they could still receive partial credits if they wanted to avoid parts. I think the large number of points for the Weekly Report makes students take it more seriously.
- After my students came to term with the approach, I noticed that I got A LOT fewer messages telling me that they had no idea what they could talk about in their Capstone. Yes, the information was easily available in the various assignments before, but I think that having to compile the information into one report helped them see the modules as one activity with many parts instead of as a group of unrelated assignments. As a result, I saw more Capstones that used the skills and information they were building as part of their Capstones. And, on a related, note, the students stopped ranking the Learning activities at the beginning of each module as ineffective/somewhat effective. The scores moved up to very effective/extremely effective, which pleased me because I now feel like students believe the course is supporting their learning. Yay!
I changed the organization of most of my HUM and ENH classes so that students were compiling their responses into one Weekly Report at the end of the module. This has made grading easier for me, and it has helped students see a connection between the various activities and has caused them to value the Learning activities more highly.