Module Overview: START HERE

THE BIG PICTURE: What is the Essay Writing Module about?

The title for this module is "Community Building and Personal Reflections." An issue that many online students experience is a feeling of isolation. Signing into an online class is a very different experience than physically walking into a classroom on campus. The online class can feel very unreal, which can make it easy to ignore class assignments until you are dangerously behind, even though the consequences of ignoring your online class and not participating or turning in assignments are the same as those for not attending or turning in assignments for in-person classes.

To help overcome the feelings of isolation and unreality, this module is designed to help you really get to know your classmates to an extent that typically is not done in online classes. This will also help you when it comes time to work in groups later in the semester.

You will be learning more about your classmates while you gain practice at writing in specific essay forms (descriptive essay form). By having you start the semester by writing about a topic you know well – yourself – you have the opportunity to focus upon writing and the essay form without having to worry about doing research and writing the citations that you have to use when you refer to research in academic writing. (We will learn about research and citations in a module later in the semester.)

This personal reflection will also help your classmates learn more about you. To facilitate this, you will be recording videos of yourself reading your essay draft, and we will be discussing these essay drafts on the discussion boards in order to help you revise and write a better version to turn in for your grade. By seeing and hearing your classmates, in addition to reading their words, the online class should feel more real and less isolated to you.

We will also begin studying some techniques having to do with editing during this module. Be sure to keep track of the due dates for the different parts of the module so that do not miss any of your deadlines. This could be a bit tricky since this is a two-week module. The schedule for the module is below.

Essay Module Schedule:

Aug. 28

Module opens:

Do the activities in Editing Lesson: Proofreading

By Aug. 30

Post in the Discussion: Proofreading

Aug. 31

Do the activities in Writing Assignment: Descriptive Essay

By Sept. 3

Post required replies to classmates in Discussion: Proofreading

By Sept. 4

Post Descriptive Essay draft in Essay Discussion

By Sept. 6

Post required replies to classmates in Discussions: Discuss your classmates' Descriptive Essays

By Sept. 10

Revise Descriptive Essay and submit final version into the correct assignment dropbox