Frequently Asked
Questions
Click on
the question category (TEXTBOOK) or the question itself. If you have additional
questions, just ask and I will add them here.
Do
I really need the textbook???
How
can I find all the essay questions I have to answer for each Unit essay exam?
How
can I find every possible objective question I have to answer for each Unit
objective exam?
What
is the best way to prepare for the exams?
What
is the goal of writing in this course?
What
are the three versions of the quizzes for?
What
should happen when I take the Check Your Knowledge quiz?
How
does the extra credit work with quizzes?
Why
the other versions of the quiz are only 10 minutes?
CONTENT
AND VIDEOS & ASSIGNMENTS
How
do I use Blackboard’s Assignment tool for ANY assignment?
How
do I figure out how to do the video assignment for this course?
What’s
the purpose of looking at the videos and the report I fill out?
Why
can’t I see the Unit Exams?
Why
can’t I see the Unit 1 Essay Exam? I know I did the Practice Essay (History
Changes Essay)?
READING
AND FACTUAL ACCURACY, RELIABLE SOURCES, AND NOT COPYING
Why
this emphasis on factual accuracy?
Why
this emphasis on not copying words?
Why
this emphasis on using the textbook as the reliable source?
What
is the Practice Essay (History Changes Essay)
How
does my instructor grade my written work – my essays?
What
are some tips to help me read and plan a practical essay?
How
can I avoid problems with using quotation marks and “half-copy” plagiarism?
I
click on a link but nothing happens?
I
click on a video but it asks for a password or nothing happens?
What
is the grade A_ec and B_ec and so on?
What
are the possible extra credits for quizzes and the additional benefits beyond
the extra points?
I
am a little confused on how to: submit assignments? post a discussion?
On
a mail message how to I use strike through?
The
answer to this is yes. You can buy older editions of this textbook or rent or
use it at your local library, but you need the textbook. You use it as your source of facts when you write; I use it
when I grade your evidence.
Edward
Ayers, Lewis Gould, David Oshinsky, and Jean Soderlund.
American Passages: A History of the United States. 4th edition. The ISBN
for the current 4th edition in paperback is ISBN: 9780547166469.
If you need tips on buying or
borrowing a cheap book, click here. You can use
many of the older books as long as they have 32 chapters.
Caution: You cannot use
the BRIEF, 4th edition which
has 2 fewer chapters than the 32
chapters in the other 4th editions and all prior editions of this
book.
Content
is in Learning Modules (on the left menu). You have:
·
Getting
Started
·
Unit
1
·
Unit
2
·
Unit
3
·
Final
Exam
Each
Unit is a major time period that reveal shifts in our history. To make
the work manageable, I have divided each Unit into 3 smaller time periods, or
Parts. For example, Unit 1 is divided into Part A, Part B, and Part C, each
with its own major theme and its own quiz.
There is one website or webpage for each Unit. It includes at the top all possible essay questions.
In
the webpage for each Unit, you find printable versions of the "check your
knowledge" quizzes. This provides you a fast place to record stuff--like
the answers or what you missed or where you read so you got it straight.
The
"check your knowledge" quizzes at Quizzes & Exams
·
Reveal EVERY fact you have to know for
the objective exam.
·
Tell you what you don't know and do
know. If you miss something, go read that content in our textbook AND no other
source.
For objective exams, use the Check Your Knowledge quizzes to test your current
knowledge. Read what you do not know. Memorization does not work. There are
also practice versions of the same quizzes if you find that helps you.
For essay exams, use the link at the top of each Unit webpage (at the top
of the unit). It lists all the possible questions so you know what to read. If
you can’t find information, you can email me and I will add to the list some
tips that everyone can see.
For general success, use these resources:
·
In
the course--the Unit webpage, including things to help you self-test in
history.
·
In
the discussion for the Units—ask for the help you need.
·
With
your prof—if you post asking for help and no student responds in a few days,
then I can offer content and make it visible to everyone.
The purpose of
writing is to help you learn the history. With something that people talk about in many ways,
sometimes it helps to state what is not the goal.
With writing in this course, you are not summarizing or paraphrasing the
textbook. You do not, therefore, need to repeat every fact or word in
the textbook. You are also not showing your personal writing style while
stating your feelings or your opinions.
Instead,
in this course, the goal of all writing assignments is for you to do
activities that help you learn the history of our nation. One of the most
powerful ways to learn something is to try to teach it. You will succeed in
these assignments if you do these things:
·
If you
read carefully and work to understand what happened and ask if you need help.
·
If you
figure out what essential facts that you would teach your cousin.
·
If you
figure how you could organize those facts as simply and as accurately as you
can.
·
If you
write in a common sense way as though you are teaching your cousin history that
he or she needs to understand.
There are three versions of each quiz:
1.
Check
Your Knowledge quizzes – Measures your current knowledge so you know what you
need to read (.01 point extra credit per question in the quiz)
Never prepare for these. You are testing your own CURRENT
knowledge so you know your strengths and weaknesses.
Requires the
password onetimeonly
2.
PRACTICE
ONLY quizzes – Lets you practice as much as you want (no
points, but unlimited retakes).
3. The real 10-point quiz
Prepare for these by reading carefully everything you missed
in the check your knowledge version. If needed, ask questions. Do NOT memorize
what you do not understand.
Requires the
password onetimeonly
When you start out, all you see is the Check Your Knowledge
quiz.
1.
You click the Check Your Knowledge
quiz.
Example: you take Quiz A_ec Check Your Knowledge.
2.
Blackboard automatically displays its
Practice quiz and its real one
Example: you see both
- Quiz A - PRACTICE ONLY (no points, but unlimited retakes)
- Quiz A (10 points, onetime only)
1.
Let’s say you take Quiz A_ec – Check Your Knowledge
on 7/20. Let’s pretend you got about ˝ of them right.
2.
You started reading everything you missed and you record those page numbers on
your printable version of Quiz A that you got from the Unit 1 webpage.
3.
You periodically take the PRACTICE ONLY version of Quiz A to check on how well
your brain is holding this new information.
4.
On 7/22 (the date in the Course Schedule) you think you are ready. You take
Quiz A—the one you can only take 1 time. You make 9 (Yes!).
5.
On 7/23, I go stick 2 points in the A_ec block at My
Grades.
In
other words, I reward you guys for doing things that help you succeed (what a
sneaky teacher I am).
For
the check your knowledge quizzes, you WANT to do quickly without looking up
anything. You want to know what your brain thinks is true before you
read. If I give a longer time, students will start looking up stuff or
pondering the answer to try to figure it out.
I
have some students doing this:
1.
There are links to all the questions in each quiz in the Unit 1 webpage at the
top of the Learning Module. You can print those out if you don’t want to read
online.
2.
Take a sheet of notebook paper and write a number for each question.
3.
Make a quick decision about what you think is the right answer and write
the letter for your answer by the number.
4.
Go type those decisions into the Check Your Knowledge Quiz.
5.
Hit submit and see the results. Then record the answer
and what you missed and then start reading what you did not know.
As
for the regular quizzes, there are only 10 questions at 1 minute a question.
When I first began working here, the departmental policy was 1 minute per
question. That has been more time than people needed for the objective exams
from what I have seen for years.
On
the menu on the left, there is a link to On Demand Tutorials. Blackboard
provides videos that show you how you must use their tool.
First notice these things at top of
the Videos & Assignments (on the left menu)
·
How
to Do the Unit Videos –This is the same thing as the file you download from the
assignment tool, complete, and then upload..
Lets you see the instructions in the file you
complete for the assignment.
Shows an example of what you record for Step 2.
·
Searchable
List of Dallas Telelearning Videos for US History
1302
Click on the link to decide which videos you want to use. Instructions and tips
for how to find the videos you want are at the top of the webpage.
·
How
to Click to See a Video
Tells you how to click on these videos so you can
display them.
Below that you see the file you
download and complete. You also see all of the videos for this time period.
The purpose of this
assignment is to help you see change
over time period covered by the Unit. The purpose is
·
not to summarize each video
·
not to write a lot of words
To quote the syllabus:
You
choose three videos, one from each Part of the Unit, to see how history changes on an issue that matters to you. Examples:
what happened to African Americans, big business, factory workers, farmers,
immigrants, ranchers, technology, women, and so on. |
Before
you write your answers, you need to choose your probable videos. You do that by
thinking about what you want to see (such as what happened to workers) and then
using the Searchable List.
The
Searchable List shows you all of the videos that the Dallas Telelearning
group created (and the Virtual College of Texas lets us use). It also tells you
how to search and bring up a Find box if you do not already know.
Tip:
depending on the browser, the Find box may be at the top, bottom, or perhaps
other places.
Once
you find a video that you want to look at, be sure to copy and paste somewhere:
·
The folder name – The bold title above a list
(The videos are grouped by folders with those names.)
·
The video name – The name
in the left column of the list
You must choose:
·
1 video from about the 1st
of the time period
·
1 video from about in the middle
·
1 video from the end of the time period
Go
look at the 3 videos. You may find one of them is not what you need; then
choose another.
I'm not going to zap people for
matching the chapter numbers for each Part--because the parts frequently cover
more than one chapter. I just want you to SEE real people at about the
beginning, middle, and end of the time period covered by the Unit. I let you
chose the issue.
Why would I do this? Students
frequently think that their own lives reveal the past.
This Blackboard does not display anything unless students can
take it right now. The Unit 1 exam (both essays and objective) are sitting
there, but you can't see them until the hour you can take them.
To help you know what exams will be at Quizzes & Exams, you
can see a block of information right above each Unit (and other things). The
block of information tells all possible quizzes and when the exam becomes
available.
The course includes a Practice Essay so that students find
out the typical requirements for a factual essay without getting their grade
average (or their futures) messed up:
1.
You prepare and do the Practice Essay.
2.
Your instructor gives you feedback on
that essay and tells you the essay grade for the Practice Essay AND for any
future essays if you do the work in same way.
3.
You follow the instructions in that
feedback--an
4.
What happens next depends on what you
did:
·
If you found the problems the
instructor pointed out, she replies back saying she will enter the points for
the essay itself AND the extra credit.
The points for the extra credit cause Blackboard to display the Unit 1 essays
to you.
·
If you did not, she may do several
possible things such as:
- Read her response and then reply back
- Have a phone or face-to-face meeting
If history is not factually accurate, it is useless—and
dangerous.
Being factually accurate is a good life skill (not just for
history). In real life, no one will pay you for copying words passively. No
boss will reward you for being wrong about how something works.
Two reasons:
1.
When a student plagiarizes, he or she
has handed the professor the evidence to use in any way the professor wants. If
you do not use the required quotation marks (“”) around an author’s words, you
are saying you wrote those words.
I want for you to know what you are doing—not to hurt you but to keep you from
being hurt.
FYI: If you want to quote a lot, I am OK with that. If you use the “”
accurately and if the quotations you chose reveal that you understand well, I
am fine.
2.
Students who plagiarize never
understand the history. They are only faking out themselves.
Writing simply in your own words is a good life skill (not
just for history). In real life, no one will pay you for copying words
passively.
Reliable sources matter for good thinking, and this history
textbook is honorable and reliable.
I started using the textbook for grading because I do not
want to grade on politics. Your politics are your business.
I kept grading using the textbook because I discovered that I
can tell what you do not understandings—and misunderstandings--about how
history works and about credit courses work with one tiny assignment—the
Practice Essay (History Changes Essay). I had a chance to help students with
one tiny assignment.
Here’s the Section from the Syllabus
Practice Essay (History Changes
Essay) The Practice Essay introduces you
to essential content for your understanding of United States History. With this
essay, I provide a table to help you see how events changed and I list the
specific pages for you to read for each possible question. I provide an
overview and you are encouraged to ask questions about the content in class.
I provide a link in the top section of the Unit 1 webpage that lists all
possible questions and how to find what to read for each one. The version of
the test you receive determines which question you must answer. |
Here’s the Information Right above
the Practice Essay at Quizzes & Exams
The practice essay opens July 16
at 12:00 am and closes July 20 at 11:59 pm. You have 25 minutes to answer the
question displayed by Blackboard. This is a practice essay that is required
to see any of the Unit essays, but it also lets you earn full points as extra
credit. Maximum word length is 175 words. It’s
practice—and it cannot hurt your grade. For more about the extra credit,
see your syllabus. For the possible essay questions that Blackboard may
display and for the required readings for each of those questions, see the
1st link in the Unit 1 learning module. You also can ask questions about this
work in the Unit 1 Ask and Answer discussion topic. Requires a password because you can take it ONLY one time.
The password is: onetimeonly |
Because
the goal of writing is to help you learn our nation’s history and the priority
is for you to be accurate, I grade your writing by comparing what you wrote
side by side with the facts in the textbook. With essays submitted, I use a
method that lets me quickly identify all of the submissions where the students
wrote on the same question.
1. I download those submissions, print them, and place
them side by side:
·
On the
left, the textbook opened to the probable section or sections students should
have used. ·
On the
right, the submissions of students’ papers on that question. |
2. I use the Evidence Checklist and its 2-letter
abbreviations for feedback (shown below) and grade each student’s submissions one
by one.
3. If there are multiple possible questions, I then
repeat the steps above with the next question.
With the
two essays for the Unit exams, I grade one of the questions using the method above.
Unless I find problems such as factual errors in that essay, I grade the other
one without the textbook side by side with your paper—a quicker method.
You
can see an example and PowerPoint movie of practical tips on how to read.
It also offers a PowerPoint movie on why taking notes does NOT work for
learning stuff quickly and well.
The link is http://www.cjbibus.com/1301_1302_Method_to_Read_Understand_Write_Fast.htm
You can see tips on that and all of the other problems
identified by the Evidence Checklist by clicking on this link: http://www.cjbibus.com/1301_1302_Preventions_WhatToDo.htm
Some
links open a webpage in a new window, so first be sure that all of your pop up
blockers are off. Sometimes one may be working in the background, so you may
want to try holding down the ctrl key when clicking on the lesson link.
Sometimes
there is a lag time between clicking on the link and the page loading
(depending on your connection speed).
In
spring this year, the management group for the videos (Dallas TeleLearning) sent out an email saying they had changed the
interface. When I tried it this morning, I initially had a prompt that required
a password--which I cannot give you. I began trying other browsers and, in
general, this method has worked:
1.
Place your cursor over the video link
2.
Click the right mouse button
3.
On the menu displayed, click Open in New Window so the video is in a separate
window.
4.
Follow the prompts from there. (Example: click the > arrow to start it.)
This
tip may not work on an older machine or Internet browser. (If you have
problems, then please tell me so I can try to research an answer.)
You
can access your grades by clicking on the "My Grades" link on the
left hand menu.
A_ec is the place I stick
the 2 points extra credit if you make 9 or 10 on Quiz A (the regular one for 10
points) on the date in the Course Schedule.
Last term this was more quessable because students
could see right next to each other like this:
Quiz
A |
FYI:
I may add the grade "name" to that grades chart at the end of the
syllabus.
Here is what the syllabus says about
extra points for quizzes.
By taking the Check Your Knowledge
quiz in Blackboard, you earn a few points. (At .01 per question and
with a maximum of 40 questions that is less than .4 for each quiz.) |
The additional benefits from how
you are working are that you also see:
|
By taking the Check Your Knowledge
quiz by the date in the Course Schedule and by making 9 points or
higher on the quiz, you earn 2 extra credit points. |
The additional benefits are that
you also:
|
By completing the
instructions for the 10-point Practice Essay, you can earn 10 points extra
credit. |
The additional
benefits are that:
|
By participating in the Ask and Answer topics in the
Discussion Board, for each Unit, you earn up to 6 points for each Unit. |
The additional benefits are that you also:
|
On
the menu on the left, there is a link to On Demand Tutorials. This link
provides help on most of the common issues for students.
1.
Click reply on the message (and do plan what you want to do before you do
that).
2.
Look at the edit box--on the left it shows 3 small buttons T T T (for bold, italic, and underline).
3.
Look at the edit box on the same line but far right. You see a small
button showing 2 downward pointing Vs or arrows or
whatever you want to call them. It is a very common symbol for MORE
stuff available by clicking here
4.
Click on that the small button for MORE.
5. Notice
on the left it NOW shows 4 small buttons T T T T (for bold, italic,
underline, and strike through). It also shows a LOT of other types
of buttons.
With
thanks to WCJC’s Director of Distance Education, Professor Michele
Betancourt, for her permission to use her Getting Started documents
(including her exact words) in the Getting Started sections of our WCJC
courses. |
Copyright C. J.
Bibus, Ed.D. 2003-2013 |
WCJC Department: |
History – Dr. Bibus |
Contact Information: |
281.239.1577 or bibusc@wcjc.edu
|
Last Updated: |
2013 |
WCJC Home: |