Date for Entry: (Monday 14th September 2020)
Actual
Date of Online Entry: (Thursday 7th July 2022)
Dear Diary,
I had to take a fourth year to complete two remaining courses. The semester in which I was required to do this course was not permissible because the space of eight hundred students was already taken. I did attend the first plenary of that semester to find out the information from the course lecturer.
I was very scared to do this class at first. It reminded me of the sciences classes in school. There was a lot of coursework to be done including some in groups. There was going to be a tutorial so it felt hard to have to take a second class. I decided that the tutorial should not be on the day of the plenary or the day before. I decided Thursday evenings at 4PM was best suitable.
The COVID-19 lockdown made us continue the online classes for both plenary and tutorial. As in the thesis class, we used Blackboard Collaborate on the UWI's My-E-Learning platform. It was difficult to find the classes so I missed the first plenary. Even finding some of the tutorial classes was trouble.
Link(s):
JOURNAL REFLECTIONS ASSIGNMENT.
* Unknown/Forgotten Date *
This was a last-minute completed
assignment. I spent a few late nights into the morning trying to review class
sessions to do journal entries. They dropped this assignment on us on the very first
plenary after the review of the course outline. There were very strict rules on
missing a deadline and even for plagiarism.
Links(s):
ASSESSMENT.
* Saturday 31st October 2020 *
There was a multiple-choice assessment to
do. I was asked to do it over with some others because we had done the practice
test and the actual one had passed its deadline. Those were some really hard questions.
GROUP PRESENTATION & SUBMISSION.
* Unknown/Forgotten Date *
Late down into the semester, the groups
had to present to their tutorial class. My group had to discuss water security.
I was working with a girl named Aaliyah. We had issues with another girl who
was not communicating with us while we tried to get the presentation ready.
Aaliyah and I had to make the girl do
her part and we both had to endure the ‘interesting’ tutorial instructor yelling
at us in the middle class. Thank God the tutorial was only an hour long. The class had to take
in a tutor to go through this with us. This was not like English tutorials. The
interacting persons presented were much different.
The Turn-It-In submission had to be done
the week before class presentations. The other girl was not communicating again and we had to keep
on calling her for her accountability statements and entries to the PowerPoint.
In the remaining six minutes before the deadline, I had to abandon
Aaliyah and the other girl and submit the PowerPoint without getting their final things. That
submission was very scary because the second it was confirmed submitted on the
My-E-Learning platform; the time was twelve on the dot. The closing was midnight
and no other submission would work.
The presentation was done in class the following
Thursday after some other groups. It took me six emails until I got the
PowerPoint to the instructor’s email. That UWI email could not take a certain
amount of size in a document. TOO faulty! Each time I did the emails I had to
take out some things from the PowerPoint just to reduce the size. Two other groups
were in the same trouble.
I went first in the presentation. I had
my speech prepared on Microsoft open and waited for the discussion to start. Aaliyah
spoke after me and then the other girl spoke but not much. We had a ‘disappointment
conversation’ afterward but the best part was that both of us were able to achieve
eight points out of ten. I felt satisfied with that after the trouble with the
group member and the tutor.
Links(s):
FINAL EXAMINATION.
* Tuesday 8th – Friday 11th December
2020 *
I’ve never seen what a final exam question paper looked like for this course. We were told that the exam was modified because of the COVID-19 setting. On Tuesday 8 December 2020, the examination paper was released on My-E-Learning on a separate page from the course’s page. All I did for that day was printed the entire instructions document and began studying the information. I did not work on it right away until the next day. We were given until Friday for submissions on the My-E-Learning’s Turn-it-in.
Two essay-type questions were given with
serval things to discuss. One was a COVID-19 piece and the other was based on
energy. I was excited to work on the energy essay first because a majority of my completed
studies from the ‘course manual’ included that particular topic.
I did not get plenty of reading done
from the second half of the book’s topics and I did not bother to continue it because
I had already done the reading on the pandemic and Epidemic sections for the COVID-19 essay. So, the
work in the book was done and it was time to go online for further research.
Just like the “Writing for Academic
Purposes” course, I planned the number of words per paragraph like a financial
budget and began working on the introduction for the energy. When the night
came, I planned out the COVID-19 essay while taking a recess for the next day. One essay would be worked on a day. I
did not expect to take so much time on the energy essay but it was fine. The
COVID-19 essay was done in one shot. I had a lot of things that needed to
make up for it.
I did not wait for Friday evening to
submit. I submitted the work on the My-E-Learning platform and then went out
into the gallery. I felt like a prisoner being granted freedom into the world
after sixty years of incarceration. We did not have a candidate’s receipts again
so the cover page was filled out like the receipt and I had the headers designed as
the folder page booklet they give us as writing paper.
Links(s):
- Question Paper.
- Responses.
- Study Notes. ** [For Request by Email.]
- Scrap Work. ** [Document Misplaced.]
Daryl Zion M. Ali
