Some of you are ready to make a thing, some of you are ready to make a plan, and some of you are still not quite sure what sort of project you would want to create to address a problem you’ve researched this semester. This final project offers three different options for these three different scenarios
Options
- Option 1: Make the thing! Create content for the after school program, design the mental health workshop, or compose the revised examination for law enforcement officers (of course, these are only three of the many ideas you all have already formulated). It will likely work best to make your thing outside of OpenLab and share a link to it in a post on OpenLab so all of us can see it at the end of the semester. I can help you figure out how this can work.
- Option 2: Create a multi-year plan, including specific people you want to meet, experiences you want to have, courses you want to take, and internships you want to pursue in order to be in a position to make the thing in the future. Your detailed plan should be described in a post on OpenLab.
- Option 3: Create revised versions of all three assignments that could be used as example posts for future students in this course. Please leave your original post as is, but copy all of the content into a new post to revise it further. This will involve expansion of your ideas, more deliberate use of sources, and careful attention to attribution statements for images and other content created by other people. I encourage you to revisit my feedback video for each assignment, but note that the expectations are higher for this revised version of the assignment than they were earlier in the semester. You are not required to make your work public, but you do need to revise carefully to ensure that posts meet all assignment requirements and could provide a helpful example to future students.
Research Notes
For all three of these final project options, you will need to think carefully about the sources you’ve already found and you will almost certainly need to find more sources. Once you’ve made a decision about what you’ll do for the final project, you will start creating research notes (see course schedule for the deadline for these notes). Please use this template to draft your research notes (you can download the file to make changes to it–I’ll demonstrate how to do this in class).
Looking ahead to the “Final Exam”
My goal is for you to have fully completed your final project before the last day of class. You will see a draft deadline and a final revision deadline in the course schedule–also note that I will meet with each of you individually in the week just before the final day of class so you’ll get feedback from me then. Completing the final project before the last day of class will allow each of you to compose a project reflection (and give yourself a grade) during the last day of class. This will also allow us to make a plan to read each others’ projects before the final exam day, which will be devoted to a collaborative discussion about final projects. I will also set aside time on exam day for each of you to compose a statement of practice: a final reflection on the way you will use the things you’ve learned going forward.
