so this approach was what we used for our program specialization courses and it has really helped students to be able to begin that exploration process that is sometimes missing for most students as they start to hone in on what their dissertation topic is we don't provide any specific readings for them there is a list of literature however that if they want to go to that list of literature to take a look at specific things we don't necessarily say you must read this or you must know this they actually have to investigate that the assignments there are many assignments all of the assignments are scaffolded across three primary projects which they're working toward completing and this is uh very very instrumental in um and helping them in their progress the other thing that's been a big shift for the way that we handle the discussions is that students actually are collaborating with one another they're not just asking the question uh on the initial post a student. checkout: professional novel writing help

 may you know have we still have initial posts however students are actually asked to go and investigate the topics that other people are interested in and find articles that may be relevant uh to that other individual and so there's this real sense of sharing that goes on in cooperation between one another and it has been very fruitful in in what i've observed i do teach the courses and so it's been really an extraordinary experience to see them provide a really actionable feedback that students can use on their projects as well as on some of the um the things that students do contribute uh other articles and books alike to to that topic area and this brings us into assessment of skills so because the projects are set up similar for the three content courses that they take throughout the program we're able to take a look at skills specific skills for each project as it relates to the to the actual design of the assignment we'll get into that design here in a few minutes we can look at both formative and summative assessment we have an example that we'll show you after we kind of show you the model um some good examples of formative assessment are the use of reflection reflection can be very powerful.