MODULE 9 – Synthesis – (July 18-24)

As you design your Synthesis Essay, please use the following standards to guide your work. These represent the particular criteria that your instructors will use to evaluate your portfolio.

• Title – Does your essay have an expressive title?
• Quality of Text (or Other Multimedia) – Do you use text accurately and effectively? If you use images and other media, do you also use them accurately and effectively?
• Discussion of Individual Courses – Does your essay discuss in detail how three courses affected your thinking and practice?
• Synthesis of Master’s Program Experience – Does your essay discuss how the master’s program as a whole affected your thinking and practice?
• Word Length – Is your essay about 2000 words? As with the other written assignments, try to be within 10% of the goal

Common issues

• Jargon and Acronyms – Remember that people outside your program or workplace might not understand all the terms and acronyms you use. It’s always a good idea to “spell out” an acronym (like MAET or MAED) the first time you use it, and you should also consider defining terms that aren’t commonly used.
• Balance of the General and the Specific – Make sure to include some insights from both your individual classes and the program as a whole.
• Add a Link to a PDF – Think about adding a link to a PDF copy on this page so that viewers have the opportunity to read your essay in an alternative format (and this makes for easier printing if someone wanted to print your essay).
• Avoid PDF-only access – An additional link to a PDF is great, but it cannot replace a web-page version of your essay. If you’re going to do one format, put your essay on a webpage. If you want to go that extra step, add an additional option for a PDF (not a replacement for a webpage).

When you post and reply in this course, please pay attention to the following guidelines. These guidelines also form the basis for the rubric used to grade your discussion contribution.

What makes for a good post?

It depends on the specific assignment, but the following generally apply:

• Pay attention to the prompts.
• Use a good portion of the 3 minutes allotted to you.
• Show us what you’re thinking and why you’re thinking it.
• When sharing your own work, point to some places where people who respond to you might be most helpful in giving you feedback.

What makes for a good feedback?

Good feedback is important in all design activities, including the design of portfolios. It is especially important in this class. When giving feedback, keep in mind that good feedback is:

• Thorough – Use a good portion of the 3 minutes allotted to you. Try to cover as many aspects of the assignment that you can—do not focus on only one thing. However, don’t try to cover too much, because each point you make should have some details (see next point).
• Specific – Avoid generalities like “you had a good design,” and instead be more specific, like “your headers are easy to read, clear, and helpful in breaking up text into more manageable pieces.”
• Critical – Point out what needs improving. Even if you’re looking at the best piece of work, you can give the author something to think about working towards or thinking about differently.
• Supportive – Point out what is working well. Even the earliest of drafts is the start of something good that can be highlighted as a success.

Finding ways to meet face-to-face in an online class can be tough, but we’ve found that it’s worth it, especially for your exhibition in Module 11. To make exhibitions go smoothly and to give you some additional opportunities for face-to-face feedback, we require you to check out the Capstone Coffeehouse technology at least once by the end of Module 10. In short, the Capstone Coffeehouse is Zoom – the video conferencing software we use in this course.

You can find some general information on using the Capstone Coffeehouse here. To fulfill this requirement (and get your points), you must specifically do four things:

• Check video: Make sure that your webcam is working and that you (and others) show up on the screen when you join the Coffeehouse. This should happen automatically.
• Check audio: Make sure that you can hear other people in the Coffeehouse and that they can hear you. Zoom, the Coffeehouse technology, should ask you for permission to use your speakers and microphone once you join. In a few cases, though, this takes a little fiddling to get it to work properly.
• Check chat: Make sure that you know how to open the chat window in Zoom (the Coffeehouse technology) and that you can read and write messages properly. If you’re using the Zoom desktop client, the Chat button should appear at the bottom of the Zoom window.
• Check a page: You (and each of your classmates) should take a few minutes to share a page that you’ve recently completed. If possible, make this a Piece of Flair page, but you really have free range on what you’d like to look at. Have some specific questions and concerns in mind: What are you trying to accomplish with this page? What are you still struggling with? This is a great chance to “practice” for the end-of-semester exhibitions and to get some more face-to-face feedback, which capstone students consistently point to as one their most valuable experiences.

For most people, the Tech Check is a quick and easy assignment, but problems do occasionally occur. If you are experiencing frustration with the Tech Check, keep in mind that it’s better to experience this during the Tech Check than during the exhibition! Also, please remember what you had to do to get past the difficult spots, just in case they come up again.

There are two ways to complete the Tech Check: through office half hours or with a classmate.

Office half hours (if you prefer to talk to instructors)

In addition to talking about your portfolio during an office half hours session, you can carry out the Tech Check with the instructor who is running office half hours. Just mention that you’d like to take care of your Tech Check, and she or he will walk you through the steps and make sure to give you the points!

Classmate (if you prefer to talk to your fellow educators)

The great thing about the Coffeehouse technology is that it is available 24/7. If one of the office half hours sessions doesn’t work for you or you would prefer to meet with a classmate instead, you can schedule a time to meet with a classmate in the Coffeehouse and take care of the Tech Check on your own. Walk through the four specific steps listed above, and once you’ve made sure that everything works for all of you, send us an email to let us know that you took care of everything. While this should be a short email, please include enough detail that we know who you worked with and that you walked through all four steps together.

When you contribute feedback at the end of a module, you are usually expected to provide feedback to two of your classmates.

Our Bonuses and Bummers policy describes exceptions to this expectation as follows:

• Bonus – If you’re the first person to submit your work for an assignment, you do not have to provide any feedback to anyone.
• Bonus – If you’re the second person to submit your work for an assignment, you only have to provide feedback to one person (the person who submitted first).
• Bummer – If you’re the last person to submit your work for a task or Piece of Flair, you probably won’t receive any feedback from anyone.

Equally important as giving good feedback is learning how to receive good feedback. We have a few tips for receiving feedback:

1. Take time to process the feedback. Carefully review the feedback you received and take time to go through it. We can sometimes read constructive feedback as critical feedback, but this feedback may be especially helpful to the development of your portfolio. If some of the feedback seems critical, taking time to see the value in it can be helpful.
2. Think through how the feedback applies to your portfolio. While we trust that the feedback you receive will be helpful, there are always opportunities to think through how the feedback applies to your portfolio. For example, specific feedback about how to organize a specific page may not make sense given your audience and goals, but the general idea of the feedback may still let you know that you need to organize it to be easier to navigate. Other feedback may be helpful and aligned with the rubric and assignment descriptions but not line up with your good reasons for designing a page or your portfolio in a specific way. In these cases where your design may not align with feedback you receive, please feel free to reach out to the person providing it—or us—to clarify and expand on the feedback. We are always happy to help with this in any way we can.
3. Make a plan for changes, but recognize that some may take longer than others. If portfolios are to be authentic and ongoing, everyone needs some flexibility in when they will introduce all of the changes that have been suggested. If you simply don’t have time to make a particular change to your portfolio (especially if the change isn’t a critical part of the assignment requirements), try to leave a record of the suggested change and go back to it later. Think of these as not as an “IOU” but as an “IOM,” meaning something “I Owe Myself.” Of course, you are also free to say, “My portfolio was actually perfect before the feedback and there was really nothing I learned from feedback that was worth treating seriously, so I’ve made no changes as a result of the experience.” We think that’s highly unlikely to happen, though.

Office half hours are optional times that instructors are available for you to meet online in our capstone coffeehouse to discuss your work, ask questions, or get additional feedback. They are completely and totally optional, although office half hours is one way you can meet the tech-check requirement.

Our office half hours are held in the capstone coffeehouse (under the “Communicate” menu).

Office half hours are:

• With Matt Koehler
• Tuesday Evenings, 9:00-9:30PM (Michigan Time)
• OR, by appointment (reach out to make an appointment via email)

Exhibition preparation

Office half hours are opportunities to prepare for the end-of-semester exhibition in Module 11. This is particularly true from a technology perspective, since we want to help you iron out any bugs or problems well ahead of time. However, this is also true from a face-to-face perspective; one of the most common things we hear every semester is that people wish they had had more opportunities to meet with classmates and instructors face to face. Although we don’t have any “mid-semester exhibitions,” office half hours are meant to provide this kind of opportunity throughout the semester!

By appointment

If any of these times don’t work for you, and you need help or need to meet the Tech Check requirement by the end of Module 10, contact us to schedule an alternative time for you that works.

Please also keep in mind that you can use the Coffeehouse to meet with your classmates! If you’d like to get some face-to-face feedback from someone in your house, just set up a time to meet together and use the Coffeehouse to do it!

Where are office half hours?

Access office half hours by clicking the ☕ button on the menubar on the top of this page, or by reading our full overview of and instructions for the Coffeehouse.

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The university requires that there be a comprehensive examination—written, oral, or both—for all graduate degrees. In the past, this might have been a one-day sit down examination or a two-week take home examination. The good news is that your portfolio and the “exhibition” of your portfolio collectively meet the university requirement. We think your capstone portfolio is both meaningful and comprehensive, and we want graduates of our program to showcase their accomplishments. Administratively, the synthesis essay plays an especially important role, as it is read carefully and kept on file as evidence of your having met the comprehensive examination. So you should view this essay as presenting a comprehensive look at what you have accomplished and learned in the master’s program as well as being a part of your Web portfolio that is useful to you beyond the master’s program.