Course:LFS350/DE
| LFS 350 Distance Education: Land, Food and Community II | |
|---|---|
 | |
| LFS 350 | |
| Section: | TBA |
| Instructor: | DeLisa Lewis |
| Email: | delisa.lewis@ubc.ca |
| Office: | MCML 233 |
| Office Hours: | TBA |
| Class Schedule: | TBA |
| Classroom: | N/A |
| Important Course Pages | |
| Syllabus | |
| Lecture Notes | |
| Assignments | |
| Course Discussion | |
| [[Category:]] | |
Teaching Team
Distance Education (DE) LFS350 Instructor: Delisa Lewis
- Contact anytime via VISTA email
- In-person, telephone, virtual classroom or office hours (MCML 233) are available. Please send an initial request through VISTA email. I will make every effort to respond within 48 hours.
- If you need immediate assistance and the VISTA Blackboard login system is down, please contact me through the UBC faculty mail system with TERM 2 LFS 350 in the subject line of your email: delisa.lewis@ubc.ca
Teaching Assistants: Contact through the VISTA email system for questions on your assignments or marks.
Technical Support, VISTA issues: Faculty of Land and Food Systems Learning Centre is@landfood.ubc.ca Morgan Reid
Land, Food, and Community Core Courses Faculty Team: Andrew Riseman, Alejandro Rojas, Brent Skura, Eduardo Jovel
Overview of Land, Food, and Community Core Course Series
Land, Food, and Community students who have completed the Core Series are systems thinkers, able to work collaboratively in multicultural, interdisciplinary teams to develop solutions for complex, multi-stakeholder issues related to food, health, and the environment. Incorporating academic and community perspectives, they apply their knowledge in an environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable manner to community food security challenges.
The LFS Core Series Courses provide students with the opportunity to acquire and apply the fundamental knowledge, tools, and expertise required for successful participation in food security and sustainability initiatives.
Upon completion of the Core Series Courses, successful students will be able to:
- Anticipate land, food, and community systems challenges and opportunities, and design sustainable strategies to address them.
- Think critically and reflectively about land and food systems issues.
- Collaborate effectively and professionally as members of inter-professional, multicultural, interdisciplinary teams and communities of learners.
- Engage with multi-stakeholder communities at UBC and across British Columbia in an ethical and reciprocal manner to investigate complex food, health and environmental issues.
- Apply food system sustainability knowledge, values, and skills to enhance food security within urban, suburban, and rural communities, using qualitative and quantitative research methods.
- Communicate clearly and respectfully to diverse audiences through individual and collaborative reports and presentations.
- Engage with others to initiate and implement positive, sustainable change within their varied and diverse communities.
Overview of Learning Objectives for the Web-Based LFS 350 Course
This course is web-based, but it does require regular participation with members of your discussion and project groups, as well as direct (off-line) contact in the form of interviews and volunteer service learning. The curriculum was designed to create opportunities for you to develop individual and team-based collaboration research skills. Experiential and team centred project activities provide the means to synthesize fundamental course concepts of: food security, sustainable food systems, community service learning, and food citizenship.
You are responsible for making sure that you have the technical capacity to navigate and access course content via the VISTA learning portal. Make sure you have consistent access to VISTA and UBC library licensed e-journals through updated browsers and VPN when off-campus. Weekly discussions, along with individual and group assignments will help you keep up with and synthesize course material. It is your responsibility to work through all of the required readings and assignments, and to contact the instructor with questions or special requests well in advance of the assignment due dates.
You may contact the instructor or the teaching assistant at any time for guidance through VISTA email. The instructor will make every effort to respond or acknowledge your email within 48 hours of receiving it. If there are any unforeseen circumstances that require modification of the course calendar or assignments, the instructor will notify you through an announcement on the VISTA Course Announcements page. Please make a habit of regularly checking the course announcements page for updates and guidance with assignments from the instructor.
Specific Learning Objectives
Upon completion of DE LFS 350, successful students will be able to:
- Critically analyze land and food systems sustainability and public health issues.
- Complete a participatory food systems project, in a community, with an interdisciplinary, multicultural team.
- Apply evidence-based practices in a community-based food systems project. (In basic terms, this means that you will demonstrate fundamental data management and organizational competence with participatory research methods. Students will show awareness of ethical research protocols, properly cite interviews, and other interactions with community partners and project mentors.)
- Display the characteristics of caring, respectful, critical, and reflective thinkers.
Technical Capacity/System Requirements
As mentioned above, for this web-based course, it is your responsibility to ensure that you have the technical capacity and sufficient, timely access to course materials found online through the UBC e-learning VISTA portal. The official log-in link is: http://www.elearning.ubc.ca/lms/login-to-vista/
From here, we strongly recommend all students to check their browser, operating system, and run the browser tune-up, even if you have had previous experience with VISTA online courses. https://www.vista.ubc.ca/webct/urw/tp0.lc5116011/browserchecker.dowebct?checkType=manual&java=true&cookies=true&popups=true&jvmVersion=1.6.0_37&jvmVendor=Apple%20Inc.&isJvmSupported=true
Students who have not previously enrolled in WEBCT/VISTA courses are encouraged to take the time in the first week of the course to follow the VISTA student tutorials found on the e-learning WEBCT/VISTA home pages.
Many of you will be accessing course materials and conducting research off-campus. To access licensed UBC LIbrary resources, make sure you are aware of the January 2013 updates to this service: http://services.library.ubc.ca/off-campus-access/connect-from-home/
Course Readings and Resource Materials
See the Course Content folders for the Syllabus and Course Calendar and the Course Reading Materials and Resources for complete descriptions, reading assignment due dates, and links to download reading material files. The instructor has made every effort to provide updated materials that will help you meet course Learning Objectives. This will be further updated with your input as the course progresses. As part of the group discussion assignment, students are expected to introduce supplemental resources (from multi-media, peer reviewed journals, or other scholarly sources) as a contribution to the community of learners. These will come from materials introduced in other courses, or as part of the research and dialogue for the student group-community research project.
Required readings are listed in the course calendar by date, and while some of the readings will reiterate themes or modify definitions and frameworks only slightly, close examination of these recurring themes should provide a solid foundation for evaluating core concepts and synthesizing these within the group discussions and written assignments.
Grade Profile
| Assignment | Percentage of Grade |
|---|---|
| Initial survey and self-assessment quizzes | 5 |
| Discussion board/group participation | 15 |
| Individual essay proposal | 5 |
| Assignment #1/Individual essay | 25 |
| Group project proposal/Community Food Assessment Project (group mark) | 5 |
| Assignment #2/Community Food Assessment Project Report (group mark) | 25 |
| Assignment #3/Individual project review | 20 |
Each of the above listed components of your grade profile has a complete description and instructions posted in the Assignments folder on the course content page.
Late Policy
Submit electronic versions of papers via VISTA on the due dates provided in the course calendar. For assignments #1-3, you and/or your group members will be penalized 5% of the total mark each day that the essay or group report is overdue, including weekends.
The initial survey and self-assessment quizzes are open until the due date shown in the course calendar. The self-assessment quizzes are simple exercises, intended to provide some feedback and guidance from the instructor on the required readings. These exercises are also intended to help you keep pace with the reading assignments. Each one has a total marks value of 1% of your final grade, and no late self-assessments will be accepted.
It is your responsibility to contact the instructor through VISTA email to discuss any questions or issues you may be having with scheduled assignments.
Group Work Marking
In DE LFS 350, many of your class activities and assignments will involve working in a group. While group work can be a rewarding learning experience, it can also be a source of resentment and frustration if the workload is not shared equally. To avoid the possibility of someone becoming a 'free-rider' in group work, and to reward those who make significant contributions, we use a multiplier to help determine participation and final report marks in group-based assignments.
Active participation and creative contributions to the group discussion board will also play a role. At the end of the term, each group member will provide a multiplier score for members of their working team, including him/herself. Multiplier scores range from 0 to 1.1, and group members are to provide these according to a given group member's contributions and participation. A group that worked perfectly together will receive unanimous scores of 1.0 for every member, indicating that the work was shared equally within the team. Members who did extra work could receive up to 1.1. Members who did less should receive less than 1.0, in proportion to the amount of work they contributed. The set of multipliers given by each group member will factor into the final determination of each individual's mark for group assignments. The teaching team reserves the right to review and decide upon the final multiplier for each student.
A Note on Plagiarism
Plagiarism is a serious offence that can result in expulsion. Please ensure that you understand what qualifies as plagiarism before you hand in your assignment. Never use another author's ideas or phrasing without indicating a source, and use quotation marks when quoting. (Website for UBC Plagiarism Resource Centre: http://www.library.ubc.ca/home/plagiarism/)
Plagiarism is considered cheating and the consequences are severe.