| layout | title | nav_exclude |
|---|---|---|
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WS 297V |
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This course website for WS 297V: Feminist Disability Justice at Pace University, taught by Dr. Vyshali Manivannan, uses Jekyll and is based on the Just the Class template by Kevin Lin.
It was developed in response to having generative AI forced into course learning management systems, where it fabricates lies, steals student writing (and increases false positives in plagiarism detection), and manipulates students and faculty into believing they can outsource any part of their thought process without proportionally atrophying their brains.
This website was also designed to streamline our technological platforms to Discord (for class discussion and low-stakes writing); and this website for course content (with essay drafts to be posted to Classes). I decided to use Discord + an (this) external website after three consecutive semesters of students wanting to decouple from administrative surveillance, since running class exclusively on Classes means I have to comply with administrative protocols around grading, i.e.:
- I have to count the number of hours you spend on Classes every day, how many hours you spend on different videos, slides, texts, and other materials every day
- I have to add up how long you spend on discussion posts and other LMS-based activities
In short, mixed-modality or async courses on Classes force instructors to account for your participation with fixed numbers each day/week and make it difficult for us to defend lenient participation grades. Because I pivoted to this Discord + external website combo — where I can't tally the total hours you spend on class each day and can be more forgiving of an occasional drop in participation and of late work — participation becomes a more informal activity that I can grade holistically and leniently.
More concretely, this choice allows me to keep most final course grades within the B-range, whereas Classes-based participation forces me to assign grades along a bell curve distribution where the class average is usually a C or C+.
Thus, the Discord + external website combo is designed to protect you from how the university wants instructors to grade you, and therefore works in your favor!
This site contains:
- a course syllabus,
- a course calendar,
- announcements,
- course materials, and
- a weekly schedule.
The Just the Class template extends the popular Just the Docs theme, which includes features like:
- automatic navigation structure,
- instant, full-text search and page indexing,
- and a set of UI components and authoring utilities.