Grading: Notebooks

Notebook Grading

Students in Web Business Strategy learn about e-commerce through lectures, readings and the creation of a Web business as a project. To assess learning on e-commerce through lectures and readings, students can maintain a Notebook.

The E-Commerce Notebook is a record of a student's learning about e-commerce in the course. Each week the student is expected to add content to their Notebook showing what they have learned that week. This learning comes primarily from reading about e-commerce.

Students can:

find current examples of concepts covered in the lectures
discover new concepts that could potentially be added to the lectures
contrast viewponts discussed in class with their own viewpoints or with others' viewpoints
add anything else to their Notebooks that demonstate learning and thoughtfulness about the e-commerce material of the course. For example, students could find Web sites that demonstrate the successful (or unsuccessful!) use of concepts from the lectures.

It should be clear from these examples that the best Notebooks integrate course material with the readings.

There are two sources of readings:

Current Readings: Articles posted on the News page of the course Web site
Articles that you have found on your own

The best Notebooks have a balance between the two sources of readings.

Grading of Notebooks

The Notebooks are graded as follows:

Progress 25% (this means making weekly entries by the due date)
Content 75% (this is the quality of the Notebook, graded after the last entry)

Weekly entries in Notebooks are due on the day of class starting with the second week and ending with the 11th week of class. This means there will be 10 total entries in your Notebook.

Notebook progress is graded 0-1 and any late entry is 0.

For the first four weeks of class Notebooks are due at the beginning of class. Beginning with the fifth week of class (the week of the Buyer Behavior I lecture) all Notebooks must be in electronic form, including all of the earlier entries, and are due at noon on the day of class. (An entry is late if the time stamp says 12:01 pm or later.)

Notebook Template

You can use this template for your Notebook. Please feel free to change the color scheme, change the image or add images in the right column that illustrate your learning.

But please:

Use a white background
Use the Times Roman font without specifying the font size (as the template does)

Your Notebook is private and so you will need to come up with a code name for it and then communicate this to the course teaching assistant. No one can read your Notebook as long as you have an index.htm file (even a blank page named that!) in your subdirectory.

Writing Quality

The class follows the suggestion of the business community to develop skills in effective communication by requiring that Notebooks be well written. This includes grammar, spelling and proofreading. Notebooks falling short of this requirement will have lower grades.