Students reflect on the course's key concepts as they relate to personal and/or professional experiences.  Ideally, journals will demonstrate a student's depth of introspection and application of course concepts and express those ideas in a complete, articulate, and appropriate manner. 

Journal 1A: Weekly Reflection

For this submission, students should reflect on the course's key concepts and their relationship to their personal and/or professional experiences.  Journal entries should demonstrate a depth of introspection and application of course concepts expressed in a complete, clear, articulate, and appropriate manner.  This reflection should:

1. provide an ongoing record of personal responses to course material, 

2. be a well-organized and sequential outline of what you have learned, and 

3. is a culmination of what was learned during the week that might not have been reflected in the other assessments for learning. 

The journal is a comprehensive course analysis and review.  It is strongly recommended that you maintain the documents in sequential order (journal) outside of this location on your own. The journal may later serve as a useful study tool.  Be sure to answer the following three questions:

1. What are 3 important things that you now know that you were not aware of before reading this chapter and other materials presented?
2. How will what you learned this week help you in your major field of study?
3. What is one thing that came to mind that I would like to know more about?

The submission should be a minimum of 750 words in length and is due by day 7 of each week. Journals will be graded in accordance with the Reflective Journal Rubric located in your course.

IMPORTANT TIP:  A course's journal assignments, collectively, embody a comprehensive analysis and review of the course concepts.  Students are strongly urged to copy/paste their journal posts, sequentially, into a separate document, saved on their own device, for future reference and as a  useful study tool.

Spring 2025, the developer of the Moodle journal tool unexpectedly updated it, which temporarily broke the tool. While faculty can once again add journals to individual Moodle courses, importing journals from mastershells remains problematic.

• Traditional Courses:

  • For traditional courses, the journal plug-in will remain active and available to faculty.  Please see the Importing Journals using the Journal Duplication Tool below.

• One Shell Model Courses (OSM):  

• Since all OSM courses employ mastershells, we have found a workaround. Starting with the winter 2026 courses, we are using the Moodle assignment tool for journals. Please note: Despite this adjustment, the purpose and function of journals will remain unchanged:

• The journals are still private (between student and teacher);

• Journals are distinguished from other weekly assignments by naming convention (i.e., “Journal 1A:…” versus “Assignment 1A:…”);

• Students submit their reflections as they did previously.

• “Journals” still appear in the Moodle course’s “Grading Summary” tab as a distinctive category (with “assignments” listed separately); and

• You can grade students’ entries the same way you grade other assignments.

• The only visible difference will be the “assignment” icon appearing next to the journal assignment (instead of the “journal” icon).