Rules of Conduct for SPOT Participants

If you choose to participate in a SPOT experience, then you will be required to follow a few rules of conduct that will help you and others, whom you’ll interact with, progress steadily, and successfully complete your course of study. Some of the rules are meant to help folks be respectful of others and their time, and some are to help everyone progress as quickly as possible without unnecessary delays.

In order to be a participant in SPOT, you agree to:

• Make progress on your work in SPOT by logging on to the SPOT Blackboard (Bb) course, submitting feedback to your peers (when necessary), and/or submitting work to your writing mentor (WM) on a regular basis. You will need to submit your work at least once a week, but likely you'll need to check Bb more often than that.
• Stay in contact (usually by email) with your writing mentor (WM) every week, so that your progress and status is known by the WM.
• Do all the activities in each step in each unit completely, thoroughly, and in the spirit it is asked of you, spending as much time as needed to complete them thoroughly and to the best of your ability. It's more important that you spend time and effort on each activity and not rush through them.
• Approach each activity—and your SPOT work generally—as a process to work through, as work and labor to engage in, not as documents to complete or assignments to finish.
• When your task is to read, follow the processes for reading given to you carefully, even though they likely will mean you'll need more time than you usually spend reading that amount of text (part of the tutorial's goal is to you read better, more productively, more carefully and academically)
• When your task is to draft a document, follow the prompt carefully, but always write from your own interests and questions. It's most important that you find engagement and interest in what you write and read about in SPOT, not that you complete assignments.
• When your task is to provide feedback, follow the directions very carefully and provide the most helpful and detailed feedback you can, even though it may take more time than you initially think it should.  Giving effective feedback is one way to become a better academic reader and writer, and if you can read and provide good feedback to others, you can read and write better in your academic discipline.
• Always be respectful and courteous to peers and your WM, even when you disagree with them. Everyone in SPOT is here to help each other. All comments and feedback to you should be understood as feedback that is given because we care about your success and want to offer you the best ideas we can. As a reader of your peers' writing, you should take the same stance.
• If you wish your work judged for UDWR equivalence, a fee will apply.  This option is only open to students who have completed 60 units (hours) of study at an accredited comprehensive university.

IMPORTANT: If your Bb account is inactive for two (2) consecutive weeks, you will receive an email from your WM, notifying you of this. You will have seven (7) days from the date of the email to reply to your WM and answer their question(s). If you do not reply within the seven (7) days, your account will be cancelled from the SPOT Bb course shell and your SPOT experience will be done.