COSC A499 Independent Study
Open Source Software
Final Reflection Paper

As the final assessment for this course, you will be required to write a personal reflection essay based on your reflection journaling examining as many of the following questions as are relevant to your experiences:

• What grade do you believe you’ve earned in this course? Why?
• What activities did you perform during this course? What did you find difficult or frustrating? Why? How might you improve those experiences in the future?
• What were your expectations at the beginning of the course? How did your expectations and attitudes change throughout the semester?
• Describe moments of clarity that occurred for you during this course? What made the concept clear for you? How did you gain a better understanding of it?
• For the projects you made contributions to, describe your interactions with the project teams or maintainers. How productive do you feel they were? How welcoming? What might you do to improve your interactions with the project in the future? Do you plan to continue contributing to the projects?
• Did the work toward open source project contributions in this course make your understanding of software development and computer science clearer? Your understanding of open source software and the teams and contributors that work create and maintain it? How?
• What did you learn about yourself during this experience?
• How can you use what you learned through this experience in your future coursework and in your future career? Do you feel better prepared for your career path after this experience? Why?
• What topics will you continue exploring after the course? Why does each interest you? How will you go about exploring each of those concepts?

Please use the journaling you did during the semester to aid in your reflections.

Submission Information

Papers must be submitted in PDF format through the Canvas assignment, which uses Urkund for plaigiarism detection. Unless you have arranged with me ahead of time due to some unforeseen circumstance, essays emailed to me or transmitted by some other mechanism result in you forfeiting your ability to weigh in on your grade for the course, meaning that my decision, based on what I know of your work during the semester, will be final.

How you will be graded

Alongside your reflections and engagement with material during the semester, your grade proposal will be a primary consideration for your final grade in the course respectively. In order to ensure your grade proposal is well-defended with specific personal reflections, you will want to focus on the following:

Content. In order to effectively argue for a passing grade, your paper must address many of the above questions. Reflection essays may explore other topics related to these questions if they are relevant to demonstrating your learning or defending your grade proposal, but ignoring these questions may significantly weaken your argument.

Depth of Personal Reflection. Your paper and journal entries should show depth of reflection. Learning often means struggling not only with new concepts and ideas, but also with your own habits and perceptions. Spend enough time thinking about this and reflecting on these questions that you are able to feel that struggle. Your argument for your grade will be much more convincing if you have put in this work and are able to discuss it.

Correctness. In addition to content, the correctness of your writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, word choice, etc.), and the readability and formatting of your submitted paper (font choice, margins, line length, spacing, etc.), are important factors in making a convincing written defense. Papers that are difficult to read result in fragmented understanding of your argument and disrupt the ideas you are trying to communicate. Please be careful in your writing and be sure to proofread before submitting.