The Culture of Chinese Festivals and Traditional Food

Instructor:  Yanqing Liu

 

Virtual Office Hours: By appointment. E-mail, call, or speak with me about scheduling a day and time that are good for us both to meet online.

 

Meeting Location and Time: Online class

             

E-mail: Yanqing.Liu@usm.edu

 

• Basic computing skills - Students are expected to have the following technology skills before taking this course:

• Using basic features of Microsoft Word (changing font styles, alignment, indent, spell check, line spacing, page margins, etc.)

• Sending e-mail messages and replying/forwarding E-mail

• Internet (searching for pages, saving images from WWW, general use)

• Creating PowerPoint presentations

• Managing and saving files to disk; deleting files from disk 

• Using software programs in general

• Creating folders to save files under (e.g., create a Word folder to contain all of the Microsoft Word related assignments to)

 

Number of Hours for Course:  3 hrs

                    

Format of Course:  Online course.

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Course Description/Overview: This Course will introduce the histories of Chinese Festival, the customs in different festivals and the Chinese traditional festival food. You also can learn how to cook Chinese traditional festival food. The Spring Festival, Lantern Festival, Ching Ming, Dragon Boat Festival, Double-Seventh Day, Mid-Autumn Festival and The Double Ninth Day are the seven traditional festivals in China.

 

 

Catalog Description of Course:  Skill development in learning Chinese traditional culture and learning how to cook Chinese traditional cuisine.

 

Course Generally Scheduled:  Spring, Summer, Fall semester

 

Course Goals: The purpose of this course is to understand the concept of food culture, the object, content and methods of research, and the status quo of research; to understand the diversity of the environment and culture, the development stage of food culture and the causes of food change; to understand the different between world diet culture and China Regional diet culture.

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Course Requirements/Grading Scale:

 

Requirement(s)                          Points          Weight                         Specific   

Discussion forums                     100                 25%          Post pictures of dishes to the forums

Blogfolio                                     150                 37%          Reflections of each festival

Interaction                                  50                  13%           Comments in blog posts

Paper reflection                         100                 25%          Course reflection

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Weighted semester average will be rounded to one decimal place, and be used to determine course grade based on the following scale:

 

A = 90 - 100 %
B = 80 - 89.9 %
C = 70 - 79.9 %
D = 60 - 69.9 %
F =   0 - 59.9 %

 

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Blogfolio (150 points)

Students need to create their own blog account in weebly.com in the first week and post their blog URL to the Discussion forum.

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1. After the blog was set up, student will post the first entry, which will be a very brief self-intro and the introduction about his/her blog.

2. From the second posting, you will reflect on the materials you read in the course website. Your reflection should be thoughtful, complete, and with enough details.

3. Students are required to read and comments on their group members’ blog posting. Your comments to your peers’ posts will be accounted for the participation. You should provide valuable comments to your peers’ posts (at least one comment for every post from your group members). Students will link all other peers’ blog URLs under blogroll to make it easy to read each other’s’ reflection and provide comments. You can get your classmate's URLs from discussion board.

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Blogfolio Rubric 

Your blogfolio will include:

Self-introduction and recent photo    ______ (5pts)

A list of your classmates’ blog URLs      ______ (5 pts)

All assignments uploaded or linked correctly ______ (10pts)

Thoughtful and detailed reflection on reading materials ______ (30 pts)

A thoughtful entire course reflection      ______ (10 pts)

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Your blogfolio should:  

 Creative in your design _______ (5 pts)

 Be well organized and informative _______ (5 pts)

 Open all external links (projects) in a new window _______ (5pts)

 Be visually appealing and text is easy to read   _______ (10 pts)

Required comments were posted on time and thoughtful    _______ (40 pts)

 Misspellings/Grammar Errors   ______ (10 points) 

 TOTAL    ______ (150 pts)

 

Participation in Online Discussion Forums (100 points)

Weekly participation in discussion threads is required.  Each week the instructor will post one tutorial of how to cook traditional festival food.  Students are required to post the picture of their cooking in discussion forum, and to comment on their classmates’ postings

 

Rubric:  Points are distributed in the following way: 

Meeting the required number of postings(40 points)

Timely responses (20 points)

Thoroughness and detail of postings (40 points)

 

Paper Reflection (100 points)

At the end of the course, students are required to complete a reflection paper, including what the student learned from this course, how the student comments on this course, where the student likes best among this course, and where the course could be improved. Reflect your experiences in this online class by answering the following guide questions. Your reflection should be five double-space page, 12 New Time Roman with 1 in margins in word file. The assignment is due on August 11th, 2018. Please email the final version to me.

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• What have you learned from this online class? Describe your learning experience.

• What were your weak and strong points? Explain.

• How did you like the interaction between you and your peers, you and instructor? Explain in details. Provide examples if necessary.

• Finally discuss your experiences with blogfolio. What aspects of blogfolio do you like most or lest? Explain in details.

 

For your reflection paper, style, grammar, spelling, and all matters of form will be taken into consideration. The paper should be prepared in a careful and scholarly manner. No more than 5% of the paper may consist of direct quotes or close paraphrases of source materials.

 

Rubric:  Your paper will be graded on the following criteria:

• Originality (25 pts) - Are the ideas in your paper original to you? Do you look at your topic in a unique, creative way? Do you offer a new insight into the topic or is it just a rehash of other people's ideas?

• Organization (10 pts) -  Is your paper well organized with appropriate headings and smooth transition?

• Readability (20 pts) - Is your paper easy to read? Does it make sense? Are major points well-communicated, presented in understanding terms?

• Opinions (20 pts) -  Do you demonstrate understanding of the topic? Do you provide opinions and conclusions about the question you are trying to answer?

• Documentation (10 pts) -  Do you provide evidence to support your opinions and conclusions?

• APA Style (5 pts) -  Does the paper adhere rigidly to the rules of APA Style?

• Professional Quality (5 pts) -  Is the paper professional done with no spelling or grammar errors? Are charts and graphics, if any, of high quality?

• References (5 pts) -  Are references complete and accurate? Do you have references from a variety of sources - not just from the WWW?

 

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