Texts at end of course description vs.seperate page?

[swimmermom3]

What was your rationale for the location you ultimately chose for listing the course materials you used during high school?

 

Because I don't label any of my own classes as "honors" classes, although many of them would qualify as such, I had figured that listing the texts and additional resources with the actual course description would do some of the talking for me. For example, many of our texts from 10th grade on are college-level.

 

However, in a previous life I used to layout ads and when I add our resources to the course descriptions, the descriptions begin to look rather intimidating with their big chunks of text.

 

If you list resources separately, do you sort them by subject or just throw it all together alphabetically.

 

Yes, I am well aware that obsessing over small details that in the long-run don't really matter distracts me from bigger issues like that educational philosophy dealie. :tongue_smilie:

[cjzimmer1]

I looked at various samples, found one that was visually appealing to me and copied it.  I ended up creating a 3 column spreadsheet with index page.  Column 1 is simply course title, column 2 is resources used, including teacher used, provider website, any book materials used etc, column 3 was the actual description.  This way was easier for me because I could work through my courses one at a time, record all relevant information and move on.  Also my DS doesn't do a lot of fun reading (his idea of fun is reading math textbooks) so I really didn't have much to add that wasn't already part of a course.  If my child did extensive reading outside of classes than it would probably make more sense to lists all books together.

[snowbeltmom]

I had a sentence at the end of every course description that listed the textbook/materials used. I also had a reading list summary sheet and included a section that summarized the textbooks used grouped by subject.

[Kareni]

I did not include textbook or other book titles in the course descriptions I wrote.  Instead I created separate reading and textbook lists.  The latter was fairly short since my daughter used relatively few textbooks throughout her high school years.  This made for more succinct course descriptions and a more well balanced reading list.  My daughter's out of class reading tended toward fantasy, some fun Latin books, and a smattering of non-fiction, so the inclusion of books and essays read for her various classes made for a more interesting compilation.

 

Regards,

Kareni

[bugs]

My course descriptions were separate from my resource list.  My resources were arranged by courses.

 

 

[swimmermom3]

I did not include textbook or other book titles in the course descriptions I wrote.  Instead I created separate reading and textbook lists.  The latter was fairly short since my daughter used relatively few textbooks throughout her high school years.  This made for more succinct course descriptions and a more well balanced reading list.  My daughter's out of class reading tended toward fantasy, some fun Latin books, and a smattering of non-fiction, so the inclusion of books and essays read for her various classes made for a more interesting compilation.

 

Regards,

Kareni

 

 

My course descriptions were separate from my resource list.  My resources were arranged by courses.

 

 

So if I understand the process correctly, there is space to upload "four transcripts."

 

This is what I am going to have:

 

1. my transcript

2.course descriptions

 

Then I may have a separate document for resources, a transcript from the high school, and a transcript from PA Homeschoolers as the NCAA now recognizes their classes and I am assuming an "official" transcript will be required.

 

That's five things.

[snowbeltmom]

My son had a number of classes from PAHS, but none of the colleges asked for a transcript from them.

Fwiw, based on the past actions of the NCAA, next year when I get to go through this lovely process again, I am listing myself as the teacher of record on every single class, even if the class is taken with a well-known online provider. Just because a provider is approved today, does not mean that the provider will be approved at the end of the year.

[Sebastian (a lady)]

What is in your resource list that it needs to be a separate document.  Even if you separate it out from the paragraph descriptions of the courses, couldn't it be at the end of that document when you do uploads?

 

Does the transcript from the high school have to be separate?  It could be scanned along with your transcript and uploaded as one multi-page document.  Or you could scan the high school and PAHS transcripts together and upload as one document (ie, the outside transcripts pdf).

[Sebastian (a lady)]

FWIW, I have a copy of my high school transcript.  There is one nice one with the courses listed, grades, ie.  There is another worksheet document where the staff of my second high school physically CUT APART a copy of the transcript from my first high school and PASTED the course info into the document for the school I transferred into.

 

Don't let the perfect be enemy of the good.  

Get some exercise.

Eat chocolate.

[regentrude]

I included the major texts for each course in the course description and did not have a separate list. In my opinion, the textbook information is an integral part of the course description. I am also listing the TC lecture courses we used in the course description.

 

[bugs]

So if I understand the process correctly, there is space to upload "four transcripts."

 

This is what I am going to have:

 

1. my transcript

2.course descriptions

 

Then I may have a separate document for resources, a transcript from the high school, and a transcript from PA Homeschoolers as the NCAA now recognizes their classes and I am assuming an "official" transcript will be required.

 

That's five things.

 

I didn't need anything from NCAA, so I can't help you there.  I did not "upload" the transcript from the college my daughter took her DE classes, so I don't believe you need to have the high school's transcript uploaded as one of your four. The cc transcripts were sent separately.

 

I used HST+ for my information and the format just looked better having a course description on a separate report from the resources than having the two combined. 

 

I included a description of the college classes by either using their on-line catalog, or the instructor's syllabus.  I began my description as follows:

"Five credit college class administered and graded by XYZ Community College." Then pasted the description.

[angela in ohio]

I included the major texts for each course in the course description and did not have a separate list. In my opinion, the textbook information is an integral part of the course description. I am also listing the TC lecture courses we used in the course description.

 

This is what I do. If I was reading the course descriptions, I would want the materials listed right there. I hate flipping back and forth between two documents. :)

 

For older dd, I also included a list of books read when she applied to schools which would evaluate in more depth. This did not include any textbooks, just fiction and non-fiction works from courses and outside reading combined. I uploaded it as the final pages of her course descriptions.

 

I used some online tool to reduce the file size of pdfs so we could upload them. I need to ask older what it was, because it's time to upload middle dd's next week. :(

[Nan in Mass]

I also did layouts for ads at one point, so I know what you mean and I think this is worth some thought. I found that for most of classes that used a textbook as the basis for the class, I was able to be very brief in my description, so I included the textbook name. I set it off by itself so if you glanced at the page, you could easily see the course name and textbook name without wading through the text description. In courses which required more description, I already had a large chunk of text. if a textbook was involved, I mentioned it. I knew that it didn,t show well, but also knew it wasn,t as important. In courses where many books were involved, I said, "... such as blank, blank, and blank. See reading list." It was rather clumsy, but especially for the more unusual courses, I wanted to be sure that the reader knew there were books involved in all courses and I wanted to list them out because the book list gave a very good at-a-glance picture of my sons' education. The textbooks didn,t add much to the length of the list. I thought that readers with more time would probably actually read the course descriptions, but readers at larger schools would just flip through and run their eye down the list. I hoped they would be able to see the extent of the reading for literature and science from the list and maybe notice a few things like PLato,s Republic, and be able to easily to pick out the name of the physics textbook from the course descriptions. Not very helpful, probably, but I wanted to tell you that I think your concern is valid.

 

Nan

 

ETA The reading list was organized by subject. I think if I had had a limited number of spots for things, I would have stuck the course descriptions and reading list into one document, with a large label at the top indicating that both were there so people would know to flip through if they didn,t want the first one.

[TeaTotaler]

I included the major texts for each course in the course description and did not have a separate list. In my opinion, the textbook information is an integral part of the course description. I am also listing the TC lecture courses we used in the course description.

Agree.  This is what I did.

[TeaTotaler]

 

I used some online tool to reduce the file size of pdfs so we could upload them. I need to ask older what it was, because it's time to upload middle dd's next week. :(

 

Please post the online tool used.  I may be needing this too.

Thanks.

[cjzimmer1]

Please post the online tool used.  I may be needing this too.

Thanks.

 

My PDF file is only 148KB despite being longer in pages than some of the people mentioned here.  So I went back and looked at my settings.  When I chose Export to PDF from my software (currently using Libre Office which is one of those free products), there is a JPEG compression option and mine is set to 90% quality. There is also a reduce image resolution that is set to 300DPI.  I suspect most software has some of these built in that you could also play with to control the final space size.

 

[katilac]

I included the major texts for each course in the course description and did not have a separate list. In my opinion, the textbook information is an integral part of the course description. I am also listing the TC lecture courses we used in the course description.

 

Bolding by me, this is what we did, including TC lectures, and then the description was quite short. 

 

This is what I do. If I was reading the course descriptions, I would want the materials listed right there. I hate flipping back and forth between two documents. :)

 

For older dd, I also included a list of books read when she applied to schools which would evaluate in more depth.  

 

Agreed that it's more convenient than flipping back and forth. We did not include a separate list of books read for any schools, but included the main works for each year in the description, like so: Readings included Paradise Lost, The Misanthrope, Book C, Book D, world poetry, and others. 

 

My theory is to include enough information to show that there was rigor, while keeping in mind that they can easily ask me for more information - for example, if they did not request a complete reading list in general but decided they want one from my student. 

 

I work on the premise that they get so many applications that they will be tempted to skim longer ones, lol, so I only include 'mission critical' information and make everything as short and visually appealing to read as I can. 

[TeaTotaler]

My PDF file is only 148KB despite being longer in pages than some of the people mentioned here.  So I went back and looked at my settings.  When I chose Export to PDF from my software (currently using Libre Office which is one of those free products), there is a JPEG compression option and mine is set to 90% quality. There is also a reduce image resolution that is set to 300DPI.  I suspect most software has some of these built in that you could also play with to control the final space size.

 

I tried this when converting my course description word document to pdf (currently 11 pages, yikes!)and it didn't give those compression options.  Will see if dh or ds can help.  Right now I'm trying to see if I can keep it under 500 KB.

Thanks.

[regentrude]

I tried this when converting my course description word document to pdf (currently 11 pages, yikes!)and it didn't give those compression options.  Will see if dh or ds can help.  Right now I'm trying to see if I can keep it under 500 KB.

Thanks.

 

what program did you use to write them? I wrote mine in Word, 8 pages,  257k when saved as pdf/a. No extra options or additional compression tools used.

 

[TeaTotaler]

what program did you use to write them? I wrote mine in Word, 8 pages,  257k when saved as pdf/a. No extra options or additional compression tools used.

 

I'm using Microsoft Word 2010.  I had actually saved instructions you had posted back in 2013 about saving as pdf/a because I'm such a non-techie!