Earning the ModPo certificate
If it is your intention to receive a ModPo certificate, please contact us as modpo@writing.upenn.edu. In that email please include a link (or “URL” or web address) to your ModPo profile page.
The easiest way to locate your ModPo profile page is this: find any discussion forum comment you have posted, and click on your own name in the upper left corner of that post; that will take you to a page where you can see every forum post or reply you have ever made in the ModPo site.
Below—taken from our FAQ page—are the requirements for receiving a certificate.
If you had hoped to earn a ModPo certificate but did not complete the requirements, please don’t despair! Our aim is that many people engage with the poems, videos, webcasts, meet-ups, and forum discussions in whatever way they find possible. Whatever engagement is possible for you earns praise from us! And, anyway, you can always try again for the certificate next year.
—Al
Q: Will we get certificates upon completion of this course?
A: Yes, we will present non-credit Statements of Completion to those who complete the course and fulfill all the requirements for such a certification. Such statements are only given out during the annual September-through-November special “live” running of the course—the annual period we call the ModPo Symposium. ModPo will be open all year and we do encourage participants to take the course any time of the year, and indeed to complete assignments, including the essays, any time. But, again, we are only able to award the ModPo Statement of Completion during the 10-week “symposium”-style “synchronous” gathering—the ModPo Symposium—which in 2018 ends on November 19, 2018.
So what are the required assignments? You will receive a Statement of Completion if during the ModPo Symposium you:
- write the four essays;
- write at least four peer reviews during each of the four peer review periods, for a total of at least 16;
- take all the quizzes and receive a score higher than 0.0 on each one of them; and
- participate in our discussions by posting a comment at least once each week to any of the poem-specific forums set up for that week.
Further on this fourth requirement: each week’s forum will include subforums for the poems assigned for that week. Students seeking a Statement of Completion should post at least once per week, to any of these subforums (you’re welcome to post to all of them, of course). ModPo will be open all year but only those who complete the work described above during the September-to-November Symposium will be eligible for the ModPo Statement of Completion. We do not charge a fee for ModPo; our certificate is created and distributed by us at the University of Pennsylvania rather than by our colleagues at Coursera. Once the ten-week Symposium period is completed, we will be in touch about the process and timing of awarding the Statements. If you have questions about this, please post them in the discussion forum.
