ENV FINAL

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Faculty of Arts ENV1101: Global Environmental Challenges

Take-home exam: Fall 2020

Professors Sonia Wesche and Eric Crighton

Deadline for submission via Brightspace: Thursday, December 17 @ 11:59pm

Purpose

This take-home exam in ENV1101 is summative, with the goal of testing your overall academic knowledge and understanding of issues we have discussed related to Global Environmental Challenges.

Task

Your task is to develop a 20-minute presentation with 15-20 PowerPoint slides intended for Grade 12 students. Your presentation is entitled “Global Environmental Challenges: Concepts, Problems and Solutions”. The students can be assumed to have a very basic knowledge of these issues but not the in-depth understanding you now possess. Thus, they will need to be given definitions of any highly technical terms that you might use.

Your objective is to select and discuss some key concepts that help us to understand and address pressing environmental challenges and their solutions. This subject matter is very broad and could include environmental, economic, social, historical and political perspectives, as well as their projected change in the future. Given the limited length of the presentation, you will have to be selective in terms of the topics you cover.

 Identify and explain the key concepts that are important for understanding the environmental challenges and solutions that you are focusing on

 Describe several (i.e. 2-4) important environmental challenges we are facing as a society

o Discuss what they are, why they are important, and potential solutions or ways to address these in a sustainable manner.

The justification for your choice of topics must be explicitly incorporated into the presentation on the second slide (immediately following the title slide). In other words, the second slide must indicate the topics that you will be covering and why you have chosen those topics. This is an important part of the exam and it requires critical thinking as you must decide what should be included and what should be excluded, what is extremely significant and what is less important. In creating your presentation plan, think hard about the scope of your presentation, given the title, and how best to organize it. Do not simply copy the list of topics from the course outline. Make sure that either your second slide, or the notes associated with your second slide, explain your reasoning for the topics you decide to present. Please note: “I covered these topics because I think they are the most important” is not a reasoned justification.

Format

Your submission should include the slides themselves and the notes section that appears beneath the slides when you use “normal view” or “notes view” in PowerPoint. The notes section is an

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essential part of the exam: you must use it to show the verbal commentary that would accompany each slide. In this way, you can demonstrate your knowledge of the subject while still having an uncluttered slide. FYI: it takes about one minute to speak 150 words of text. To make sure that you stay within the 20 minutes allocated for your presentation, you should not have more than 3000 words in your “notes”.

Ensure that the sources of all illustrations that you use on your slides (photos, graphs and tables) are properly acknowledged on each slide, using an author-date citation. If your text paraphrases the ideas of others, you should indicate this on the slide through an author-date reference. Your text in the “notes” section will also require references. You must provide a bibliography with a full list of references, properly and consistently cited in APA or Harvard style, in one or more slides at the end of the presentation. Slides that list your bibliography can be in addition to the 20-slide limit.

You must not copy the slides that were presented in the course, but it is acceptable to use your understanding of them and your lecture notes to help develop your summary presentation. Do not cite the ENV1101 lecture slides, nor lecture notes, as sources. You may use and cite the original sources referred to in the lectures.

Do not use animation on your slides; they will disappear when converted to a pdf document.

Grading

The assessment will take into consideration:

 the choice of topics and their justification

 the clarity of the text and the use of illustrations on the slides

 the accompanying text in the notes

 the sources used

The final grade will be based on content (e.g. ideas, structure of arguments, research, etc.) and on presentation (e.g. quality of writing, grammar, spelling, graphical presentation).

Submission format

When your PowerPoint presentation is complete, convert it to a pdf document (this may require using the ‘print to pdf’ function), making sure that you choose the option to include/print both the slides and the accompanying notes.

If you decide to use software other than PowerPoint to create your presentation, it is your responsibility to ensure that it is possible to create a pdf that shows both the slides and the notes.

You must submit your completed presentation as a pdf document. No other format will be accepted.

Submit your take-home exam through Brightspace. You will be able to submit as many times as you wish. We will look at and mark only the last submission. Problems with on-line connections do not represent valid reasons for not submitting before the deadline, so upload a draft as soon as you have one.