My Sweet Old Etcetera

This isn't so much as what I learned as a critique of this online class. I guess I have learned a lot from the class, but one thing that always bugged me throughout the semester was writing up these discussion posts - I can understand why they're mandatory and why participation is essential to the class, but the problem is even though we're forced to participate, there's no incentive to put any effort into our work. Or at least not for me. All I try to do is meet the minimum word requirement and the minimum amount of posts every week. I don't try to write something insightful or show that I learned something useful from the book, since I know I would get the same amount of points just typing out a rambling stream of consciousness post that only happens to be tangentially related. And I've reached my quota.