I used to hate academic writing with a burning passion. Prior to starting at Langara College, I had a bad experience with a college-level English class online.
Without dwelling on the past too much, I disliked my first take because of the way it was delivered. In the early years of the pandemic, I took a college English course online with what I thought was the most troublesome delivery to date.
That former course relied heavily on regular online discussion posts for assessment and placed very little emphasis on actually practicing academic writing techniques such as finding good sources and making rhetorical moves in writing. To make matters worse, the provider of that course thought it would be a good idea to "gamify" the learning experience by assigning random points to discussion posts.
"You have to post a minimum of three times per week."
"Each post has to be at least 1000 characters for it to count for discussion points."
"You only meet your minimum discussion points when you reach 1800 points."
With these guidelines in place, it took sometimes more than six posts per week to reach the minimum weekly requirement. I gave it an honest effort for about 3 weeks, but after that, I called it quits and dropped out of the course.
If I had more feedback or more compelling responses from my classmates or even my course instructor, I would have kept going along with the exercises. It was disheartening to look forward to meaningful feedback week after week and see a sad little comment in the grading portal with either "Requirements met" or simply "Good work" pasted in without additional thought.
If the instructor who taught that course ever remotely sees this, I hope they realize that active engagement makes a world of difference in all learning environments, especially ones that take place online. It's not enough to rubber-stamp your students and call it a day when teaching your class.