APBI361
2024.25 W2
Course Syllabus v010125
Land Acknowledgement
UBC’s Point Grey Campus is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. The land it is situated on has always been a place of learning for the Musqueam people, who for millennia have passed on their culture, history, and traditions from one generation to the next on this site.
Though this course is offered online, many enrolled students will be engaging in learning about “Indicators of Sustainable Agroecosystems” while based on the UBC Point Grey campus within xwməθkwəy̓əm territories. Learn more about the living culture of xwməθkwəy̓əm with educational resources created by them at this site: https://www.musqueam.bc.ca/our-story/educational-resources/
As a settler farmer and faculty member of Land and Food Systems at UBC, I am grateful to be instructing this course that is focused on learning how to sustain resources for food production and livelihoods from a place that stands within the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Hul’qumi’num Speaking Peoples. Many Indigenous peoples within the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group make their homes, livelihoods, and thrive in these lands and waters, despite the ongoing dispossession of their home territories and livelihood resources through unlawful acts and impacts of colonialism.
Since time immemorial, the six First Nations comprising the Hul’qumi’num People and Territories have created and maintained distinct systems of governance, knowledge-keeping, and stewardship of their homelands where I am now also living and working. I am indebted to and thankful for the Quw’utsun, Halalt, Penelakut, Ts’uubaa-asatx, and Lyackson peoples of the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group.
Course Information
Course Title: Key Indicators of Agroecosystem Sustainability
Course Code Number: APBI361 199
Course Credits Value: 3
There are no prerequisites for this course, however, the course is designed to provide learning opportunities for building remote and hybrid team collaboration skills.
Specifically, this course is designed to increase students’ familiarity with how agroecosystem sustainability is measured and to support better understanding of sustainable land management and decision-making while enrolled in a 3 credit, online undergraduate course.
Students should be prepared for a 300-level course assignment schedule, and plan for weekly online team collaboration (discussions, project work, assignment due dates) in their efforts towards ‘success’ as measured by above average marks value in this course.
Find excellent resources here: https://learningcommons.ubc.ca/student-toolkits/managing-your-time/
Contact Information
Course Instructor: DeLisa Lewis, PhD, LLAg ,(she, her)
Contact Details: Reach out with questions or requests via Canvas APBI361 course email.
Virtual Zoom Meetings: Request via Canvas APBI361 course email.
I encourage you to reach out and schedule time with me to chat about anything related to the course that is personal or specific to your individual situation. If you are registered with the Centre for Accessibility, please send your letters of Accommodation and any follow-up questions or concerns you may have via Canvas email.
At any time, I welcome your questions about how to approach an assignment that have not been asked or answered on the FAQs discussion board, any questions or ideas you'd like feedback on for individual assignments prior to their due dates, concerns you have about your performance with assignments, or other.
General questions? If you have general questions about the course content or assignments, please first post these to the Canvas course Frequently Asked Questions/FAQS Discussion Board. On the FAQS discussion board, anyone in the course may helpfully respond—another student, the instructor, or your TA.
The assignments due dates have been scheduled with an awareness of traditionally heavy course assignments timing for term 2, with weekends and the mid-term break avoided. I will also be providing several late submission concessions and grace periods with the recognition of the challenges with keeping pace of a full undergraduate workload and that extra pressure during the winter months of term 2 with staying well. More details on these concessions and grace periods in the “Late assignments” section detailed below.
One other note that plays a role in my availability for scheduling synchronous meetings during term 2, I simultaneously instruct three undergraduate courses including this one, APBI361, APBI265, and LFS250.
Please note, the teaching team will not be responding to incoming emails or the FAQs discussion board on weekends or during the mid-term break in February.
Course Instructor Brief Biographical Statement
As mentioned in the Land Acknowledgement, I am a settler farmer, a grateful and uninvited newcomer who is living and working in the territories of Hul’qumi’num Speaking Peoples. I am also grateful to be an instructor in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems, where I earned my PhD on completion of research focused on the ‘Land and Livelihoods’ in Nuxalk Traditional Territory. This was a study that relied on the lenses of Agroecology and Soil Science to better understand the past, present, and future contexts of regionally based food systems with a case study of the Bella Coola Valley.
I have been teaching courses focused on Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems in our faculty since 2009, and this course focused on key indicators of agroecosystem sustainability since 2015.
My areas of research are focused on soil health practices with an agroecological lens. I collaborate with the Sustainable Agriculture Landscapes Lab (SAL) team and the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems (CFSFS), both led by Dr. Sean Smukler.
Integral to this research collaboration and to my practice as an Applied Biology instructor in this Faculty, I connect my work as a practicing farmer with long-term research projects, with outreach, and mentoring across multiple farming communities. If you are interested in potential opportunities for work-learn with on-farm research, check out some of the web resources linked here for more information about a few of these long-term research projects: CANOVI, OSC4.
Course Teaching Assistant: Jasmine Bal (she, her): Contact via Canvas course email and view Jasmine's introduction on the course introductions page.
Course Description
APBI361 offers an exploration of contemporary models and measurements of sustainable agriculture as developed by policymakers, non-government organizations, academic researchers, and for-profit commercial enterprises. Students will encounter the complexity, challenges, and limits of sustainability indicators at global, national, and regional scales. Agroecosystem sustainability examples are intended to inspire critical thinking, to connect with your everyday life and/or with your future career in agriculture and food systems.
The course goals are: 1) to provide an opportunity for students to explore the ways agriculture and food systems sustainability are measured against sustainability criteria. This learning opportunity takes place in this course within a hybrid-remote team-based environment; 2) to facilitate better understanding of the roles of stakeholders’ engagement and policy recommendations. The ‘better understanding’ is meant to emerge from the application of agroecosystem sustainability assessments with support from peers and the teaching team.
Course Structure
APBI361, centered on a study of the ‘Key Indicators of Agroecosystem Sustainability’, was designed as an online course. As noted above, team-based learning activities and assignments will require coordination of your schedule with your peers, which means there are a few unscheduled synchronous learning activities that are required. There are no required weekly synchronous lectures or final exams for this course.
Course readings, learning resources, and all assignments are located within the APBI361 Canvas course website. Students will be responsible for familiarizing themselves with the course site, where, how, and when to submit each assignment, and must take responsibility for communicating regularly with classmates and the instructor.
Course Schedule
The schedule for the course is organized on a weekly basis, with assignments due on Tuesdays and Fridays. The weekly course schedule, links to the learning modules and assignments, can be found on the APBI361 home page in Canvas. The course calendar is found on the far-left Canvas navigation panel, above the Canvas inbox and the scheduled assignments are listed in the Assignments Schedule in table format below.
Any change to the course schedule will be communicated with Canvas Course Announcements.
Learning Materials
All learning materials for this course will be provided on the Canvas course website. No additional textbook or other purchases required.
Learning Outcomes and the activities and assignments linked to these:
Upon completion of APBI361, students will be able to…
Assignments schedule and marks breakdown
See the Assignments tab link on left side navigation in Canvas for assignments overviews, for updates and detailed assignment instructions, and marking rubrics. See the Course Schedule at a Glance and APBI361 Calendar for complete list of assignments and their due dates.
Learning Analytics
Learning analytics includes the collection and analysis of data about learners to improve teaching and learning. This course will be using the following learning technologies: Canvas and Turnitin. Many of these tools capture data about your activity and provide information that can be used to improve the quality of teaching and learning. In this course, I plan to use analytics data to:
ACADEMIC INTEGRITY
What is academic integrity?
The academic enterprise is founded on honesty, civility, and integrity. As members of this enterprise, all students are expected to know, understand, and follow the codes of conduct regarding academic integrity. At the most basic level, this means submitting only original work done by you and acknowledging all sources of information or ideas and attributing them to others as required. This working definition of ‘academic integrity’ was created by Dr. Catherine Rawn, was suggested by the Centre for Teaching and Learning at UBC and carries a Creative Commons license.
Much of the written work in this course on “Key Indicators of Agroecosystem Sustainability” will rely on your individual reflections and on the exercise of writing as critical thinking. We will be using the Turnitin tool to collect and review written assignments in APBI361.
To help you learn your responsibilities as a student in this course, please read and understand UBC’s expectations for academic honesty in the UBC Calendar: “Academic Honesty,”.
Where can I find support to meet these expectations?
For written assignments and help with plagiarism and citation, see the Centre for Writing and Scholarly Communication.
Additional resources for learning with integrity can be found on the UBC Academic Integrity Website.
All students are subject to the University's rules on Academic Misconduct
Academic misconduct includes any conduct by which a student gains or attempts to gain an unfair academic advantage or benefit thereby compromising the integrity of the academic process or helping or attempting to help another person commit an act of academic misconduct or gain, or attempt to gain, an unfair academic advantage.
The Academic Calendars (Vancouver and Okanagan) provides details about the different types of academic misconduct, and it is important that everyone understands these.
Plagiarism is a serious offence and any student caught plagiarizing will be subject to penalties set out in the UBC calendar. Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to:
Academic Integrity and written acknowledgement of learning resources in APBI361
The accepted citation-acknowledgement format for all written assignments in APBI361 is the American Psychological Association (APA) format. You are expected to follow this format for all written assignments.
In brief, the APA writing style aims to promote objectivity in communicating science, and the APA format is a means to standardize reports across the scientific community (Schwartz, Landrum, & Guring, 2013). More detailed information about this format, including how to cite references correctly can be found here https://guides.library.ubc.ca/apacitationstyle and here https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_style_introduction.htmlLinks to an external site.
Specifically for this course and assignments:
To be clear, it is unacceptable for you to be in the same room with or receiving real time collaboration or assistance from a peer in this course, any other person, or any other reference tool outside the APBI361 Canvas course pages during a quiz. Doing so will be considered academic misconduct. You will be prompted to sign a statement of your understanding of these terms and of your intention to carry out academic integrity as part of completing your online quizzes.
Please reach out to me with any questions you may have about this, either with a request for scheduling a meeting time in our virtual office, or with questions and responses that can be shared with all students on our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) discussion board.
Due Dates and Late Assignments
All assignments are due at the times and dates listed in the course calendar. All times listed are set to Vancouver campus time (PST/PDT, UTC-7 hours). Students in different time zones will be responsible for converting to their own time/date to meet on time assignment deadlines.
Course assignments and their scheduling are intended to support students’ learning with frequent, low stakes learning activities that build organizational and analytical skills and competencies. Timely completion of these relatively low marks value assignments is integral to the process.
APBI361 Policies on requests for assignment due date extensions
Other Important Notes on Late Assignments...
Late Discussion Assignment?
To support your learning and the instructor's efforts to be effective in this particularly challenging role of asynchronous, online instruction, I've decided to launch a new way to break the online 'ice'' while offering a student-centered incentive.
Sign-up sheets to set an early term brief check-in will be circulated on week 1 of the course. For you to be eligible for a late discussion marks deduction waiver, you must sign-up and show up for an instructor meeting within the dates listed.
Outside of that opportunity for waived discussion late marks, specific marks reductions for late discussion assignments submitted after either the initial posting or peer response/final discussion due dates are noted within the discussion marking rubric.
Late Team Policy Assignments?
Note the general policy listed above, restated here: with proactive communication (minimum 48 hours advance Canvas email), all APBI361 students are eligible for a 'no-questions asked' 12-hour assignment deadline extension applied to either the individual or team assignments.
How about a 24-hour extension?
In addition, students who wish to qualify for one full 24-hour extension without penalty on any of the remaining individual assignments must complete the mid-term APBI361 feedback survey. Again, this is an effort to incentivize you to support my efforts to be a more effective instructor with this online course with timely, constructive feedback.
Absent any communication and/or required documentation when you submit an individual or team assignment late you will receive: Late marks reductions of 10% marks value per day.
AND Quizzes?
Online quizzes in this course are low stakes learning activities included to help students keep pace with important course content. And yet, they are notoriously easy marks at high risk for breaches of academic integrity. Quizzes will be released on a set schedule as noted in the course calendar and late or missed quizzes are discouraged for the reasons just noted. If you are unable to complete a quiz during the scheduled release/open period for documented medical reasons, your missed quiz will be waived. Any requests to re-open or adjust the quiz schedule that do not include adequate medical documentation or other clear and proactive communication (e.g., academic accommodations or other documented individual emergency) will be subject to 20% late marks penalty per day. With that said about the late marks, your participation in a scheduled one-on-one virtual meeting with the instructor will qualify you for a ‘drop-the-lowest’ quiz mark. More details on this opportunity will be posted in course announcements after drop-add period has passed (January 17).
Student Resources and Mental Health
If you are having issues with stress, anxiety, or other mental health problems, please do not hesitate to contact the instructor and to reach out to the wide range of UBC resource persons who are focused on providing support in this arena.
International Students
The shift to online learning has greatly altered teaching and learning at UBC, including changes to health and safety considerations. Keep in mind that some UBC courses might cover topics that are censored or considered illegal by non-Canadian governments. This may include, but is not limited to, human rights, representative government, defamation, obscenity, gender, or sexuality, and historical or current geopolitical controversies. If you are a student living abroad, you will be subject to the laws of your local jurisdiction, and your local authorities might limit your access to course material or take punitive action against you. UBC is strongly committed to academic freedom, but has no control over foreign authorities (please visit here. for an articulation of the values of the University conveyed in the Senate Statement on Academic Freedom). Thus, we recognize that students will have legitimate reason to exercise caution in studying and researching certain subjects. If you have concerns regarding your personal situation, consider postponing taking a course with manifest risks, until you are back on campus or reach out to your academic advisor to find substitute courses. For further information and support, please visit: http://academic.ubc.ca/support-resources/freedom-expression.
Additional University Policies
UBC provides resources to support student learning, and to maintain healthy lifestyles but recognizes that sometimes crises arise, and so there are additional resources to access including those for survivors of sexual violence. UBC values respect for the person and ideas of all members of the academic community. Harassment and discrimination are not tolerated nor is suppression of academic freedom. UBC provides appropriate accommodation for students with disabilities and for religious observances. UBC values academic honesty and students are expected to acknowledge the ideas generated by others and to uphold the highest academic standards in all their actions.
Details of the policies and how to access support are available on the UBC Senate website.
Additional Learning Resources and technical support
Chapman Learning Commons
Resources for a wide range of learning support including Online learning, writing support, academic integrity, tutoring and advice.
https://learningcommons.ubc.ca/
Faculty of Land and Food Systems Learning Centre: Technical issues with Canvas
https://lc.landfood.ubc.ca/support/
Copyright All materials of this course (course contents, lecture slides, assessments, course readings, etc.) are the intellectual property of the Course Instructor or licensed to be used in this course by the copyright owner. Redistribution of these materials by any means without permission of the copyright holder(s) constitutes a breach of copyright and may lead to academic discipline.
Version: January 1, 2025
Schwartz, B. M., Landrum, R. E., Gurung, R. A. R. (2013). An easy guide to APA style (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: Sage.