Abstract:

Covid-19 has been a great opportunity to learn from students in a large variety of classes. One of the things that the students have made clear is their desire for simplicity. This led to the development of the Bundle. In project-based classes there are often group assignments and individual assignments so that you can learn about a student’s knowledge, and they can have the advantage of the group project-based learning.

With Covid-19 and moving to virtual learning the students were inundated across their classes with due dates, Zoom meetings, Teams meetings, and so much more.

Building a calendar was at best chaotic. Students had to deal with:
- Professors setting virtual meetings
- Homework
- Student team meetings
- All kinds of changes at work.
- Every class was different.
- A social schedule
- Required changes in their health routine (for example, gym closed requires an outdoor activity, often limited by daylight.)

Students kept asking for simplicity. Out of this was born Bundles. A simple concept that has three goals fewer due dates, consistency in types of assignments, and simplified grading. It started with a focus on the due dates, then on the consistency of assignments, and finally simplified grading.
Creativity in the Marketing Environment is a flipped face-to-face class that meets once a week for fifteen weeks.

There are six bundles of assignments each consisting of the following:
- Smartphone activity – students use the camera on their phones to take pictures relevant to the class topic of the week. The pictures are posted with a write up about how this relates to the topic for the week.
- Creative Play – Using simple things the students are asked to create objects or situations with friends and family. They then took pictures of and recorded in words in pictures what they had done. An example, would be to take a lego person into the woods and create a detailed camping site.
- Creative Skills – students are asked to use one of the creativity skills to develop something to share with the class.
- Group Work – This is moving their project forward using a problem-solving model such as the stages of Design Thinking.

The grading rubrics on the first three maintain a consistency across the whole semester. Rubrics vary to fit the Bundle assignments for group work.
Students seem to really like the idea that there are a very limited number of due dates in the semester. As they get into the process by the second bundle most of them like that consistency of types of assignments. They are quick to learn the styles of the assignments and can plan their time better to accommodate their calendar.

The other part they seem to like is grading as each bundle is 50 points they always know where they stand. It is easy to calculate their grade when the divisor is 50, 100, 150, 200, 350, and 300.

The paper explains how this is used in different courses, what has worked, what has not and where this may go into the future. It turns out to be Useful as waves of Covid-19 washed over the campuses of the university. Bundles are two to three weeks long and only on one occasion, so far has a student been sick enough to require extensions across the multiple Bundles.

Keywords:

Bundle, Simplicity, Consistency, Flipped, Project-based learning, Design Thinking.