There are lots of videos on YouTube that give tips for F2F students, but what about students in online courses?
BONUS LEVEL: Tell me your mother, sister, brother, best friend, aunt/uncle read it and thought it was great. If you get a peer review that uses "great job" and "yes" answers only and doesn't demonstrate that the reviewer actually understands the assignment themselves, use that.
ADVANCED LEVEL: Try telling me about your middle school English teacher, who, when cornered at the grocery store and forced to read your work from your phone screen, said it is A level work.
2. Don't make use of tools provided to you. Blackboard has a spell checker function. I provide models for how to reference and also give the entire class a template that will set up the font, spacing, and basic format for an APA document. I also tend to suggest the Grammarly extension for web browsers. By all means, though,, feel free to skip these free things and just wing it. What are points for if you can't just throw them in a hole?
BONUS LEVEL: Spelling errors and punctuation errors are basic. Try refusing to capitalize the first letter of a proper noun or name. Hey, it was good enough for e.e. cummings. Get out a thesaurus and find some words that are really out-dated and that don't quite fit in the sentences. Chances are I won't look them up and will assume your vocabulary is stellar.
3. Ignore direct instruction. This goes hand-in-hand with #1. Even something as small as consistently refusing to use the filename format of no spaces and no special characters can be really effective in eliciting eye rolls, groans, and heavy sighs from me when Blackboard freaks out or I can't open your work in the grade center. It's the little things, sometimes, that speak volumes about your investment in the course.
BONUS LEVEL: Find a writing assignment where the instructions state clearly that you are to write about X OR Y. Write about X, Y, and Z instead. Surely by writing about more than instructed you'll get an A.
4. Do about 50% of the work. This can apply in a variety of situations. Maybe the course design is such that it requires papers that are 6-8 pages long. Turn in three page papers. If an assignment calls for a minimum of five paragraphs, surely three will do. Likewise, if I set up ten really carefully chosen discussion prompts on the individual readings for the week, just post on five. I'm probably just bloating the board because I have nothing better to do. Surely those prompts are relevant to the other assignments you're preparing. Scaffolding is just teacher-speak for "wasting time," right?
5. Just act like the boards are a drop off point. What I mean by this is don't actually "discuss" anything. Just shoot off one post in response to the prompt. Don't answer my follow up questions and certainly don't interact with your classmates. Actually writing out rough drafts of your larger written assignments in discussion boards is just silly! Why would you want to lay groundwork for the major assignments?
6. Don't give examples from the reading or make connections to the text. I'm sure we all know what you're talking about and we all agree with your reading of the work. Likewise, use really broad words like "the author" or even better, just use "he". "Writers" and words like "some people" are also great in their broadness and ambiguity.
BONUS LEVEL: Liberally sprinkle in the following into all writing for the class: I think, it seems to me, in my opinion, I believe.
SUPER ADVANCED BONUS LEVEL: Statements like "everybody interprets literature differently and no interpretation is 'wrong'" can send me into near apoplectic shock.
7. Just post random links to resources like the Encyclopedia Brittanica. After all, copying from the encyclopedia was high academic work in second grade. I'm sure the same applies in college-level work. I especially love it when you quote and cite from free essay sites, from SparkNotes, and from sites like Book Rags.
BONUS LEVEL: Go find some posts by fellow students on sites like "Ask.com" where people ask for random internet strangers to help them on course questions. Be absolutely sure that you do not make actual connections between outside resources and the course materials and do not cite anything. At most just give a link. Try to avoid any URLs with "edu" in them. Whatever you do, don't explain why you chose the source you did. It's best just to use Bing.com to search and then grab the first results you get. And never, ever, use any of the resources provided in our library.
8. More advanced students might try mutiny. This can be done in several ways. There is the classic "obviously you are really mean and no one likes you because people are dropping the class." You can also choose between mutiny out in front (posts in the board, disrupting class) or the behind attack (email). For instance, maybe you want to email the class and ask them who hates me or who is "trying really hard" but can't "figure out what she wants." Another classic is "I'm not getting a PhD in English!" Because, you know, you obviously are very aware of what graduate level work in the field is like. PhD dissertations are just 10 page plot summaries, right?
9. Try to make me feel bad by saying "I try really hard." Don't ask questions about my feedback (after all, if you're following #1, you haven't read it). Just keep saying you are a 4.0 student who always does well in English and you can't seem to understand why I have a personal problem with you even though I haven't met you and the grading comments (which you don't read) are all focused on rubric keywords and the written instructions.
10. My favorite pattern of behavior is probably to just pop in and turn in enough work to keep from being administratively withdrawn. I love nothing better than to spend my time giving feedback on work for a student who couldn't pass the class because of the number of zeroes they've amassed in the first two weeks. I'm sure your classmates are glad that instead of spending one-on-one time with them on their work that is turned in on time and demonstrate real attempts to grasp the course concepts that I'm spending time asking you basic questions like "do you know how to run spell check in Blackboard"?
While this post isl tongue-in-cheek, these are actual behavioral patterns I see in courses all the time. When I taught on ground, I used to tell students the first day that anyone can get a C or better if they: Follow directions and turn in all work. It's as simple as that. Some students go above the minimum and really show progress in the term and earn Bs or even As. Those who consistently do not follow instructions or turn in all work don't earn Cs or better.