Course syllabus

U.S. History to 1877 — Syllabus

U.S. History to 1877 Free sample edition

U.S. History to 1877 is a 3-unit, lower-division undergraduate course offered at [Institution] in [Term]. The class meets in person twice a week for about 75 minutes each time: [Meeting days/times].

This syllabus is the governing document for the course. It tells you what the course is, how your grade is built, what happens each week, and the policies you can count on. Weeks are numbered from Week 1 to Week 16; your instructor's course site gives the due date for each item.

Instructor and Contact

Instructor: [Instructor name]
Contact: [Contact info]
Office hours: [Office hours]

Bring something specific to office hours, such as a document you cannot date, a sentence in an old spelling you cannot untangle, two sources that seem to disagree, or a claim you are not sure the evidence supports. Reach out early: a question asked in the week it comes up is far easier to answer than one saved for exam week. Old documents are hard to read at first, with long sentences, unfamiliar words, and spellings that look like mistakes. That is normal, and the weekly work is built to be supportive while you learn to read them. Check the course announcements at the start of each week.

Course Description

This is the first half of the U.S. history survey, from the Indigenous Americas before contact through the end of Reconstruction in 1877. The period from 1877 to the present is the second-semester course. Students in every major take it, and it has no prerequisite.

The course teaches the historian's way of working on a dated document every week: who made it, when, and why; what surrounded it; what it says and what it leaves out; what other sources confirm or complicate it; and what claim the evidence supports. It is not a political science course: government is taught as history, through the documents that made it. It is not an ethnic studies course: the experiences of Native nations, enslaved and free Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and women run through the narrative as history. And it never tells you what to conclude about the debates historians still have.

Every week practices one habit. You meet the story in plain words first, then attach the term, then read it in a document. Every reading ends in one plain sentence that names what the source shows and what it does not, such as this one about a document from Week 9: Jackson's message shows how the President justified removal to Congress; it is evidence of his argument, not of the Cherokee Nation's view.

The arc of the course

The course runs in chronological order. Method comes first, because every later week reads a document: Week 1 joins the historian's craft to the worlds before 1607, from Cahokia and Tenochtitlán to Columbus's voyage of 1492 and the Columbian Exchange. Colonization (Week 2) and colonial society and the origins of slavery (Week 3) follow, and the rest of the course cannot be understood without them.

The imperial crisis (Week 4) leads to the Revolution (Week 5), whose ideals and limits the Confederation and the Constitution (Week 6) and the new republic's first parties (Week 7) inherit. Week 8 reviews contact through the new republic, adds one light topic, the first federal census of 1790 read as a numeric primary source, and holds the midterm.

Jeffersonian and Jacksonian America (Week 9), reform (Week 10), and expansion (Week 11) set up the sectional crisis (Week 12) and the coming of the war (Week 13). The Civil War (Week 14) and Reconstruction to 1877 (Week 15) close the course, and Week 15 also reads the whole document roster again. Week 16 holds the cumulative final.

What you will work with

One thread runs through the whole term: a roster of 36 dated primary documents, at least one at the center of every instructional week, so each week's story is met in a document you can open and read at the archive that keeps it. The roster runs from Ferdinand and Isabella's grant to Columbus (1492) through the Mayflower Compact (1620), the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Constitution (1787), Jackson's message on Indian removal (1830), The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850), South Carolina's declaration of the causes of secession (1860), and the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), to the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

Around the roster, the course works with two chronologies (six contact-era years from 1492 to 1607, and twenty-eight survey years from 1606 to 1877), the 1790 census schedule, the Reconstruction amendments, the measures that decided slavery in the territories, and the two directions of the Columbian Exchange. Two small sorting sets, one for telling primary from secondary sources and one for telling what a source shows from a claim that goes beyond it, are written for teaching and labelled illustrative wherever they appear. Examples also come from ships, courthouses, farms, newspaper offices, census offices, army camps, convention halls, and churches, and the people in them get roles, not names.

Our approach: evidence, accuracy, and evenhandedness

Five commitments run through every week.

The four moves of historical thinking. Every document is read with the same four moves, in this order: sourcing (who made it, when, and why), contextualization (what was happening around it), close reading (what the text says and what it leaves out), and corroboration (what other sources confirm or complicate it). Contextualization explains a source; it never excuses what the source describes.
Documented facts are stated plainly. Slavery, the removal and killing of Native peoples, war, and racial violence are treated factually and with gravity. They are never staged as debates or softened. The secession declarations' own words, which name slavery as their cause, are read as the evidence they are, not as one side of an argument.
Open questions are named debates. Where historians still disagree, the course names the debate and gives the strongest case on each side: whether the Revolution was radical or conservative (Weeks 4 and 5), whether the Civil War could have been avoided (Week 13), and how far Reconstruction failed (Week 15). You argue a view of your own, but no page, quiz, or exam announces a verdict, and none is keyed.
People in their own names. The course's own voice says "enslaved people"; the older word stays only inside quotations and legal titles. Native nations that exist now are written about in the present tense, and by their own names where a week names a nation. When a document uses the language of its time about a group of people, it is quoted only to read what the document says; the course's voice never adopts that language.
No current politics. The course argues no current policy question, and no living politician, party, outlet, or commentator appears in it.

No grade depends on which side of a historians' debate you take. Your grade depends on sourcing a document accurately, placing it in its time, reading it closely, corroborating it, quoting it word for word, and supporting your claim with dated evidence.

Quotations, dates, and attributions

History's most common errors are a quotation reworded or invented, a document misdated, and a phrase credited to the wrong person. The course guards against all three.

Only pinned fragments are quoted. The course quotes short passages from its 36 documents, each reproduced exactly as the archive's page prints it, with the original spelling, capitals, and punctuation ("Body Politick" in the Mayflower Compact, for example). Every other reference to a document is a paraphrase and is marked as one. The course never invents a quotation, puts words in a real person's mouth, or invents a source.
Dates come from the document. A document is dated from its own text or the archive's record. When an archive's page heading and the document's text disagree, the text wins and the disagreement is named, as with the Treaty of Paris of 1783.
Attributions are checked. The phrase "entangling alliances with none" comes from Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural Address (1801), not from Washington's Farewell Address (1796). The Federalist No. 10 is James Madison's. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) was written by Olive Gilbert from Truth's dictation, so it names both the teller and the writer.

Required Materials

You buy no textbook and pay nothing for course materials. Every reading and video is a link to an external resource, opened from the week's page so you always reach the version the course teaches from. Beyond a web browser, you need these free tools:

The archives that keep the documents: the Avalon Project, the National Archives and its DocsTeach site, Founders Online, and the Library of Congress. Each week links the exact page you need, and none requires an account or a payment.
Free reference and explainer sources: each week's Readings & Resources page links museum and park pages, short explainers, and captioned videos. None requires an account or a payment.
A notebook or any free note-taking app: for sourcing tables, close readings, and timelines. Pen and paper work too.
Any free audio or video recorder, or a phone's voice memo app: for the short spoken explanation that ends each Primary Source Workshop. A written script is accepted instead.
A free account with one approved AI chatbot, from the list in the AI-Use Policy below. A free tier is enough for everything in this course, and every AI-based activity also has a route that needs no AI at all.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course you will be able to:

Outcome A. Historical thinking and source analysis: identify a primary source by origin, date, and type; place it in its time; read it closely for what it says and leaves out; and corroborate it against other sources, stating the result in one plain sentence.
Outcome B. Historical argumentation: build and support a claim about the past with evidence from dated sources, quoted accurately, while acknowledging another interpretation and checking any claim about the past, AI output included, against the record.

The eight course objectives below build toward those two outcomes. Each week's overview page names the objective that week serves and turns it into a short checklist of what you should be able to do by the end of the week.

Practice historical thinking — source, contextualize, closely read, and corroborate primary documents, and reason about causation, change and continuity, periodization, contingency, and significance — to interpret the past from evidence.
Describe the Indigenous societies of the Americas before contact, the motives and methods of European exploration and colonization, and the demographic and ecological consequences of the Columbian Exchange.
Explain how distinct colonial societies and economies developed in British North America and how the Atlantic slave trade and colonial law built a system of hereditary racial slavery.
Analyze the causes, course, and consequences of the American Revolution and the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, including who the Revolution included and who it left out.
Explain the making of the Constitution and the federal system — the Articles of Confederation and their limits, the Convention's compromises, the ratification debate, and the politics of the new republic.
Analyze the political, economic, and social changes of the early and mid-nineteenth century — Jeffersonian and Jacksonian politics, the market revolution, reform movements, and westward expansion, including Indian removal and the U.S.-Mexican War.
Explain how slavery and its expansion drove the sectional crisis — the cotton economy and the lives of the enslaved, the compromises over the territories, Dred Scott, and the secession of the Deep South.
Analyze the causes, conduct, and consequences of the Civil War and Reconstruction — emancipation, the Reconstruction amendments, the struggle over Black freedom and citizenship, and why Reconstruction ended in 1877.

How this course works

Every module presents the same content in three ways — a chapter to read, a slide deck with speaker notes, and captioned videos — so you can choose how to take it in. Each module's lecture page also carries the week's story as one spoken-style walk-through.

A typical week runs in this order:

Week overview. Open the module's overview page, titled "Week N Overview" (for example, Week 1 Overview). It lists the week's work in order with time estimates and names the week's checkpoint, the one thing you should be able to do by the end of the week.
Chapter (about 45 to 80 minutes; each chapter prints its own time). The week's primary reading, where each idea moves from plain words to the term to a dated document. Read it first.
Lecture page and slide deck (about 15 to 20 minutes for the lecture, plus time with the deck). The same story, told aloud and in slides.
Readings and videos. An optional go-deeper menu of documents at their archives, museum and park pages, and explainers; every video has captions.
Lecture tutorial (60 to 90 minutes). A one-on-one session with your chatbot that teaches, gives practice, and ends with a completion summary you submit.
Practice set (15 to 25 minutes). Ungraded practice with a Socratic coach that asks questions, offers hints, and gives you a short self-check rubric for each problem, at your own pace and on fresh everyday scenarios.
Primary Source Workshop (about 90 minutes). One dated document worked end to end. You start from the historical question it can help answer, then source it, place it in its time, read it closely for what it says and leaves out, and corroborate it against another source. Next, you ask your chatbot to summarize and date the same document, check every date against the document's text and every quotation word for word against the pinned fragment, and catch and correct one of its slips by hand. You finish with a short spoken or recorded explanation that ends in one plain sentence, and a brief reflection.
Discussion (about 45 minutes) and assignment (about 60 to 90 minutes). Where you put the week's documents to work on an arguable question and on problems of your own.
Quiz. A short auto-graded check of what you now know, taken on your own.

Week 8 is lighter: the chapter (about 45 to 55 minutes), the lecture, slides, readings, practice set, and discussion, then the study guide, exam-prep tutorial, practice exam, and midterm. Week 16 has no new module; it holds the final exam and its study guide, exam-prep tutorial, and practice exam.

Grading

Your course grade is the weighted average of the six groups below. The weights sum to 100%.

Grading weight by assessment group
Component	Weight
Tutorials & Practice	10%
Quizzes	10%
Workshops	20%
Assignments	25%
Discussions	15%
Exams	20%
Total	100%

What each group holds

Tutorials & Practice: the 14 weekly lecture tutorials, one in every module except Week 8. The practice sets sit beside them and are ungraded.
Quizzes: 14 weekly quizzes, one in every module except Week 8. Quizzes are closed to AI.
Workshops: the 14 weekly Primary Source Workshops, one in every module except Week 8. Each Workshop publishes its rubric with it. The rubric rewards accurate sourcing, sound context, a close reading tied to the text, real corroboration, the chatbot slip you catch and correct, and a defended conclusion.
Assignments: 14 weekly assignments, one in every module except Week 8. Each assignment publishes its rubric with the assignment.
Discussions: 15 weekly discussions, one in every module from Week 1 to Week 15.
Exams: the midterm in Week 8 and the cumulative final in Week 16. Within this group, the final carries twice the midterm's weight.

Each week's discussion, and each week's assignment outside Week 8, ships in two versions. The adaptive version is published and graded by default. A traditional version that uses no AI is also in the module, unpublished; your instructor may publish it instead. An unpublished version does not appear to you and does not count. A published traditional version takes the adaptive one's place in the same group and counts the same.

Letter grades follow the standard scheme:

Letter grade by final course percentage
Letter	Percentage range
A	90–100
B	80–89
C	70–79
D	60–69
F	below 60

Weekly Schedule

The course runs for sixteen weeks: fifteen weeks of modules and a finals week. Every module from Week 1 to Week 15 holds the same materials: the week overview, the chapter, the lecture page (titled "Lecture:" followed by the module's title), the slide deck, the readings and videos page, and the practice set. Every module also ships both an adaptive discussion and a traditional no-AI alternative, and every module except Week 8 ships both an adaptive assignment and a traditional no-AI alternative. The adaptive versions are scheduled, graded, and published; the traditional alternatives are unpublished by default and count only if your instructor publishes them instead.

Module title, published graded work, and unpublished traditional alternatives by week
Week	Module	Graded and published	Traditional alternative (unpublished)
1	Doing History & Worlds Before 1607	Tutorial, Primary Source Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
2	Colonization & Empire	Tutorial, Primary Source Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
3	Colonial Society & the Origins of Slavery	Tutorial, Primary Source Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
4	The Road to Revolution	Tutorial, Primary Source Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
5	The American Revolution	Tutorial, Primary Source Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
6	Confederation & Constitution	Tutorial, Primary Source Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
7	The New Republic	Tutorial, Primary Source Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
8	Midterm Review & Exam	Adaptive discussion, midterm exam	Discussion
9	Jeffersonian & Jacksonian America	Tutorial, Primary Source Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
10	Reform, Religion & Reawakening	Tutorial, Primary Source Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
11	Manifest Destiny & Expansion	Tutorial, Primary Source Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
12	Slavery & the Sectional Crisis	Tutorial, Primary Source Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
13	The Coming of the Civil War	Tutorial, Primary Source Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
14	The Civil War	Tutorial, Primary Source Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
15	Reconstruction	Tutorial, Primary Source Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
16	Finals week (no module)	Final exam	None

What each week asks of you

Week 1. Workshop: Checking a Draft Caption for Columbus's Letter. Discussion: What Should We Call 1492, and Where Does the Story Start? Assignment: Measuring the Contact Era: Years, Sources, and Two Directions.
Week 2. Workshop: Checking a Draft Summary of the Mayflower Compact. Discussion: How Much Can a Founding Paper Carry? Assignment: Charters, Covenants, and the Years Between.
Week 3. Workshop: Checking a Draft Exhibit Panel on the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. Discussion: How Was Slavery Built, and What Does an Author Change? Assignment: Building Slavery into Law: Years, Contracts, and a Colony's Frame.
Week 4. Workshop: Checking a Draft Exhibit Caption on the Stamp Act Congress Declarations. Discussion: Radical or Conservative, and Whose Consent? Assignment: Consent and Empire: Dating the Road from 1763 to 1765.
Week 5. Workshop: Checking a Draft Audio-Guide Script on the Declaration of Independence. Discussion: Radical or Conservative, and What Can One Letter Show? Assignment: A Promise, a Letter, and a Treaty: Dating the Revolution's Documents.
Week 6. Workshop: Checking a Draft Audio-Tour Script on The Federalist No. 10. Discussion: What Did the Constitution's Bargains Protect? Assignment: Two Frames of Government: Years, Clauses, and a Ratification Essay.
Week 7. Workshop: Checking a Draft Museum Panel on Washington's Farewell Address. Discussion: Above Party, or a Party's Words? Assignment: Warnings and Changes of Power: Years, Parties, and the Farewell Address.
Week 8. Discussion: Portrait or Categories? Then the midterm, taken on your own.
Week 9. Workshop: Checking a Draft Exhibit Label on Jackson's Removal Message. Discussion: A Wider Democracy, or a Narrower One? Assignment: Growth and Its Costs: Years, a Line, and Jackson's Message.
Week 10. Workshop: Checking a Draft Exhibit Label on The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Discussion: Engine of Reform, or a Told Life? Assignment: A Told Life and a Reforming Nation: Years, Voices, and the Truth Narrative.
Week 11. Workshop: Checking a Draft Exhibit Label on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Discussion: A Phrase or a Plan? A Promise or a Paper? Assignment: A Declaration, a Treaty, and a Moving Border.
Week 12. Workshop: Checking a Study Guide on Douglass's My Bondage and Freedom. Discussion: Which Compromise Broke? Assignment: The Line, the Vote, and the Court: Measuring the Sectional Crisis.
Week 13. Workshop: Checking a Study Guide on South Carolina's Declaration of Causes. Discussion: Could the War Have Been Avoided? Assignment: In Their Own Words: Dating and Reading the Secession Crisis.
Week 14. Workshop: Checking a Museum Label on the Emancipation Proclamation. Discussion: Who Made Freedom Real? Assignment: Order, Amendment, and Address: Measuring the War for Freedom.
Week 15. Workshop: Checking an Exhibit Label on the 14th Amendment. Discussion: How Far Did Reconstruction Fail? Assignment: Freedom, Citizenship, and the Vote: Reading Reconstruction and the Whole Roster. The week closes the course: the document roster read again, and a claim about the period argued from three dated documents.

The midterm and the final

The midterm in Week 8 covers Objectives 1 to 5 as taught in Weeks 1 to 7, from contact through the new republic. Week 8 itself reviews those weeks by the one distinction each week asks for: primary against secondary sources, contact against conquest, St. Augustine against Jamestown, indentured servitude against slavery, the Stamp Act Congress against the Continental Congress, the Declaration against the Constitution, the Articles against the Constitution, and the Farewell Address against the First Inaugural. Its one piece of new material, the first federal census of 1790 read as a numeric primary source, asks where a number comes from, who was counted, and how the schedule counted free people and enslaved people in separate columns. It is worked in that week's chapter, lecture, and discussion, and the practice set puts the same questions to fresh tables of numbers.

The final in Week 16 is cumulative and draws on all eight course objectives. It gives the most weight to the second half of the course, Objectives 6 to 8 (the growing nation from Jefferson through expansion, slavery and the sectional crisis, and the Civil War and Reconstruction), while still drawing on every first-half objective, Objectives 1 to 5. Both exams come with a study guide, a practice exam, and an exam-prep tutorial you work with your chatbot. Both are auto-graded, so every item is multiple choice, multiple answer, matching, or true/false, with no essay. Items key only what the course pins, such as the definitions of its core distinctions, the years in its two chronologies, a document's author or origin, type, year, and archive, which document a quoted fragment comes from, and what each measure and amendment did. No exam item keys a verdict on a historians' debate, a revised estimate, or a date the course teaches only in words.

Attendance and Participation

This course meets in person twice a week. Come to class having opened the week's overview page and read the chapter, because class time builds on that reading with documents, questions, and arguments. Your participation also shows in your weekly work: the tutorial, the Primary Source Workshop, the discussion, the assignment, and the quiz. Each week builds on the ones before it (you cannot read the secession declarations well until you know the compromises over the territories that came before them), so falling a week behind is the most common reason a grade slips. Keep to the weekly rhythm, and talk to your instructor the moment a week stalls. If you must miss class, follow the week's module from its overview page so you stay on pace.

Late Work

Late work loses 10% of the item's credit for each day it is late. If something serious comes up, such as an illness or a family emergency, contact your instructor before the due date whenever you can so the two of you can agree on a fair plan. The penalty exists to keep the course moving, not to punish genuine hardship.

Academic Integrity

The work you submit must be your own, and you are bound by your institution's academic integrity standard. Do not copy another student's work, do not submit work you did not do, and do not misrepresent how a piece of work was produced. In a course built on documents, integrity also means honest sourcing: every quotation you use is checked word for word against the pinned fragment, every date against the document's own text, every document is credited to its author or origin, and every paraphrase is marked as one. Three violations matter most in this course: inventing a quotation, a document, or a source, or putting words in a real person's mouth, including one a chatbot supplied; fabricating or doctoring a chatbot conversation or its share link; and using AI on the quizzes, the midterm, or the final. Violations are handled under your institution's academic integrity process and may result in no credit for the item.

Your own views, and hard history

This course reads documents about slavery, removal, war, and racial violence, and some of them use the language of their time. They are read to understand what happened and why, with the gravity those events carry. You are graded on how well you reason from evidence, never on which side of a historians' debate you take, and you never have to disclose your own political or religious commitments. Treat classmates' views the same way: state them in their strongest form before you answer them, and leave out names and identifying details when you draw on your own family's past.

Accessibility and Disability

This course is designed to reflect universal-design principles and offers multiple means of representation, engagement, and expression. If you have a disability and need an accommodation, contact your institution's disability services office to arrange it, and let your instructor know so it can be put in place promptly. If any material is hard to use with your assistive technology, tell your instructor and an equivalent version will be provided. This course is not yet accessibility-certified, and your feedback helps improve it. The course page Accessibility & Inclusion in Module 0 explains how the course offers multiple modes, how to turn on captions, and how to request an accommodation.

AI-Use Policy

This course uses an AI chatbot as a sparring partner, and then asks you to check its every date and quotation against the record and correct its work by hand. Use any one of the approved chatbots: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, or Microsoft Copilot. Your instructor may edit this list. Free tiers are fine, and Copilot is often included with a campus Microsoft 365 account.

AI may be used on these activities:

Lecture tutorials (completed with a chatbot). Each week you work the tutorial in a conversation with an approved chatbot, then submit the conversation share link and your completion summary.
Practice sets (ungraded). You work the practice exercises with a chatbot coach that asks questions and offers hints.
Adaptive discussions (completed with a chatbot). You hold a real-time dialogue with an approved chatbot, then post the AI's summary with the conversation share link. This version does not require replies to classmates.
Adaptive assignments (AI-coached). You do your own work first, then work it through with a chatbot coach that scores it against the assignment's scoring criteria, and submit the coach's report, your revised work, and the conversation share link. You remain the author: the coach asks questions and checks your reasoning; it does not write your reading of a document for you.
Primary Source Workshops (a pair-consult step and a required AI-critique step). After your own reading, you ask your chatbot to summarize and date the week's document, and you check every date against the document's own text and every quotation word for word against the pinned fragment before trusting any of it. Then you catch and correct one of its slips by hand, such as a quotation invented or reworded; words put in a real person's mouth; a document or an event misdated; a document credited to the wrong author (Jefferson's "entangling alliances" given to Washington); the Declaration confused with the Constitution, or the Articles with the Constitution; the Emancipation Proclamation read as freeing every enslaved person; the Reconstruction amendments mixed up; a pattern in a source read as proof of its cause; or the past judged only by present-day assumptions.
Exam-prep tutorials and studying. Use AI freely to review, to check your understanding, and to prepare for the exams.

AI may not be used on the quizzes, the midterm, and the final. These are closed to AI and must be entirely your own work, because they confirm that you personally can identify a source, date and order events, and match a document, a person, or a measure to its significance.

A chatbot is not a source. It can explain a term or quiz you on a distinction, but it often sounds most confident where it is least reliable. It may reword a quotation or invent one, put a famous phrase in the wrong mouth, give a document the wrong date, or announce a verdict on a question historians still debate. Every quotation it offers you check word for word against the pinned fragment, and every date you check against the document's own text before you use it.

If your instructor publishes a traditional alternative. A traditional discussion is your own post and your own replies to classmates; a traditional assignment is your own submitted work, graded by your instructor. Both are designed to be completed without AI: you do the sourcing, the close reading, and the writing yourself.

Disclosure. The share link documents your AI use on the AI-based activities, so they need no separate note. For any other graded work where AI help is allowed, add one line naming the tool and how you used it.

BYO-AI Access: equity, cost, and privacy

Equity and a non-AI route. You never have to create an account with a chatbot company to complete this course or to reach any grade in it. Every AI-based activity in this course carries an Equivalent route (no AI required) on its own page. It assesses the same objectives, for the same credit, against the same rubric. Take it whenever you like, for any reason or none; you do not have to ask permission, explain, or arrange it in advance.
Cost. A free tier of any approved chatbot covers everything in this course. No graded work depends on a paid subscription.
Privacy. Before you start, read what your chosen chatbot keeps of your conversations and how it uses them. Never paste personal information you would not want stored, and never paste a classmate's name or post or anyone else's private details: the week's documents and your own reading of them are all a chatbot needs to see. Remember that a share link lets anyone who has it read that conversation.

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