Research essay is the most challenging assessment in the unit and those students who have inadequate essay writing skills should seek additional training and help with their writing skills. The University offers a wide variety of academic writing workshops both for undergraduates and postgraduates as well as other types of support in this area  (see under Student Support, Policies and Procedures below). You are strongly recommended to take those workshops, in particular if you are not a native speaker of English. Students who have inadequate writing skills in English are most likely to fail in this unit.

Unless a Special Consideration request has been submitted and approved, (a) a penalty for lateness will apply – two (2) marks out of 100 will be deducted per day for assignments submitted after the due date – and (b) no assignment will be accepted more than seven (7) days (incl. weekends) after the original submission deadline. No late submissions will be accepted for timed assessments – e.g. quizzes, online tests

This is a flipped unit: all lectures are video taped and available on the iLearn page. Students are to access the lectures prior coming to the classes in January. Each lecture has the required readings assigned which are available through e-reserve in the Library. Student have to be familiar with  the lecture content and the required readings in order to complete two assessments:  the short paper and the class test (in class).

Each lecture ends with a list of questions from this lecture which will be discussed in class. Students need to come to class prepared to discuss the listed questions.

Class sessions will be delivered in the form of seminars and tutorials involving student oral presentations, specific task activities and general discussion of various topics from the lectures, including the questions listed at the end of the lectures .

There is no single textbook. The book that is used most often is in the required readings is: 

Leashing the Dogs of War: Conflict Management in the Divided World.Edited by Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson and Pamella Aall. United States Institute of Peace Press, 2008.

 A separate list of sources for the research essay will be posted on the unit iLearn page.

The following is the list of the lecture topics.  Each of those topics has required readings, the list of  which will be posted on the unit iLearn page. You are asked to read the required texts before listening to the lecture.

Introductory lecture: 'flipped classroom" as a model for this unit

Introduction of flipped classrooms and changes in the content of several standard lectures.

It is obligatory for you to read carefully the Univeristy Academic Honesty Policy at: http://mq.edu.au/policy/docs/academic_honesty/policy.html. If in any doubt whether you are following the academic honesty policy, please contact the unit convenor or MIR convenor before submitting your work. Sometimes students breach the rules of academic honesty policy unintentionally ( without intention of breaching them) simply because they are not clear as to what the rules are.

There were several cases in the past in which students were penalized - including failing the whole unit  - for the following offenses:

- Submitting an essay or a take home examination/test written by someone else (whether paid or unpaid)

- Copying paragraphs, sentences or clauses from books/journals or from web pages without quotation marks and without the proper acknowledgement of the source. This is also passing the work  of someone else as your own.

- Copying parts of your own essay/examination already submitted in another course. The assessment you submit for this unit must be written for this unit only and cannot contain parts of what you have written for another unit.

Any part of your assessment that is not written by you or is written for another unit, without  proper acknowledgement of the source and without using quotation marks to distinguish it from your own work, will not be assessed (because it was not written for this unit) and your over-all mark will reflect this. This kind of offense may be also reported to the Faculty Academic Honesty Committee.