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Name your courseroom. We'll take it from there.
A scheduled live session each unit, run at a fixed time, where the week's material is discussed. It carries marks. For students working rotating shifts it is usually the single most stressful element of the term, because attendance depends on a roster nobody consulted when the schedule was set.
There is normally an alternative assignment covering the same material, and it is marked as real work rather than treated as a formality. Missing the session is not the same as losing the marks, provided the alternative is completed properly and on time. Students who plan for the units they already know they will miss do considerably better than students who scramble afterwards.
Ten weeks for most courses, structured as ten units. There is no spare week built into that, so losing a fortnight removes a fifth of the course, and the closing units tend to arrive on top of each other while a final project is also due.
The weekly graded thread: an initial response to the prompt with real sources behind it, then replies that engage with what classmates actually argued. It repeats every unit for all ten units, which makes it the single largest consumer of time in most courses for a fairly modest share of the grade.
Earlier than the calendar says. In a ten-week term the last unit is for submission and the one before it for revision, so the practical working deadline for a capstone piece falls around unit eight. Students who plan to the published date routinely find their real deadline passed a fortnight earlier.
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