Learning about the student experience in OWI

What are students doing and experiencing in online writing courses (OWCs)? How do they feel about learning in their OWCs? What do we really know about this particular learning context/environment? Our Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing Instruction (OWI) (I'm co-chair) is eager to learn more and is engaged in several research projects and initiatives to answer questions like these.

Since the publication of our committee's Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for OWI, our group has structured its efforts along the lines of a three-year plan: year one was “Institutional Matters”; year two was “Faculty Matters”; this year is “Student Matters.”

For me, I have been curious about the fact that many teachers might not have a good anchor for thinking about our OWI students' experiences for a simple reason: Many teachers have themselves never taken an online course. So, simply put, in onsite instruction, while teachers can draw on their own personal histories when developing their pedagogy, online, they’re often adrift because they don’t have the background to know what a course “looks” and "feels" like to an online learner.

Onsite, a teacher might remember what it was like to sit in the back of the class or receive praise or work next to an annoying (or charming) partner or sit in a room with a hangover – uh, I mean head cold. But if you haven’t taken an online course, it could understandably be difficult to envision a student’s experience with discussion boards or the pressure of taking a timed quiz in a dorm room or how it feels to speak up using a microphone and Webcam in an online synchronous classroom. What are those activities like?

Our committee wants to help fill in the gaps in this knowledge, especially clarifying students’ experiences in terms of access and disability. Our primary initiative is the OWI Student Survey. Several of my colleagues have worked hard to create a series of questions to help us understand what is happening for students in OWCs. This fall, we’re piloting the survey, but if any of you are interested in sharing it with your students, please reach out to me.

The survey process and results will be part of our workshop and panel presentation at next year's CCCC in Houston. At CCCC, we'll also be exploring several other aspects of students and OWI.

All of this work dovetails with a project I’m engaged in right now with one of my own students – I’m going to hold off on disclosing exactly what we’re doing for another month or so, until we see where the project will ultimately lead, but we're basically working on co-authoring an extended narrative of an online course as seen through the eyes of not just the teacher, but the student. This is another effort to provide a view of how the online writing instructional environment looks -- through student eyes.