Online Writing Teacher

OWI as a way into institutional politics

2012-01-31T06:45:00.004-12:00

I'm gearing up to visit a couple schools this spring to talk about OWI initiatives, and thinking about these visits led me to reflect again on the great potential I think OWI can represent for WPAs and compositionists.

Institutions rarely move to hybrid and online writing (mainly first-year) courses for reasons that are intrinsic to the writing program or English Department in which those courses reside. Instead, external pressure, as I described in the article “And Then There Were Two: The Growing Pains of an Online Writing Course Faculty Training Initiative" (1), pushes/forces programs to offer their courses online. Classroom space. Efforts to recruit students beyond the immediate geographic area. Cost savings. These factors drive, and pedagogy, if you are lucky or very hard working, jumps in the back seat and gets to offer some direction.

This can understandably breed resistance, but I'm reminding us that OWI can allow us to make arguments about what we do, to make us visible in new ways that can help the entire writing instructional mission. (To be fair, I should point out that there's a premise or better yet an assumption at work here, which is this: Online and hybrid writing courses are as good or better than onsite writing courses.) If you are moving to online courses, you don't want department in-fighting to detract from a unified focus on what is ultimately inevitable; you will waste time, energy, and good will and you may lose the ability to create these courses with the scaffolding and support so they will help you in the bigger sphere.

You don't want any of that, because the benefits for the classically disenfranchised comp program could be tangible. Let's take classroom space. If your institution is going digital because it's crunched for classrooms, keep track of exactly how many classrooms you have saved each term. Do a simple calculation: How much did that cost? Now, when conversations about resources arise, remind people of the contribution the writing program has made to this institutional problem. Is faculty training an issue? You could use administration-mandated online courses as a way to pay for more faculty training offerings (and, since pedagogy and technology should always be linked, this training can cover all areas). You may find ways to improve your part-time-full-time ratio, arguing for a commitment to the technology that a full-time faculty would better meet.

You could also use these new courses modalities to create conversation and energy about what is happening in the writing program. People get excited about new technologies, and these courses could be a tangible, visible way of opening the door for probably long-overdue campus-wide conversations about the teaching of writing and the role of writing courses in general.

WPAs want better working conditions, and we wish the hard work of our programs was self-evident. But, as Ed White points out, "... all administration deals in power; power games demand aggressive players; assert that you have power (even if you don't) and you can often wield it" (2). Technology-facilitated courses can open a door for WPAs, providing us with new ways to argue for the good of our programs -- and for the good of all of those teachers who really need us.

Notes
1) “And Then There Were Two: The Growing Pains of an Online Writing Course Faculty Training Initiative,” published in the Proceedings of the Distance Learning Administration 2007 Conference.
2) In "Use It or Lose It: Power and the WPA" in Ward and Carpenter's The Allyn & Bacon Sourcebook for Writing Program Administrators.

Talking topics online

2011-11-30T04:24:00.005-12:00

Online class forums such as message boards, because of their textual nature, can allow students really to "hear" each other and to have conversations that might be tricky or difficult face to face. Writing teachers have seen this advantage of these forums since the earliest days of computers and composition. One particularly constructive conversation students might have in an asynchronous forum is about their writing project topics. I have always been a fan of having students spend lots of time at the invention stage in their major projects, and I think my approach became even more productive when I moved the process online.

I typically ask students to submit topics to a message board with a prompt that looks something like this (the project topic below asked for a rhetorical analysis of the message of a person who influenced them):

Conversation about Project 1 topics
Hi everyone,
I am a big, big believer in using writing to discover ideas and learn.

I want each of you to post here at least one potential idea for Project 1 by Wednesday (see the Weekly Plan). This counts as a primary post. Some of you will want to build on your strong question posts from last week. Your post should fill out your idea as much as you can, including by asking some provocative questions. You might also describe the sources or evidence you might use.

Obviously, we can all help you a lot more if you give us something to work with.

That's right, "we."

After you post your idea(s), I want you to review at LEAST one of your colleagues' topics and give that person some feedback. You might address some of the following questions:
1) Is the rhetorical situation clear? Are the purpose, audience, and theme of the project clear?
2) Does the writer seem clear about focusing enough on the analysis of their interactions, or does the project seem mainly about the person who influenced them?
3) Can you think of ways to organize the project to increase its potential impact?
4) Would you like to write this (or a piece like it)? If not, why? (Answer this in a way that is helpful to the writer.)
5) Can you suggest any source material from our texts? What primary evidence might the writer use? How about any other sources?

Your suggestions can be succinct, but, basically, try to help each other out. Your response counts as a secondary post, and that should be posted by Friday.

Let's see what you've got in mind,
Prof. Warnock

Now, I have to tell you that during topic week I really earn my keep as a writing teacher, as I comment extensively on each topic proposed, incorporating the responses from other students in my comments. I then write up a summary post of commonalities I see in their projects.

It's worth it, though, as they do amazing work on these topic threads. The students get a great deal out of what are basically peer review conversations about their writing topics. They have time to think through the topic in earnest and bolster each other, sometimes by making personal connections about a topic. They can ask questions. They often suggest specific sources or even organizational strategies. They can have their collective game raised by seeing what their peers are doing (my students regularly re-think simplistic topics after seeing their peers' topics). Because students are proposing topics not just to me but to the whole class, they may be more inclined to think through carefully for this broader audience what they have to say. And when they are way off-base on a topic, other students often point that out, so I'm not seen as the squasher of their ideas.

Overall, they work together, and they learn in the process that they have some smart, helpful colleagues.

I should run an experiment one term in which I don't handle topics on the forums in one class but do in another; I believe there would be a noticeable difference in the quality of the final projects. But, alas, in my "do no harm" approach to teaching, I feel that in such an experiment I would be doing the "control" group a tremendous disservice.

Pedagogically, I hope to send a clear message with this approach: At the crucial stage of invention, you should get some input about where you are. Your project will be better, and your learning experience richer, because of that conversation.

Patience -- don't be a technodefeatist

2011-09-30T08:51:00.004-12:00

This summer Steven Corbett wrote a great piece in Inside Higher Ed about technology and teaching titled, appropriately enough, "Technology and Teaching." Corbett, a tech savvy teacher who says he was a "late bloomer" in using digital tools, describes "The Ups" and "Potential Downs" of using teaching technologies. Reading this, I thought again that despite the views of extremists on both sides, the obvious center ground is that there are good reasons to use technology in your classes -- and there are reasons not to.

Corbett recommends that teachers be patient learning/implementing new technologies. Good advice, and I would add that no digital teaching technology I have ever used was so convoluted that the smart teachers I know couldn't use it. Period. Indeed, be patient, because the "faculty resistance to teaching with technology" Corbett describes I think often emanates from psychological barriers people create. This is not so much technophobia as technodefeatism: the tendency to view digital technology applications as a series of barriers; when users reach one of these barriers, in a type of self-fulfilling prophecy, they throw up their hands in despair.

Digital technology seems to occupy a particular niche in our teaching mindset. Most teachers are innovative: They regularly try new teaching methods, incorporate new texts, or create different assignments for their courses. When they make these changes, they invariably end up with some teaching challenges as a result. A new method, text, or assignment creates responses from students and raises questions about course material that you cannot anticipate. Sometimes they even create issues in the overarching structure of the course.

So why make changes, especially if we like our curriculum? Again, most teachers alter their approaches because that's their nature. They try something new in the hope it will stimulate their students' learning and thinking in different ways. Those broad goals are well worth any obstacle encountered along the way.

Why don't we adopt the same approach/frame with new technology? Introduce a new technology because you believe that it can help you achieve your teaching and learning goals more effectively. I mean, believe that. If you don't (and you're not being forced to incorporate digital technologies into your classes, which is a different, and sadder and more frustrating, story that I won't pursue now), then the answer is simple: Don't use the technology.

If you look at a digital tool as an added burden, a dark, spooky cave full of glitchy goblins, then wait until you're so enthusiastic about the prospects of the new application that no obstacle could deter you. If one unexpected problem would lead you to feel crushed -- and maybe you would self-righteously think, "I knew this would happen!" -- then you're not ready. Try the technology another day.

Certainly, like any new teaching component, from a reading to an assignment to an approach, a technology could surprise you and alter your teaching in fundamental ways. Our tools can change our behaviors. If that's not a welcome experience, you're also not ready for the change.

Sure, I like technology and that gives me an edge in trying new digital tools. But know that my real technophile friends scoff at my actual nuts-and-bolts tech skills. My expertise, such as it is, is in the pedagogical uses of the tools. I used asynchronous tools to facilitate dialogue among students because I wanted them writing more in conversational ways. I have used the rubric/assessment software Waypoint to respond to my students' writing because I find it the best way for me to communicate with them and to evaluate their work. And so on.

Perhaps we need to stop placing capital T technology into its own mental bin and include it in a broader category almost all of us have and regularly use: teaching innovation. Introduce a digital tool when it makes sense for your goals. Sure, there's more whirling and humming with a computer, but in essence and philosophy, this is no different to me than if I had realized, in some long-ago time, that I needed a way to write publicly for my students in an onsite class and discovered I had the opportunity to use this weird new thing called a chalkboard.

Connecting, connecting: The beauty of asynchronous teaching

2011-07-29T06:39:00.009-12:00

Some teachers are fast on their feet teaching in front of a face-to-face class, always having the right response, also remembering that perfect connection. Some days, I'm one of those teachers. Other days, not so much.

A big advantage of teaching writing online in asynchronous environments is that students have the ability to spend time thinking through their responses and contributions. When managed well, discussion in the course becomes deeper and richer, more reasoned and thoughtful. Of course, this dynamic also works for you, the teacher. On days when that splendid information processor above your neck can't quite make connections at lightning speed, you have the time to sit back, mull over the conversational thread, and then respond.

As I've mentioned, your posts in the message board environment are not just another way for you to have the kind of interaction with students that most good writing teachers have. Your responses also do a lot to shape yourself as the audience. In your posts, you can do some amazing things to connect with them, to reach out to them, to clarify your audience role.

You can simply connect their posts to something you recently read or saw. Sharing that specific knowledge provides not only a content connection, but it shows them what you are reading and watching, maybe just that you are reading at all. By providing them with a direct link--it's the Web, right?--to such a resource, you expand the space of the class. Part of online learning, when done well, is to think regularly outside the course walls. Of course, teachers have always connected with students and have always found ways to build on relationships they had with good students from the past. But because I see so many of their ideas written form--not just in their major projects--those ideas tend to stick long after class is over, sometimes many terms later. Students have noted in online evaluations that I had contacted them a few terms after our course ended with readings related to something we had written about together.

The inherent connectivity of this environment also makes every writing course a unique blend of information and conversation. While our outcomes, our top-level goals in a course, are consistent, the students' experiences will be different because each course has its own personality, and by the end of an online composition course, you will have a one-of-a-kind series of links and connections.

Of course, you are bound by the same "problem" that students are bound by in this environment: The Web is present, so we can't ignore it. While in onsite conversations all of us at some point might say, "I remember reading about ___ once," or "I saw this ___ once," online that doesn't work. The artifact or resource must be found. As a teacher, one of my main goals is to build an evidence-based argument, so I have to model that practice by never shooting from the hip conceptually in our online discussions. I need to find that evidence.

So when you interact with them with these splendid, simple message boards, what you're doing is connecting with them in all sorts of ways. Connectivity. It's a crucial part of what we do when we teach writing online.

Maybe f2f writing instruction is the real virtual education?

2011-05-30T01:58:00.016-12:00

I often read (and hear from) critics of online learning who view that learning modality as being lesser, what they call a "a virtual experience," with a real pejorative sense to the word "virtual," along the lines of "less real."

But when it comes to teaching people how to write more effectively, isn't what we're doing in those "real" brick-and-mortar rooms often itself a kind of virtual education? If the goals are to help students learn to write and to use writing as a way to unlock critical thinking, how much of what goes on inside the walls of a composition classroom--for that hour or hour and twenty minutes--is actually geared toward those objectives?

Hey, I am not saying that what is going on a lot of the time is bad. Within those walls, seated at those desks, students talk. They listen to a professor talk, and sometimes that professor's topic is in fact writing. They laugh. They work together. Sometimes they read. Occasionally they write. Many of these activities--including the laughing--can help the students reach their goal of writing more effectively (if that is the goal, and not simply to move quickly through a no-doubt-required course). But what often takes place in that room is of questionable value to learning about writing. (My belief that the time spent in composition classrooms was not always productively geared toward writing prompted me to adopt a writing studies/writing about writing approach to writing instruction, in which writing as topic is placed at the center of the course.)

In other words, I wonder if in the thousands of writing courses across the country, most of the time what is going on is only loosely related to writing.

These students of ours are so busy, so overbooked. We have to jump on the time we have. In an asynchronous online (or hybrid) writing course, the hours students and I have together are largely spent on writing. Not only are students simply writing themselves, but they are working in a meta-way commenting on each others' written work and using writing to think through their composing and thinking processes. Almost all of their interactions in the course are written.

As I've mentioned here before, we at Drexel have reviewed some of our hybrid and online courses and quantified the amount of writing students created in these courses. The numbers were significant: Students are writing thousands of words in asynchronous environments each week, in addition to their major projects/papers in the course and to emails and other communications.

Without question, we need to know more about the effectiveness of online learning, especially when that learning modality is adopted purely for economic reasons, with pedagogy only a dim light of motivation. Rob Jenkins calls for such accountability in a recent The Chronicle of Higher Education article, saying that the low "success rates" in online courses should spur inquiry: "But isn't it time that we had an honest national conversation about online learning?" (1). (I won't wade into Jenkins' broader points, but I must say that "success rates" for online courses when compared to f2f courses may not take into account population: Some people in online courses may never, ever have even thought of taking a f2f course, let alone have the ability to get to that desk.)

Many teachers get into a style of teaching, and that's where they stay, but we might look outside our walls when it comes to teaching. As Dawn Hogue wrote recently about computer classrooms, "I've learned that when 28 students are typing it sounds like learning" (2). We have to listen for that "sound" of learning--regardless of modality.

Notes
1) In "Why Are So Many Students Still Failing Online?" The Chronicle of Higher Education. May 22, 2011.

2) In "Taking the Leap across the Digital Chasm." The Council Chronicle. September 2010. Page 29.

Wimba and other online classroom environments

2011-03-30T07:44:00.004-12:00

Those of you who even occasionally follow this space know I am a believer in asynchronous approaches to online writing courses, as they enable students to interact primarily with writing. However, say you want to have a synchronous classroom experience? There are great tools to provide learning spaces in which all students are present at the same time and can interact via writing, speaking, and video.

My experiences providing workshops, particularly several NCTE workshops last year, showed me how effective these environments can be for dialogue. For NCTE, I used a platform called Elluminate, which has now joined forces with another tool, Wimba. Dozens of people could participate in various ways in the workshops. As online classrooms, they are incredibly easy to use--you're ready to go in just a few clicks-- and they have a variety of capabilities:

Voice: Participants can use their mics to talk with each other.

Video: Participants can share video feeds of themselves.

Chat: Participants can type comments into a chat box.

Screen-sharing: Presenters can share their screens, which is a handy way to walk students through an online course site.

Whiteboard: There is a shared whiteboard space.

Presentation window: The presenter can easily present a PowerPoint.

These tools also provide other functionality, such as letting participants use icons for basic "emotional" responses--such as clicking a smiley face to let the presenter know things are going well. Teachers can create polls and surveys. The whole sessions can easily be archived and recorded.

Years ago, I began introducing my courses with video; I used Camtasia's screen capture software to record an intro in which I clicked through the class and talked to the students. Students could watch the video when they liked.

I now use Wimba, which at Drexel is built into our Blackboard Vista CMS, to introduce my courses, providing a measure of what my colleague Kristen Betts calls OHT, Online Human Touch. I display a video of myself in the corner in the beginning of the course intro (I take it down after a few minutes, because they certainly don't need to see me the whole time). I talk to them using Wimba's voice capabilities, reviewing the course guidelines and policies. I share my screen to show them the course Bb Vista site and some course documents. They can ask questions via voice or by chatting. If they want to share their own video feed of themselves, they can. If they can't sign on during our planned meeting time, the session is archived for later viewing.

Wimba can also be a handy place for students in fully online courses to meet together if they are working on team projects. The Wimba icon is on the homepage of my course, and students are welcome to click on it whenever they want to conduct a meeting.

These live classroom e-spaces can allow you to do many other things depending on your teaching style. For me, they support my efforts to make a personal connection with my students in the beginning of the term and to help them get comfortable with my course. From there, I still want them writing, so soon after, we're off to the textual adventures of the message boards.

Course content and "lessons" in the comp course

2011-01-31T08:08:00.005-12:00

I think about the idea of "course content" in the context of composition teaching a lot; these thoughts have become more acute since the emergence of the "writing about writing" (WaW) (or writing studies) approaches to composition that we've been taking at Drexel (1); I'm oversimplifying, but for us WaW has helped encourage a set of content learning for first-year courses (which takes many forms among our faculty). I think we have used this approach, where students study writing as the content of the curriculum, to improve significantly our three-course first-year sequence at Drexel.

Anyway, I realized last month that I haven't specifically written about content delivery in this space. That isn't just complete oversight. In fact, the impetus for my book was the realization that few resources dealt directly with the specifics of the writing interactivity of the online writing course, while methods of delivering content have been handled well in many books and resources about online/distance instruction (2).

Of course, so much student learning in our courses is indeed through the complex, multi-audience writing they are doing. But you still have content: You want them to understand logical fallacies or you want to teach them the rhetorical appeals or you want them to understand not just the logistics but the rationale behind citation. You have plenty of options to communicate such lessons:

Slide show-based presentation, no multi-media. A clean, clear self-paced PowerPoint can be great, especially if you use even minimal animations to create additional interactivity.
Slide show-based presentation with audio and video. Many tools now enable you to provide a slide-based video lesson with sound. Impatica allows you to package PowerPoint slides easily with accompanying audio. Camtasia and other screen capture programs allow you to create easily videos of your slides with your voice-over.
Synchronous classroom. Since I've been keeping this blog (nearly five years!), the possibilities here have increased significantly in sophistication. I use feature-rich Wimba regularly to introduce my online class, and I am struck by how easy it is to use for me and students. You may have issues getting students all in the same place at the same time, but Wimba and other software like Elluminate (now part of Wimba) allow you to archive the session, so students who couldn't attend my intro session were able to watch it, including the chat and voice comments and questions. These tools allow you to show documents, share your desktop, and interact with chat or voice.
Structure a message board conversation in a lesson-like way. I'm a big fan of message boards for conversation, as previous posts here indicate. Using them in a lesson format may require you to be a different kind of moderator than you normally are, actually taking more of the conversational reins and being more directive.
Use word processor or PDF documents. I have colleagues who have created all kinds of readable, user-friendly documents (e.g., Word, PDF) for students. You can package many simple course lessons around these types of materials. Sometimes, though, we can get too slick for our own good, especially if we don't have good design skills.

I'm just touching on the options here. To take a broader look for a moment, I see us moving toward new models of content delivery. With several institutions offering free online course content, educators are recognizing the Web as a way of matching the interested learner with the desired content. Web 2.0 technologies continue to proliferate. Presentation tools continue to improve, with multi-media thresholds dropping consistently. Apps for smart phones and other devices will only expand content offerings.

I might add that as these things change, my optimism about online writing instruction just grows. Composition instruction means that our courses are always unique, based, as they are, in our professional, and largely non-reproducible, expertise in interacting with the specific students in our courses. Good content delivery just helps us do the things we already do best, and those practices are only magnified in the online environment.

Notes
1) As I've mentioned, the text that lead me to this approach is Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle's "Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning 'First-Year Composition' as 'Introduction to Writing Studies'" in CCC. Derek Owens does a good job of describing how "writing studies" has evolved in an article on the St. John's Website.

2) Some books to help you get started include Ashburn and Floden's Meaningful Learning Using Technology, Conceicao's Teaching Strategies in the Online Environment, Henderson and Nash's Excellence in College Teaching and Learning, and Ko and Rossen's Teaching Online: A Practical Guide. Also check out MERLOT.

Onsite-online articulation in hybrid courses

2010-11-30T07:52:00.002-12:00

In hybrid courses, I suppose the ultimate goal is to maximize the online and onsite experiences, drawing from the strengths of each to create a unified, fulfilling course. I think the articulation between the onsite and online components of hybrids may be the next great frontier for me in my own teaching and scholarly work. Teachers really want to know how to make the most of the possibilities.

I want to remind you that the electronic part of my hybrid writing course environment is asynchronous and that a focus of the course is conversation. In many ways I see the online component of the course as a way for students to develop and hone written conversational skills.

This goal of conversation is one fundamental pedagogical way to connect the two modalities. Since they will be talking with each other a lot in different environments, you can productively encourage students to reflect on the difference between their f2f, spoken conversations and their written dialogue. This reflection can be overt. Several colleagues and I have students present briefly in the f2f class based on a message board conversation thread from the week before. The presentation also allows us to have a follow-up conversation about the topic we were discussing online, after the ideas have percolated a bit.

You can also use the writing-intensive electronic part of the course to exemplify writing-to-learn pedagogy. Students can identify areas of complexity and confusion on a message board, and then you can use those points from which to launch that week's in-class conversation (this strategy works well in a fully onsite class as well). For example, if you assign a difficult text, ask students to summarize the text online, and then you can see from their summaries (I often have each member of the class summarize one paragraph or section of a reading) fracture/weak points and discuss them in class.

You can conceive of the electronic component of the course as a way to sustain good f2f conversations. Often during an in-class conversation teachers think of something relevant to the conversation that they wish students could read. The hybrid is beautiful for this, allowing you to follow-up easily with readings and resources. You could make such connections overt and part of the course experience: After each class, students will come to expect some follow-up readings to augment their in-class work. One democratizing feature of e-learning is that you can encourage the students themselves to contribute to the "post-class reading lists," suggesting other readings that can be augmented by the onsite conversations. Really, your whole hybrid "mindset" can extend beyond the class itself. I once had a student say on an online evaluation of my teaching: "He even went as far as to contact me a term after I had taken him [...] to discuss how a topic that I wrote about in his class was now in the news." With e-connectivity, when inspiration strikes, you can reach out to your students.

In a similar vein, you can use the two modalities to appeal to different learning styles. Although learning style-based teaching is taking some heat lately, you can certainly do some simple things: Give the reticent in-class student opportunities to manage/moderate online threads or encourage the student who is a strong in-class contributor to bring out that voice in writing on the course message boards.

Students can also learn how to think about each other's work verbally and in writing. I find peer review a good hybrid crossover activity. If you have students engage in peer review in different ways, they will learn how to critique both f2f and in writing, and you can ask them to reflect on the difference: for instance, you could have students take their time out of class to write a written peer review online (and I have found advantages to giving them this kind of thinking time), and then you could use class time to discuss these reviews.

There are two underlying ideas here: One is to capitalize on the advantages of the two modalities. How do you make the most of each? The other is to show (again) how hybrid and online teaching can exceed normal onsite course boundaries. Class doesn't have to stop when class time ends. The course experience can be an evolving conversation that may peak when students are in class or writing on a thread online but that lingers during the whole term--and beyond.

Hybrids are hot: Suggestions for moving to hybrids

2010-09-29T08:32:00.006-12:00

In my recent travels, including during a Penn State Regional Colloquy at which I delivered the keynote, I've been hearing from lots of people about using digital tools to teach writing, and the will of the people is clear: Hybrids are hot. Educators and students are interested in combining online and onsite learning modalities.

This makes sense. The fully online environment is a huge leap for some, yet the fully onsite environment can lead teachers to neglect the flexibility, logistical advantages, and writing potential of digital communication tools. These feelings were bolstered by last year's study conducted for the U.S. Department of Education that students whose learning include online components learned more effectively than onsite students. Coupled with these findings are school movements to get students out of the classroom to enhance their learning. At Drexel, spearheaded by my colleague Valarie Arms, we have a component like this in our Freshman Writing Program called "English Alive," which views the City of Philadelphia as a "living text."

With a hybrid, students get the in-class anchoring that so many of them seem to need, especially when they are in their first year, but they also get the flexibility and enhanced writing environment of the online modality and opportunities to learn outside the classroom. As a student said in eCampus News of his hybrid course, "...it was a nice mix" (1).

So for various reasons, not all of them pedagogical (class space, market competitiveness, etc.), programs are looking to hybrids. People define hybrid or blended course in different ways. At Drexel's Freshman Writing Program, we are basically in class for half the time and out of the classroom the other half, and most, but not all, of that out-of-class time is online. So, for example, your Tuesday-Thursday course would meet in class from 9:30 to 10:50 on Tuesday as it always would, and then you would figure out a way to migrate that Thursday class experience into another format.

As I recommend for the move to fully online teaching, I think a good paradigm for new teachers is migration: Reflect on things that have worked well for you and think about how to conduct those experiences online. Here are a few ideas for the conversion, and of course many of these are similar to ways you would move to an online course:

1) Keep it simple. As I said, think about migration: How can you take your tried-and-true onsite practices and have them take place online?

2) If your class often centers on conversations about texts and other materials, you can have those conversations in many interesting ways online. I have written earlier posts about using message boards in this way.

3) Peer review is a great activity to migrate online. The peer review onsite class that you conduct with student drafts can be turned into a fully online experience.

4) There are many ways to deliver course "lessons" online, whether with asynchronous conversation tools, PowerPoint or other presentation software, or increasingly easy-to-use video technologies.

5) Hybrid can mean technology, but, as I mentioned, it doesn't have to. A hybrid experience for students can simply involve something outside the classroom walls. The one-on-one conference time that many of us have with our students can now be thought of as hybrid time. Going to see a performance or a speaker could be part of the hybrid part of the course one week.

As you know if you read this space, migration is my governing paradigm, and I still think it is the best way to get teachers initially comfortable with online tools. However, these digital learning spaces offer ways for us to re-think what we are doing. With the hybrid, rather than a cut-and-dry "Thursday migration," we have found ways to bring together the hybrid and online parts of the course, and we are seeking ways to maximize the articulation between online and onsite tools, basically to make the two halves of the course work synergistically to maximize student learning. Next time I'll look at some straightforward ways to try to make the two components work together.

1) See "Interest in Hybrid Courses on the Rise." eCampus News. February 2010. 15.

We made the list

2010-08-02T01:26:00.003-12:00

Maria from onlinedegrees.org posted a response last week to let me know that "Online Writing Teacher" made her useful list of "Top 10 blogs for writing teachers." You'll find some great resources in the blogs she lists.

Message board thread prompts (part II)

2010-07-30T08:31:00.004-12:00

My last post focused on prompts for specific situations and particular assignments. This time I'm going to look at a few term-long message board strategies/techniques.

Student-generated topics. With minimal instruction from you, each week students can be responsible for creating a prompt that their classmates will discuss. You can set up a simple schedule (on the message boards) in the beginning of the term.

Student moderators. Students can sign up in the beginning of the term to serve as moderators in certain weeks. In an email, I ask that week's moderators to participate and push the conversation on their thread; at the end of the week I require that they post a summary of the conversation on their thread. In hybrid courses, you can also ask them to present at the beginning of an onsite class about their thread--this is a great online-onsite bridge.

Peer reviews. I talk more about peer reviewing in an earlier post, but I wanted to emphasize that because message boards facilitate such easy sharing of writing, they are a great place for peer review. Using your guidelines, students can swap documents on the message board and/or work in small peer review groups. For hybrids, it makes a lot of sense to me to migrate your peer reviews online.

Portfolios. We're in the midst of an eportfolio initiative at Drexel, and the more we talk about portfolios, the more I see connections between electronic informal work and portfolios. A portfolio is a natural way for students to reflect on the rich body of work they create on the message boards. Now, I advocate significant teacher participation on the threads, but a reflective portfolio can also allow students to account for their writing in ways that may help with grading, especially for teachers with lots of students. Using the portfolio as their "raw material" also strikes me as a great way for students to create authentic responses when they write a reflective analysis of their work.

Class introspection threads. If you're gutsy, you can ask them on a thread to reflect midterm about the progress of the course. Of course, these comments will not have the anonymity of a midterm evaluation, unless your message board software allows for that, but this thread allows students to talk together with you about the course and its progress.

Questions about the course. I ask students to post any questions to a thread like this, which saves considerable time and effort, as students often have similar questions and, perhaps more importantly, they often answer their colleagues' questions. I use a thread like this, regardless of the modality in which I'm teaching.

Writing “puzzles.” I think the community self-policing for style and grammar on the message boards is excellent, but I use the non-threatening writing "puzzle" thread to delve further into mechanics. In the beginning of the term, I tell students I will periodically mine the message boards (and in a class of 20, I have 15,000 to 20,000 words from which to work each week) for examples of mechanical/grammatical flaws. I'm not looking to embarrass anyone for typos: I pick out examples of passive voice, dangling modifiers, and the ubiquitous comma splice, and I ask students to identify and discuss the "puzzle." They have had some great, spirited conversations about these writing issues.

Self-editing of posts. In a thread called "post proofs" I ask students to pick a few of their own earlier posts, edit them, and then write briefly what they think of the posts now. This is a great metawriting exercise, closely aligned with portfolio reflection. Because posts are low stakes, I think using them for self-editing is more inviting than asking students to do the same thing on a major project worth 25% of their grade.

Favorite posts. I always use a "My favorite post" thread, on which I ask students to identify their favorite post from another student and describe, using quotes and evidence, why they liked it. I up the ante at the end of the term with a thread called "My favorite poster," which asks them to choose a student whose posts were consistently strong. This is a great way to "pay it back" in the course.

Using groups. Finally, most message board systems allow you to divide students into smaller teams. This has many advantages, including as a way to have students discuss content. You may want them, say, to identify logical fallacies using a sample reading. There may not be enough fallacies in the reading for the whole class to discuss, so you can break them into groups and have each group handle the assignment independently. You could have a group leader then "present" the conversation from the group on a thread accessible by the whole class.

I'm really just getting started. Message boards provide so many innovative ways to have your students write. Also, I think it's worth noting here that convening your colleagues to talk about their ideas for threads will invariably strengthen everyone's practice immediately. This simple technology allows endless creative pedagogical approaches, and, as I've said before, it's superb for writing instruction.

Message board thread prompts (part I)

2010-05-31T02:13:00.011-12:00

I'm frequently asked about the kinds of prompts I use to start conversations on my message boards. There are so many ways to get students thinking and writing on the message boards, and below I'll go through a few common thread starters. I'll do this in two separate posts.

Remember that my message board pedagogy is grounded in the idea that we will build the ideas we are discussing as the conversation evolves during the week, and so I need to be a regular presence as a moderator and contributor. The initial prompt doesn't have to do all the work. In fact, I usually start with a very simple initial post and have a "map" of what I want students to learn laid out beforehand; I help guide the conversation based on that map, but students make plenty of interesting discoveries that steer the conversation in interesting ways.

Here are some typical threads that I use.

Thoughts and conversations about readings and class texts. Since many of our conversations stem from readings or other texts, these types of threads are common in my class. I normally begin with a simple, straightforward question: What is the author's main point? Do you agree with that main point? What do you think of the video you watched? Often, these prompts are only a sentence or two.

Course lessons. Plain and simple, the message board can be a great place to teach. Students can review a lesson in a variety of ways--textual materials, audio, video, PowerPoint slides--and then you can use the message board as a place to discuss aspects of that lesson.

Summaries. In first-year writing, we often want students to hone their summary skills. I have done this online by asking students as a class to summarize a complex article, with each student tackling a paragraph. You can use groups (I'll talk about that in the next entry) to break the work up here if you wish.

Stances on controversial issues. Ask students to articulate a clear stance on a controversial issue; I prefer if they do this using evidence from the course and other sources. Because the message board allows time to think, while their posts may still be polarizing, I find that they are more careful than similar stances onsite. As I've mentioned here, if your guidelines are clear, students will understand what you are asking and will do those things. If you want these to be evidence-based rather than shoot-from-the-hip opinions, make that clear. They will do it.

Online "minute paper." The “minute paper" (1) is a great use of writing in your class: At the end of an onsite class, you can ask students to summarize what they learned, or, perhaps more usefully, to describe what don’t they know or understand. A quick review of these responses will show you what they get and what needs to be covered more thoroughly. You can use a similar strategy with the message boards. In fact, even if you meet onsite, you can save class time by moving your "minute paper" online, which also makes it easier for you to gather and review these writings.

Project/paper topic discussions. I always spend a lot of time on the topic creation stage for written projects, having students talk a lot before they write. We often have spirited in-class conversations about potential topics. On the message board, this can be even better as students carefully reflect on their colleagues' ideas--and they have the entire power of the Web at their fingertips as they offer suggestions for readings and evidence.

Writing introspection/metawriting threads. These types of threads have been successful for me, especially as I have moved into writing about writing/writing studies approaches to teaching, in which we use the students' writing and their processes as the subject matter of the course (2). I ask about how they research, how they revise, their experiences with plagiarism. These threads have been fascinating, and students leap at the opportunity. Why? Well, for one thing, although they read, write, and conduct research in many of their classes, they are almost never asked to talk about the process behind these activities. I think they have a lot to offer to each other in sharing about these activities, which is why I sometimes call these threads “Tricks of the trade."

The provoker. I'm not much of a thespian, so playing different roles in the onsite classroom isn't my strong suit. But online, I can easily take on a different persona; I will write from the stance of a fake interlocutor--such as Dr. Logoetho--taking (what I think of as) extreme positions to get students to keep their cool and dismantle my arguments with evidence and rhetorical skill. These threads can also be a great education in having civilized discourse in electronic communications.

These ideas are for common weekly prompts. In my next entry, I'll talk about a few ideas for term-long threads.

1) John Bean discusses minutes papers in one of the all-time great books about using writing to help students learn, Engaging Ideas.

2) We are increasingly informing our first-year writing curriculum with the ideas that Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle articulated in “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies,’“ which appeared in College Composition and Communication (vol. 58, June 2007, pp. 552-84).

Updated message board participation guidelines

2010-03-29T07:55:00.006-12:00

Several years ago I posted instructions that I provide to my students at the start of a term to help them work on the message boards. In my pedagogy, I use the boards a lot, and one of my key suggestions for OWTs is to provide clear, detailed guidelines to students about how to work in this environment.

You may be surprised to find that you will get what you ask for: If you give guidelines for word count, students will more than meet you; if you say you want evidence, their posts will regularly have support; if you emphasize conversation, the environment will become a dialogic forum. It seems in talking with teachers that many problems using asynchronous tools stem back to unclear guidelines. Remember that students won't naturally how an academic interaction should look in an electronic environment.

Since that earlier post, I've made a number of changes to those guidelines--and I hope some improvements--and I wanted to update them here. The highlights of these changes reflect some of my refining of how to teach writing online.

First, I start off the guidelines now with four general rules that I want students to follow, reinforcing that I want them to read the posts, check the message boards regularly, provide a clear identity for themselves when they post (often the students' preferred names and their "official" names in the CMS are not the same), and, most importantly, build a conversation. I found myself repeatedly reminding students of this on the boards themselves, and while I still remind them, now I can refer them back to these guidelines when I do so.

I also now clearly divide the posts into three categories: primary, secondary, and "peeps." Peeps, and, I swear, the connection with Twitter "tweets" was just coincidental, are very short posts--even a word or two--designed to add conversational "glue" to this environment. In addition, I elaborate in the guidelines again about the importance of reading, advising students not to "post and run" or "post blind." Finally, I also describe the general thread categories that I use in the class, reinforcing their usefulness.

Here are these updated guidelines (again, I use Bb Vista):

Guidelines for participating on Bb Vista Discussions

Conversations that we have via Bb Vista Discussions will make up a major part of the work in this course. In most cases, I will pose a question or issue, and then you will respond to me or your colleagues or you will build a new idea based on the topic at hand. The responses will form useful and often fascinating conversations about the issues we are tackling. The whole time, we will be working on your writing; after all, that is what this class is all about. A few general matters:

Part of your responsibility as a student in this class is to read all of the posts. Yep, I mean all of them. At the end of the week, you should have no bold-faced, unread posts.
Check the Discussion boards regularly. You need to get into good habits starting in week one.
Make sure you sign your name at the bottom of your post. We want to know how to respond back to you.
As I describe below, you will write “primary,” “secondary,” and “peep” posts. It is important that we build a conversationwith these posts. After I read your primary posts, I will post specific questions throughout the term, as will your colleagues. Make sure you look at those questions and respond to them. You’ll soon see how this works, but do not simply reply over and over again to my initial prompt.

You will have three types of posts: “Primary,” “secondary,” and “peeps.” Each week, I will let you know how many primary and secondary posts are due. During the term, you are responsible for 10 “peeps”: The “peeps” are very short responses to someone else’s posts, usually only a sentence or even a few words. Here are the more involved guidelines for the other posts:

Rules for "primary” posts—these posts should be

Essays. Responses should not be one simple paragraph, and I expect them to reflect some reasoned thought on your part, thought beyond what you might put into a normal email or chat response. My students and I have found that these mini-essays present many excellent opportunities to refine the ability to make a clear, focused point when writing. In other words, these posts are great practice.
Detailed. Each of your "primary" posts must be at least 125 words. (Note: I'm not as interested in the actual word count as I am in the depth of your ideas. Obviously, a post like "Me too!!" doesn’t qualify as an “official” post.)
Semiformal. Your posts should contain some degree of formality: spell-checked, organized, etc. However, they will also be part of a dialogue, so in that regard they will differ from a major project you turn in for a class. I understand that it will take some time for us to reach a mutual understanding of the appropriate level of formality.
Referenced. While you won't always need citations in your posts, you should look for opportunities to build your argument by referencing our readings, other sources, or your colleagues' comments.
Courteous. We don't always have to agree (in fact, the class will be a disappointment if we always do), but no one should resort to flaming attacks.

Rules for "secondary" posts—"Secondary" posts should be similar to the above, but they can differ from "primary" posts by being

Less detailed: Response posts can be one paragraph.
Shorter: Response posts only need to be about 75 words.

Following are additional instructions:

Grading—Your Discussion work each week will be worth 20 to 30 points, adding up to a total of 250 points at the end of the term. In evaluating your posts, I will use these criteria:

If you complete them in an adequate manner, you will receive Bs.
If you go above and beyond the basic requirements of the assignments, you will receive As.
Very good—completed with a great deal of effort and thought—posts will receive full credit (e.g., 25 out of 25). You can also get full credit for posting with great passion or imagination.

Your Discussion posts will receive a C or below if they

are too short.
show little thought (especially if they answer questions in the same way other students have already answered).
are excessively sloppy in terms of grammar, spelling, and mechanics, especially to the point that they are difficult to understand.

engage in personal attacks or other breaches of common online etiquette.

are late.

Reading—You are responsible for reading all of the posts in the class, although you can obviously focus your attention on the threads in which you are directly engaged.

Don’t “post and run”—Once you post, you’re OBLIGATED to see what people say. In some cases, it seems weary students abandon their ideas after they post. More specifically, if someone responds to you, you should follow up with a response, however brief. I must admit that I feel miffed (and sometimes a little lonely) when I post and I’m ignored.
Don’t “post blind”—Try to be original. Don’t say the same thing as many other posts on a thread. Read before you post. Part of your job in the class is to “up the ante” with each post.

Shorter posts—In the spirit of keeping the conversation flowing, feel free to post as many shorter, informal comments on the Discussion threads as you like; for instance, writing a quick sentence to clarify a point or to state your agreement with another author’s point of view. But remember the rules for "primary" and "secondary" posts.

Staying current—In the Weekly Plan, you will see what Discussion topics are due and the deadlines for "primary" and "secondary" posts. One of your responsibilities in taking this hybrid course is that you will check the Discussion boards frequently and stay current on the conversations taking place there.

Extra credit—Those of you who are diligent, active members of these Discussions will find that you will receive a high grade for the ELC component of the course. If you post more than the required number of posts, you will be eligible for extra credit (some of you may naturally find that you have more to say on some of our topics this term, so I want to reward you).

In addition to the specific, graded Discussions about class readings and assignments, I have also created Discussion topics for general conversations you might want to have:

"Questions about the course” is a Discussion area you can use to ask questions about any work in the class. Before you email me with questions, post them to this forum. I will answer many common questions here, and you’ll be able to see the kinds of questions your classmates have. These too do not count for your grade, but many of my students have found this Discussion area to be quite useful.
"Lounge" is a Discussion thread you can use to talk about anything you wish. The only rule in Lounge is that you show basic standards of courtesy to your colleagues. These posts do not count for your grade.
“Tips Advice and Resources” is a place for us to post anything we come across that seems relevant to the work of the course.
“Writing puzzles” is a place where I will post specific writing “puzzles” based on the writing in the Discussion posts. I will randomly pick some materials for us to think about; even my own writing is game for this topic.

You will find, I believe, that through these Discussions you will have many opportunities in this course to work on and develop your writing. Make sure you take advantage of those opportunities.

Does it take me more time to teach online?

2010-01-29T07:23:00.002-12:00

Common wisdom--as reflected in conversations I've had as well as many discussions on listservs like WPA-L and Techrhet--would have it that teaching online is vastly more time-consuming. People say the front-end work, the monitoring of the written conversations, the technology snafus--they all added up to a more time-intensive endeavor.

That has not been my experience.

Now, if you are not computer savvy, don't own a computer, or you work from a very slow Internet connection, teaching using the Web is going to take time. However, I think many of the time calculations people use are skewed against teaching online for a variety of reasons, many of them based on perception and/or the frustrated way we treat digital vs. real-life problems. (Getting lost walking to class on the first day: Funny story for students! Unable to upload a file to your online class: Agony!) Note that some studies support that teaching online is not significantly more time-intensive than onsite teaching (see Hislop, for example [1]).

Below, I unscientifically compare some of my typical teaching activities for an online and onsite (I'll call it face-to-face [f2f] here to differentiate them more easily) first-year writing course, and I rate which takes more time. The f2f course meets Tuesdays and Thursdays for one hour and 20 minutes.

Pre-term general prep: Same. In developing the concepts, themes, and structure for a course, I don't spend more time teaching one way than I do another. When I first started teaching online, granted, I had to prepare a lot of materials beforehand. You will too. However, I don't know that I spent more time than in those anxiety-filled nights before I stepped into my first f2f class (I read the text we were discussing about 17 times, burying it beneath annotations). In addition, I use a course Website for every course, online, hybrid, or f2f. Sure, if you don't know your campus course management system (CMS), it's going to take longer to set it up, much like it will take you longer to get to class if you don't know where to park. Also, I want to debunk the common misconception that you have to prepare everything ahead of time for an online course--unless that's what you do for the f2f courses you teach. I provide major deadlines to students in the beginning of the term, but otherwise I assign readings and other work and reveal resources on a weekly basis in my online course, much as I do in my f2f course.

Pre-term development of course documents: Online, more. F2f, you create a syllabus and other guidelines for your students. Online, you also likely create other materials to help orient students to the class.

Organizing the course: Online, more. A significant organizational component of the f2f class is often done for us by a registrar that tells students where to be and when. Online, you have to do this structuring.

Reading course texts: F2f, more. Especially when teaching a new text, I will pore over it for an f2f class in a way I find unneccesary when teaching online. I don't have a photographic memory, so when teaching f2f I spend lots of time looking over the text to try to prepare for unexpected questions. Online, I can refer to the text as I'm conversing with them on our message boards, so one good annotated reading is more than enough.

Other class prep: Same. Class prep here is not accurate, since my online "classroom" is asynchronous. But I spend about the same time preparing activities for my f2f class as I do developing online modules and lessons. For example, it takes me as long to set up an exercise on logical fallacies for either class. It takes me as long to create an f2f quiz as it does to create an online quiz. It takes me the same amount of time to create a presentation. Etc.

Traveling to class: F2f, more. On some campuses, this can eat up an hour or more of your time a week just walking around campus, let alone the actual travel to school if you drive there solely to teach.

Teaching the class: Same. Obviously, my categories are loose, but in my f2f class I'm in the class for two hours and 40 minutes total. That's the amount of time--and I actually restrict myself in this way--I spend facilitating and responding to posts, presenting a PowerPoint-type workshop, and/or doing other "teaching-like" activities online. This similarity can be even more obvious if you teach synchronously using live classroom software like Wimba. For many teachers, including myself, asynchronous tools replace f2f conversations that we have in class.

Using multimedia: F2f, more. Online, I create a link on the CMS in seconds to a video for the class to view and discuss. F2f, I have to spend time setting up a way to show the multimedia in my class, which can range from negligible if you have a well-equipped classroom to significant if you have to secure a projector, lug it across campus, set it up, etc.

Computer issues: Online, more. If you don't use a computer at all in f2f teaching, the results here are obvious: You depend on the computer online. Even though I do a lot with my CMS and email in the f2f course, I clearly don't rely on the Web like I do when teaching online.

Providing feedback on/grading substantive student projects: Same. As I mentioned in a recent workshop about teaching writing online that I facilitated (with a great group of faculty) at Georgia Southern, I don't talk too much about the paper/essay/project evaluation cycle, because it's the same for me whether online, f2f, or hybrid: I work with e-documents. I have to say here that there a slew of electronic tools to help you evaluate faster--and probably better--but they are available for any modality.

Conferencing/communicating with students individually: Same. Students in my online courses visit me in my office for a meeting an average of about one less conference per student than in an f2f course. Students in both types of courses email me a lot, although a bit more in the online class. Online students also tend to call me slightly more than in the f2f course. It basically equals out.

If you don't like working on the computer, teaching online may take more time, and it will certainly seem that way. If you're disorganized, teaching online will definitely take more time. If you live three hours from campus, teaching f2f is going to be a much more time-consuming endeavor. If you spend an hour after every class talking informally with students, f2f is going to take longer. So what you get is a temporal give and take: There' s not a universal truth here.

Really, I haven't been fair to online teaching, because I haven't at all touched on leveraging of the technology. F2f, we do the same things over and over--after all, that's part of teaching (and, I've discovered, parenting). Online, you can leverage the technology to save time. My weekly plans (html-based tables), general message board instructions, project-based writing workshops--I have large archives of those materials I re-create for the current course. Online, I'm not spending time making Word docs; I'm thinking hard about my students' writing!

You may still not agree with me, but I will close with my experience: Teaching online for me does not take more time than teaching f2f. In fact, because online I work with so much more of my students' writing, I think I work less--and I work smarter.

Your results may vary.

Note:

1) Hislop, Gregory W., and Heidi J. C. Ellis. “A Study of Faculty Effort in Online Teaching.” Internet and Higher Education 7.1 (2004): 15–31.

Reaching a level of quality on the class message boards

2009-11-30T09:00:00.003-12:00

When using message boards, you may worry about how you will get your class to the desired level of quality in their written conversations. However, you may find, as I have, that a collective--and constructive--norming occurs in this environment, and this usually happens quickly in the term. While teacher grading and participation will help with this, you may be surprised to find that you are not even the most important factor.

I provide careful instructions to my students about course expectations on the message boards, as I've mentioned in a previous post, and I can continue to say that I have yet to have a student question a grade on a single post. It's never happened. In addition, I've noticed, as have my students this fall (we were just talking about this), that the level of conversation in the course on the message boards improves as the term goes on. Why?

In an environment in which students write publicly, class norms are established among the students in the class, and if you couple this with some informal grading and some participation on your part, you will not need to monitor the boards constantly and to grade to the point of burn-out. The students in the class quickly elevate their level of contribution to the course conversation, reaching a group norm of the expectation of quality--which you can defined in a number of ways--for the written message board work in the course.

I think this is a function of three interrelated factors: One, simple grading of discussion posts as informal work (say, on a quick 10-point scale per post or a weekly holistic grade) provides an ongoing feedback loop for students throughout the term. They get lots of grades, and they are not waiting for weeks to see just what their teacher thinks about their writing. Also, the many low-stakes grades allow teachers to use grades perhaps in that most constructive way: as a baseline for conversation. Second, your contributions--even just a few--help reinforce good posts (and writing) and place you as an interested reader/participant.

But the third factor is an inherent function of the class asynchronous communication setting. This environment provides a strong influence that can change--almost always for the better--the written contributions of students. You may see a progression in several areas:

Editorial cleanness: Students quickly come to recognize that sloppy posting isn't acceptable, and only when they're behind will you see a lot of typos and errors after the first few posts.
Use of evidence: If you want evidence in posts, ask for it. I do, and sometimes it takes a few weeks, but if you keep asking for students to substantiate their arguments, some do, and it catches on for much of the class.
Length: Students realize short posts aren't acceptable. In fact, they can feel cheated by shirkers.
Sophistication: The level of the conversation and thinking can increase precipitously in the first few weeks as students see how smart--and interesting--their peers are.

There are certainly downsides we could explore to situations of "virtual social pressure" like this, but for classroom writing and learning, I think we are building a constructive environment. If you want to avoid groupthink, as the teacher you can help not just by rewarding creativity and innovation in the post grades, but by overtly commenting on such posts on the boards themselves. I can tell you that some of my favorite posters were students who took on me and the other students all term.

Now, you can certainly hasten the development of this environment by being involved yourself on the boards, but a lot of this will grow organically (however, if you don't get involved at all, I think you are asking for trouble). Realize that good work in this environment is contagious, and a few hard-working students, sometimes just one, can elevate the course conversation for the rest of the group. Students begin to see the potential, and they go for that higher level not just in their individual writing efforts but in their interactions with each other.

Just how much are they writing online?

2009-09-30T05:54:00.004-12:00

One of the main reasons I'm such an advocate of digital environments for writing--especially first-year writing--courses is because, plain and simple, students write so much in these environments. If teachers use asynchronous tools, their courses easily become focused on student texts.

But just how much do students actually write with these asynchronous tools? Last spring, I taught a hybrid first-year course, Analytical Writing & Reading, a literature for composition-type course. Remember, Drexel is on the quarter system, so this was a 10-week course. In this hybrid, my students met once a week, on Tuesdays, and much of their work for the second half of the week took place online, with the bulk of that work being conversations about texts on message boards (in this case, Bb Vista Discussions). I also used the Journal function of Bb Vista Discussions to enable each student to set up a journal; essentially, the Journal function creates a message board thread only viewable by the instructor and the student, and I found it a convenient way to maintain journals.

As a step toward answering the question "how much do students actually write?," I cut-and-pasted all of the message board and journals posts from two students in the course, placed them in a Word file, and then counted the approximate results (making sure to subtract post headers and such). Student 1 wrote 6,800 words in the journal and 8,300 words on the course message boards. Student 2 wrote 9,100 words in the journal and another 9,000 words on the message boards.

Although I know students write a lot in my classes, I was still a bit awed by the amount of writing: These students are writing, again in an environment with all of the advantages I've described in earlier posts, an additional 1,500 to nearly 2,000 words each week on top of their formal projects and other informal assignments.

I want to make a couple comments to accompany these results. One is that this wasn't just a lot of writing; no, this was a lot of high-quality writing. Also, while these two were both certainly good students who were on the high end of the scale in terms of their performance in the course, they were within the "normal" behavior of students in this environment; in other words, this is representative student work in my courses.

1,500 to 2,000 words a week. That's a lot of writing--and that's what I want my writing courses to be about.

How much should you participate in student online conversations?

2009-07-31T05:54:00.004-12:00

I am often asked how much I think teachers should participate with message boards and other asynchronous writing environments.

There's not a one-size-fits-all rule, but I say this: You should be involved with the writing your students do in these communication environments.

Some teachers take a hands-off approach. Their reasons may range from the soundly pedagogical--not wanting to commandeer class conversation--to the practical--they have many classes and can't keep up with the conversations.

For sure, there can be a danger to your over-participation in these environments. As George Collison and his co-authors said, you can fall into "Hijacking the Dialogue" (1)--shutting down conversation or dominating it so students have little room to express their own views.

The dialogue among students in asynchronous environments can often be about students' communicating with each other, honing and refining their writing. You can obstruct that with over-involvement. In my classes, though, much of the teaching of the class takes place in these environments. So while I encourage student-centered discussion, I realize I need a voice. After all, I am the teacher. All student posts are not equal: Some of their posts digress, and sometimes they're plain wrong. I need to provide them with the support and guidance they expect from the teacher.

Also, some teachers have impossibly heavy teaching loads, and it may indeed be difficult to be active in all of the conversations taking place. However, if you don't participate much because of the time it takes, I think we need to go back again to comparing your online or hybrid courses with your f2f teaching, not just in terms of what you do, but the time it takes.

No matter how many sections of f2f writing you're teaching, you wouldn't simply show up in your f2f class and sit there silently every class while students talk--no matter how student-centered you are. That sort of "transfer" thinking should apply here to the way you conduct your online classes. Even if you need to set a timer, you should dedicate some of the time you would have spent in an f2f class to participating in your online conversations.

As you know if you read this space, I think a tremendous amount of student-directed writing and learning takes place in asynchronous environments. But if we are completely--or even mostly--absent from these conversations, then a variety of things might happen:

Students might view the whole exercise as busy work. Disgusted students may even put up nonsense posts or cut-and-paste the same comments from week to week to see if the teacher will catch on.
The conversation could go off track or, worse, could get nasty. As the teacher, you have a responsibility to create a sense of decorum, much as you would in the classroom.
As I mentioned, the learning in the class might be compromised. My asynchronous conversations build the learning of the course. I must have hand in shaping that learning.

What is the ideal response rate? I have a loose goal--that I do come surprisingly close to hitting each term--of having a quarter of the posts be mine. So about one out of every four posts is from me. This varies significantly. Some threads buzzing along so nicely that my comments would only intrude. Other threads seem to need an every-other post from me.

While some teachers have success with minimal posting, I think we must be mindful of being too hands-off. While moving the teacher away from being the center of all class activity and conversation is a good thing, an absent teacher could breed resentment and frustration among students, short-circuiting the learning goals of the course.

Note:

1) From the great book by George Collison, Bonnie Elbaum, Sarah Haavind, and
Robert Tinker: Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators. Madison: Atwood Publishing, 2000.

My book is now available

2009-06-24T02:09:00.003-12:00

I'm excited to announce that my book, Teaching Writing Online: How and Why (NCTE), is now available. Check it out at http://www1.ncte.org/store/books/comp/130888.htm or

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Writing-Online-How-Why/dp/0814152538/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245761111&sr=8-1.

Talking literature on message boards

2009-05-29T15:04:00.006-12:00

Teaching writing often involves a kind of fluid idea of course content: Often, our "content" can be largely based in the student texts created that term. But we still do teach a lot of what you would otherwise call "content." In fact, if you take a writing about writing/writing studies approach (1), as we do at Drexel, composition and rhetoric research are important components of the curriculum.

And, of course, many compositionists still teach literature (2), and we often teach literature, for lack of a better term, for its own sake.

As you know if you read this space, I am a fan of asynchronous, message board conversations. So what might online conversations about literary works look like online?

First off, know that students can produce high-level work when they converse about literary texts online. To help them, you can create whatever guidelines you wish, including requiring them to quote their texts heavily, helping them build that evidence "muscle."

To start these conversations, prompts should be simple and direct, encouraging text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections (3). Remember when creating prompts that you can interact later with students on the threads. If your goal is for them to build collaboratively their knowledge in the class, then don't give them initial prompts with too many constraints. For instance, create simple prompts around topics like this:

Ask them if they would agree or disagree with a character's actions or statements. How would they have acted in the same situation?
For poems and short pieces, ask them simply what a work means to them.
Where there's ambiguity, explain what happened. Sometimes even better, ask them to pose questions about the work.
Describe the significance of a symbol, action, metaphor, etc.
Connect one work with another they have read (or with a film, an incident in pop culture, etc.).
Comment on a particular aspect of a work--such as the setting or plot.
Analyze a particular quote.
Link two or more works based on a common theme--especially with poems and short stories--and ask them to comment from there.

These examples all lend themselves to short, one- or two-sentence prompts.

When facilitating literary-based online discussions, there is an important thing to keep in mind: The students have the Web at their fingertips. This could be frustrating, especially if you love to wow them by revealing surprises inherent in works: How many students are stunned that Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" could be about an abortion?

You may be reluctant to lose some of that power. But you can use the students' connectedness to your advantage in several ways. First, you can immediately focus the discussion's energy on higher-level problems raised in texts, the kind of issues that ultimately make literature so satisfying for us to read and discuss. Also, in these conversations students can work on interpretations embedded and developed in their particular class. What can be especially interesting is working on text-to-self connections and having other students respond to those connections. Finally, they can work hard on practicing the challenging skill of incorporating texts--from the literature as well as from each other--expertly in their own posts.

I put this issue of their Web access right out there for them, by the way: I tell them we're going to talk about literary works, and I assume they will use all of the resources available. I just ask them overtly to make sure they cite their sources.

A recent experience in my first-year hybrid class confirmed the power of this environment for discussing literature. After reading Ibsen's A Doll's House, we started our conversation in our onsite meeting and then moved to an online discussion. The final moment of the play, Nora's door slamming, has been widely considered since the play's first production (just check Google if you don't believe me) as a noble, powerful act. Yet one student, several days into the conversation, observed that children are big door-slammers (I live with three of them and can confirm this), so she wondered if Nora's act was a continuation of her childish behavior. The student who expressed this clever alternative view hardly ever spoke in our f2f classes. Not just her comment but the fact that she made it on our message board affirmed for me how students can generate creative thoughts from literature after having some time to think about and reflect on the work, which of course are the basic advantages built into using asynchronous discussions.

Notes:

1) We at Drexel have based our approach on Downs and Wardle's College Composition and Communication article “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies’”(58.4, 2007, 552–84) and the many conversations that it spawned.

2) See Anderson and Farris' anthology, Integrating Literature and Writing Instruction (MLA, 2007)

3) I'm borrowing this terminology from Zlotnick Schmidt, Crockett, and Bogarad's literature anthology Legacies (fourth edition)

Drexel's media conversion system

2009-03-30T06:28:00.004-12:00

In a March 2008 post, I wrote about using video in online writing (OW) courses. In that post, I briefly mentioned that Drexel has a sophisticated media conversion system that makes it easy for Drexel teachers to use video and other media. Now I want to provide you with more information about Drexel's system. The system, once known as the Rich Media Conversion Project, is now called DragonDrop (Drexel's mascot is a dragon, Mario the Dragon to be exact). This has been a multi-year, continually evolving project involving several iterations of the software and its interface. The system helps teachers create media files and make them available to--or "publish" them for--their students in a variety of formats. (You can learn more about this at http://www.drexel.edu/IRT/rmcweb/, but I'll talk about the basics of it here from my usual perspective, that of the OW teacher.)

With DragonDrop, you can use built-in recording software to create screencapture videos: videos of your computer screen with accompanying audio. You can then upload the video file that you've created via a simple, clean Web interface that allows you to choose file output formats so your students can access the material. Drexel's system creates an accompanying Website automatically that contains the various media files. Students simply navigate there and click. Here is an example: https://rmcp.dcollege.net/playlists.aspx/501/16215/rss. If you click on the video links on that Webpage, you will see two short (<1 href="http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp">http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp). There are other types of software you can use to create screencaptures, and Drexel's system now has a built-in recorder, but I like using Camtasia to record the audio and visual from my laptop.

I "produced" the completed video using the Camtasia software to put it into an .avi audio/video format. Don't get hung up on the concept of "producing": This production process is simple and only takes a few clicks with Camtasia; basically, producing turns the "raw" recorded video into a sharable .avi file.

Next I logged onto Drexel's DragonDrop system using my Drexel userid and password.

Via the Web DragonDrop interface pictured below, I then uploaded the file. The system asked me to name the "playlist," or the name of the Website that would contain the media materials. It then asked me to name the file and to indicate the output, that is, what type of file I wanted my audience to be able to access. Drexel's system gives you multiple output formats for audio and video: 3GPP, Flash Video, MP3, MP4, Real Media, and/or Windows Media Video. I say "and/or" because you can produce your video in multiple formats, as I have done with the example above. You can also briefly describe and tag the file to help with later searches.

I received an automated email from DragonDrop when the files were encoded; the email gave me the Website address above. As I said, Drexel's system automatically creates this Website as a home for the media files. Then, all my students (or you) need to do is go to the URL and click on the files to watch/listen to the media (don't forget, viewers must have the appropriate media software to view the files; sometimes this is a snag with students). I can use the same URL all term for my class, if I choose, adding additional media materials as the term progresses to the same URL "playlist." The media files are "streaming," which basically means that when you click on the files they are continuously downloading as you watch them rather than needing to be downloaded as a large file all at once.

The Drexel DragonDrop system is a beautiful thing, and it significantly simplifies the process of creating and, perhaps even more importantly, distributing media materials to students. This system is also a great example of a partnership between teachers and technology experts. The Drexel IT folks have worked with faculty to make the system as user-friendly as possible, and faculty have found creative ways to use this tool to enhance their courses. I think part of our job as OW teachers is to explore the technologies available and then work with the technical experts on ways of using technology in pedagogically sound ways. We can do some amazing things together that will ultimately benefit the teaching and learning that takes place in our classes.

Students message board moderators

2009-01-30T03:57:00.003-12:00

Using student moderators can be another way to expand the communication possibilities of asynchronous tools when you teach online writing courses. Moderators can help build the class dialogue without your having to micromanage each conversation. In addition, for those of you who teach many sections, moderators may help you juggle all of the conversations in your courses each week.

Rita Conrad and J. Ana Donaldson provide a number of examples of learner-led activities (see especially pages 110-19), in which students take the lead in generating conversations and activities in an online class (1). In my class, I start out the term by asking students to sign up for the week they will moderate. I do this by using a message board thread, and they simply have to put their name and the moderation week in the subject line. It's okay if there are multiple moderators in a given week, as I have many different threads each week (as I've mentioned in earlier posts about message boards).

At the beginning of the week, I send each moderator a message like this:

Hi Chris,
I just wanted to touch base with you about moderating for week three, and I want to thank you for signing up for this week.

Please help moderate these two threads: "Analyzing rhetorical effect" and "Visual literacy and immigration." As moderator, please do the following: let everyone know that you'll be moderating the conversation on those threads; keep up with what's being said; and, much like I have during week one, try to move the conversation forward with questions and new ideas. Basically, try to keep things on track.

At the end of the week, I will ask you to write a brief summary (no more than a secondary post) of each thread and post it there. The summary will address what happened on that thread during the course of the conversation.

If you have any questions during the week, let me know, but I think you will get a feel for how this works as the week unfolds.
Thanks,
Prof. Warnock

I basically ask the moderators to keep active in the conversations, which they do quite well, and then to post a summary post on that thread about what transpired in the conversation that week. Everyone gets a turn at moderating, and this moves me out of the role of sole class moderator and all-around big voice of control in the course. In fact, recently in one of my classes there was a good, polemical conversation about illegal immigration, and I was glad not to have to be the only one helping students navigate this material.

I grade the moderator role as a 20-point informal assignment (like a double-strength post in my thousand-point system).

You can take this idea of moderating further. You might also want to explore enabling students to develop the prompts they will moderate. You could also ask students to serve not only as moderators but as evaluators of each other's work. For instance, Katrina Meyer investigated having students rate each other’s posts based on their value to their class. She felt this allowed “both instructors and highly regarded students” to influence how the class proceeds (2).

Finally, and most importantly, students may learn valuable writing and communicating skills by serving as moderators. They may see how challenging it can be to manage a conversation and encourage participation, and their writing authority shifts when they assume the role of moderator, which I think is always an interesting way to help them re-think their writing roles in a course.

Notes:

1) From their book, Engaging the Online Learner (2004).

2) From Meyer's article “Does Feedback Influence Student Postings To Online Discussions?” in The Journal of Educators Online (4.1 [2007]): <http://www.distance-educator.com/dnews/Article15296.phtml>.

Meeting them in the e-writing environment

2008-11-26T08:57:00.004-12:00

I am a believer in the online writing instructional environment for a number of reasons. One of them is, as I've said before in this very space, that online learning students are writing all the time. I think we can use the technological medium to encourage and support more writing, to the benefit of our students.

Some worry, though, that this e-writing they are doing may be doing more harm than good, hindering students' ability to write in the formal genres and styles required of them in school and in their careers. A recent MSN.encarta article looked at this question, asking "Can Technology Make Teens Better Writers?" (1) In the article, Kent State prof. William Kist (2) recounts a story in the article in which he watched a teenager texting away during a major league baseball game. "I suppose some people think, 'That's pretty lame. Why doesn't he watch the game?' But I was thinking, at what point in history do we have most teen boys and girls constantly writing? It does open up an opportunity for teachers to talk about communication and audience. ... I think it's an exciting time."

I see things as Kist does. Even my students themselves are sometimes sheepish about their IM, text, Facebook, and (decreasingly--email seems as if it's almost becoming passe) email writing. But I encourage them by making it clear that I think this technologically-mediated writing is indeed capital "W" writing: It's real, and we can use it to help them get better as writers, period. The online instructional writing environment holds promise partially because it allows us to serve as a kind of mediator between the free-form, coded, technologically-based writing students are doing in their everyday lives and the formal writing they will do as students and professionals. (But let's not get carried away with a stilted view of professional writing, because plenty of professional writing will carry the earmarks of the e-communications environment; see Andrew Sullivan's Why I Blog in this month's Atlantic.[3])

We have to help our students see these connections.

I've already discussed the many advantages, for instance, of the simple message board environment in previous posts. That quick-hitting, multi-audience, dynamic posting environment can help them take their oft-used electronic writing skills and alter them for academic purposes; I've never had a problem asking students to shift their writing to the semi-formal environment and expectations of our class. I've been working on a paper about this in which I'm articulating the e-environment as a way of reducing the interface of writing: The obstacles to writing can be reduced for students in the e-environment, and we can guide them as mentors and teachers by encouraging their writing in environments in which they are already comfortable. Lavazzi talked about “pedagogic ‘happenings’” while students surf the Web; (4) in short, we can teach them while they are there.

Whether we use multimedia projects; think about the writing they are doing as "digital storytelling"; or simply use technological tools like message boards, blogs, and wikis to facilitate some of the conversations and activities of our courses, I think we can adhere to whatever traditional instructional values about "good" writing--an elusive concept indeed--we might hold while recognizing that the e-writing students are doing can be used to help them with that "real" writing with a capital "W" that we're hoping they develop as well.

Notes:
1) Slager, Melissa. "Can Technology Make Teens Better Writers?" msn.encarta. http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Departments/Elementary/Default.aspx?article=TeensBetterWriters
2) Kist is the author of New Literacies in Action: Teaching and Learning in Multiple Media.
3) Sullivan, Andrew. Why I Blog. The Atlantic. November 2008. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/andrew-sullivan-why-i-blog
4) See Tom Lavazzi. “Communication On(the)line.” South Atlantic Review 66.1 (Winter 2001): 126-144.

Leveraging digital materials

2008-09-30T05:42:00.003-12:00

As this new fall term starts off, I'm immersed in my latest hybrid English 101 course. This is the fifth straight year I am teaching 101 at Drexel, and it's also fifth straight year I am doing so with a new syllabus.

We are using a new syllabus this year in our freshman writing program (FWP), a combination of an approach we call "English Alive" (here is Inside Higher Ed's coverage of a 2007 NCTE presentation two colleagues and I gave about English Alive: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/19/alive) and the "writing studies" approach described in CCC by Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle (1), all grounded in technologically-mediated learning strategies. As the director of our FWP, I can tell you that it was quite a summer putting all of this together.

I don't mind the constant shift in syllabi at all, because I enjoy innovations in my classroom, and I think switching the curriculum keeps me fresh as a teacher. However, I am finding even more so this year than in the past that I am able to streamline aspects of my teaching by leveraging digital technology. With a little bit of decent archiving and record keeping, I have access to materials like:

Message board prompts
Writing, learning, and studying message board tips for students
Homepage announcements
Videos of workshops and presentations
Files--PowerPoint, Word, etc.--of teaching materials

I am finding it remarkable how much time I can save. Just yesterday, I wanted to post to my students some guidance on improving their message board conversations. Because I have developed the practice of saving posts like that from older classes, I browsed the Word file I have used to keep guidance and advice tips. I found a similar message, tailored it for this particular class, and then quickly posted it. I also posted in my homepage announcements (I use the header space in Bb Vista for this) a few class reminders. Since I save my homepage announcements from past classes (again simply in a Word file), I was able to cut and paste a familiar old announcement and update it.

As the term develops, I will have access to course lessons in PowerPoint, Word, and/or video that help communicate ideas to help students workshop their drafts, write with clarity, develop topics, etc.

In short, I have developed a textual and multimedia library of important teaching materials. There is nothing fancy here; I simply save things to my hard drive so they are accessible in any medium I choose to use. Also, as I hope I've made clear by pointing out that I'm teaching my fifth syllabus in five years, I don't reproduce materials blindly, falling into teaching autopilot, but I certainly save keystrokes and writing invention time so I can focus on other aspects of the class.

This is not about saving time at the expense of teaching creativity or originality. This is about leveraging digital reproducibility to save time on repetitive tasks so your teaching time is focused on higher-level concerns.

In addition, all of the materials I have described above are available to my colleagues, so I can easily distribute components of my class to fellow faculty, no matter what teaching modality they are using.

Focusing on higher-level teaching matters, sharing materials--these are the things we should be doing as teachers, and the digital environment can help us do that.

Notes:

1) Downs, Douglas and Elizabeth Wardle. “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies.’“ College Composition and Communication 58.4 (June 2007): 552-84.

Peer review

2008-07-31T07:26:00.004-12:00

A standard practice in many, perhaps most, first-year writing courses is peer review. As Hanson and Vogt say of peer editing, “It is appropriate for students in a writing class to be involved in the process of peer editing since editing is so important a part of good writing” (577) (1).

As with most teaching strategies, you do not have to abandon your trusted peer review practices in online instruction. In fact, you may find ways to enhance peer review with electronic tools.

Online peer review can be as easy as asking two students to exchange documents and reviews via email. You would just need to provide students with access to each other's emails, whether that is the email embedded within your course management system or students' standard email accounts. You can follow the process by having them cc you on their interactions. You could post or email a list of partners; I often just alphabetically match students:A reviews B, B reviews C... Z reviews A.

But things can be more interesting. Using your course management group/team functions, you can put groups of students--maybe four--together and have them work as a peer review group, maybe throughout the entire term. These peer review groups require everyone involved to write and read carefully--exactly what we want in a writing class. You could match them up with different partners within the group, or you could have one student on the "hot seat" while the other three take turns critiquing. Most CMSs allow you to have private groups, so this can be a space within the larger classroom.

Using message boards, you can also ask a whole class to critique a few drafts, meaning you'll have more reviews than drafts. This creates an interesting writing situation; I require subsequent reviewers to not only critique the draft but to account for previous reviews in doing so, thus building a chain of either consensus or productively contradictory messages. You could do this type of review via wiki or blog software.

Software tools can help you as well. Waypoint is one. This is a tool I helped design (as a member of Subjective Metrics, Inc.). Waypoint is Web-based rubric software that allows you to create peer reviews in which students have access to a rubric similar to the one you use for grading; this allows them to "see behind the curtain" and understand how their own writing will be evaluated. They "grade" their colleagues based on specific criteria, and they also write comments to elaborate on their choices (see www.gowaypoint.com).

You could also use a white board with or without audio to allow students to post drafts and receive comments. This resembles the kind of workshop some might use in f2f classes, and you can explore means of using that whiteboard space, chat, or voice technology to replicate that experience.

As the teacher, I do not mind inserting myself into the dialogue and helping reinforce some of the better points while steering the student away from the vacuous "great job!" comment or the comment that is off track.

Regardless of how you conduct peer review, you will want to to follow a few straightforward guidelines:

Provide crystal clear instructions. Don’t allow students just to respond to whether they "liked" a piece or not. Focus them on specific details: What is the main idea? Was the essay persuasive? What sources would help the writer?
Create a length requirement. By creating a simple length requirement, I have changed my peer reviews. They are chunkier and more substantive, all because I have asked students to write 125 or 250 words or whatever. They now have some baseline.
Don’t allow an “answer the question” approach. In providing guidelines, be careful to remind students not to simply provide answers to a list of questions.
Make it clear you want a critic, not a cheerleader. If not, some students will default to the comment, “This paper is great! All you need to do is __,” with the blank being filled by something superficial like spelling or punctuation.
Provide a clear genre for the comments. Do you want a letter? A brief paper? A memo? I like the memo, which is useful for the transmittal of documents. Regardless, make sure students know how you want the review to look.
Grade the reviews. They peer review itself should be a solid piece of writing that is graded on the informal scale in the course. If you give the peer reviews a grade, you reinforce their importance. Don't be shy about critiquing the reviews--you can do so without being mean-spirited.

As I mentioned above with Waypoint, one thing that can arise from your use of reviews is that you can provide students with the grading guidelines/rubric that you will use. This can be an empowering moment for them, and at least as valuable as the feedback they provide to their colleague.

Note:
1) In Theresa Enos, ed., A Sourcebook for Basic Writing Teachers.

Think about assessment

2008-05-30T08:19:00.009-12:00

The point of this post is that online writing teachers would be well served to be thinking about assessment. By assessment here, I don't mean evaluation of students and their work. I mean assessment in a course and, perhaps, programmatic, sense: How effective are instructional methods for writing in the online setting? What methods emerge as "best practices" in this setting? Is student writing different in this environment? If so, how?

If we believe our methods are solid, if we believe that the opportunities in the online teaching world are substantial, if we believe that we can help our students learn to write effectively, then we need to mine the resources--textual and otherwise--at our fingertips to demonstrate that what we do online makes sense and is pedagogically sound.

There are many methods, some of them relatively untapped, to help us demonstrate the kinds of things that are happening in our classes and how we might measure how student behaviors affect learning. Of course, we can look at student evaluations or surveys. But, if we use message boards as a primary means of class communication, we could also look at student posting habits and how they relate to student success: Do early posters/discussion participants have different outcomes in a class (I looked at this in a post here in April 2006)? Do students who follow up their posts have a different experience? Does post length have any meaning in terms of course outcome? Number of errors? We could perform a number of interesting, localized assessments of our own class practices using the student texts archived right in our own courses.

Also, because of the large amount of informal writing we can easily assign and use online, can we find quantitative or qualitative differences in the writing students do in this environment? How do students collaborate online, in peer review and team-based projects? What works in e-collaborations? What doesn't?

We also can certainly think about our efforts in terms of do no harm, bolstering the "no significant difference" aspect of online instruction by thinking about retention, student evaluations, and perhaps even student grades in future writing courses.

I write this partially as a way to motivate myself, because I'm aware that right under my nose in my online class are archives containing a wealth of information that can help us build an understanding of not only how students perform online but how they learn in general.

It's an assessment-based education world, for sure. In order to support our work, like anyone else in teaching, we should be looking for ways, in our own classes, program wide, and across the field, to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of what we are doing. There are a variety of resources to help develolp the framework of such studies, including the impressive recently published anthology Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues by Heidi McKee and Danielle Nicole DeVoss (Hampton Press, 2007). A CCCCs group, chaired by Beth Hewett, is looking into best practices in online writing instruction. Check out CompPile for a search on [assessment]. Or delve into assessment resources and model articles on sites like MERLOT or Sloan-C or one of the many journals dedicated to online learning, such as the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration.

Much of the research focus on online learning has been on so-called "content" courses. It would seem there is an open vista before us for assessment of writing-centered courses in this environment. Exploring that will help us validate our teaching work to external audiences, our students, and, of course, our selves.

Videos for writing courses

2008-03-31T03:45:00.003-12:00

There are many tools to help you teach writing in the electronic environment. Almost every term I try something new, and in most cases, I find that new tools aren't just bells and whistles; instead, each one can help you refine and expand the way you teach.

As I've mentioned, I think the online environment is ideal for a writing class because almost everything that happens in such a class is text. So while tools have evolved that allow students to communicate in ways other than writing, I still want them to rely on their writing (and reading) in the course.

That begin said, video can be a great asset to you as a teacher. Of course, the use of video is booming on the Web, at times even dominating Internet traffic (1). How could you use video in the class?:

To introduce the course--Especially in a fully online setting, it might be useful for you to deliver a 10- to 15-minute video course introduction. This way, students actually see you, which could help them in terms of framing you as an audience for their writing projects as well as simply associating a name with a face.
To deliver content--Many online courses deliver content via video. Using voiced-over PowerPoints can be a good, simple way to deliver some content in the course, and there are more sophisticated ways to record and share course "content" lessons.
To conduct workshops--I have found great use for writing workshops delivered via PowerPoint. Much like a fast-paced in-class workshop, I'll ask online students to perform certain focused tasks on their drafts in a fixed period of time.
To evaluate student writing--I have just written a book chapter about using video response; I think this is a very intriguing way for us to respond back to our students, creating a kind of "virtual conference" effect.
For student projects--Just because you're teaching online doesn't mean you have to abandon student presentations. Students can use videos tools not just to receive materials from you but to produce and submit their work as well.

Although I do get a lot of use out of videos, I hardly consider myself an expert about methods of creating and delivering videos. To create videos, I primarily use Camtasia, a screen capture program that I have found flexible and easy to use. Other tools like Impatica can help you condense and share PowerPoint presentations. Some of us may shy away from using a Webcam to capture our faces, but Webcams can have advantages, and they are inexpensive and easy to set up. There are also freeware options for screen capture programs, although I don't have experience with them.

Using video, of course, hinges on your providing your students with access to this material. At Drexel, we have a very fortunate IT situation. We have a superb IT department that provides faculty with an easy way of sharing via a streaming server Weblinks of videos that we create. You could also use YouTube or TeacherTube. If you're using videos in a hybrid course, you could even ask each student to provide a CD or USB memory drive. Email could work, although many email programs will have problems handling large videos files, and students will need fast internet connections.

Ultimately, you can use video to create an "extra-writing" presence for yourself in your online courses. Sometimes, the sights and sound of video can simply personalize the message you are trying to deliver; more substantively, though, perhaps by using video you are helping to appeal to your students' different learning styles.

1) In "Online Video: Data Tidal Wave?," Philadelphia Inquirer writer Bob Fernandez mentions how BitTorrent's peer-to-peer technology may at times account for 50% of Internet traffic (Sunday, March 23, 2008).

Quizzing in an online writing class

2008-01-30T07:44:00.000-12:00

In f2f teaching, I quiz a lot.

It's not that I'm a mean teacher. In fact, I think quizzing is one of the most effective ways to help my students succeed in reading-based courses. I described my philosophy in an article I once wrote for The Teaching Professor, "Quizzes Boost Comprehension, Confidence" (1). My initial title also included the words "conversation and community." I saw the humble start-of-class reading quiz as an effective pedagogical tool to start class with energy and a positive vibe and to help students read the material--and to feel good about their understanding of it. It's important that I add this: My reading quizzes are ridiculously easy.

As I've said, I think teaching online is not so much wandering into a completely new pedagogical territory as it is thinking hard about how to convert your teaching strengths from one environment to another. When I started teaching and had to list out some of my teaching strategies, the list included quizzing. While the reasons may be slightly different, it still made sense to quiz in the online environment.

First off, whether online or in a f2f course, I still quiz to encourage students to read; they want to do well on these simple quizzes of mine. While Michael Marcell focuses on the use of online quizzing for f2f classes, his finding that quizzes led students to ask better reading-related questions in class is quite relevant for us OWTs. He also found that students were more likely to complete the readings and that students "reported that regular quizzing provided a structure for studying that encouraged them to pace their reading and to work harder to understand the material" (2). And the five-minute time limit means that it's very unlikely students could succeed on a quiz going into it cold. They just don't have enough time to browse through the readings while taking the quiz.

As Marcell mentions, I also still use quizzing to establish a sense of pacing. In f2f classes, I start the classes with a quiz so students are on time and the class opening has a familiar feel: Class starts... now! The situation is different online, but pacing is even more important. As I mentioned in my post "Pacing and predictability," I think an OWT must create a sense of "rhythm" in the class: Students, in this virtual environment, can learn to expect X to open on Wednesdays, etc. Quizzes are a great tool for this. On the same day, I open my quizzes from 9:30 am to a little after midnight (I found that a 12:00 am deadline gets you into nothing but trouble--too much room for error in describing on what day midnight falls).

In the online environment, I still want the quizzes to be easy so students feel good about what they're doing. This is the kind of question I ask: What happens to Romeo at the end of Romeo and Juliet? There's little in the way of analysis here: I just want them to read. If they say something about Romeo's triumphant lap around Verona, then I know they haven't read the whole work.

Now, teachers may wonder how to administer a quiz online. My quizzes, again, are easy, so I simply give them five minutes to complete them; in most cases, it would be harder and more time-consuming to cheat on the quiz than just to take the darn thing. If you're worried about students taking the quiz together, you can complicate things by using a simple feature of most course management systems: create a few more questions and have the software randomize them.

Finally, the online quiz and the f2f quiz share another key feature of my quizzing strategy: low stakes. Students can drop a quiz or two. I'm not trying to corner my students and frustrate them (with one possible outcome being that they cheat, which means we all lose). Instead, I'm trying to give them a constructive, easy, rewarding method to demonstrate their learning. Soon enough, we'll build on that learning in the higher-stakes assignments in the course.

Notes:

1) In the March 2004 issue on page 5.

2) From the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/v2n1/articles/Marcell/Article_Marcell.pdf

Redundancy and the Weekly Plan

2007-11-28T04:02:00.000-12:00

In Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener said, "We can hardly expect that any important message is entrusted for transmission to a single neuron, nor that any important operation is entrusted to a single neuronal mechanism" (1). When teaching writing online, simply put, you should provide information to your students through multiple means. This redundancy and repetition will help students stay on track in the course so we can focus on the more challenging and complex task of helping them improve their writing.

In my online (and even hybrid and f2f) courses, I try to send the same message to students several different ways. I don't want to nag them, but I want them to feel on top of their assignments. I think that confidence and sense of orientation helps them with their writing, I think.

So, for instance, if they have a final draft of a writing project due, they might receive this information in several ways:

The due date is on the syllabus they receive at the start of the class (and to which there is always a link on the homepage).
The date is also listed on the specific instructions for that writing project, which I provide separately when I assign that project.
Each week, I provide my class with a comprehensive "Weekly Plan," that will list all of their activities, including the due date for the project.
In my comments reviewing the rough draft, I mention--either in writing or via audio-visual comments--when the final draft is due.
The course announcements on the homepage include a note about the due date.
A group email from me reminds them of the date (often sent a day or two before the deadline).

Some of this might appear overkill, and I don't use them all with every assignment, but remember that scheduling reminders are often embedded in course documents. In fact, only the email and pop-up option are "instrusive," and that to me is not the right term considering that I am trying to help them do their best in the course.

The main point is to reinforce your message about assignments, expectations, and requirements in several ways; while I think this is good teaching practice in general, it's even more important in the online writing class environment.

One method of communicating with students that I have found particularly useful is what I call the Weekly Plan. This method, while hardly novel, allows me to provide my students each week with a complete grid of all of the activities they have to accomplish in the course, broken down into specific (and thus easily completable) tasks. The Plan itself--and I use capitals to reinforce for students its hallowed stature--is easy to create using an HTML or Word table.

Below is an actual sample Weekly Plan from one of my courses (it looks prettier when not scrunched into a small horizontal space like it is here). Simple in concept, the Weekly Plan is a key way that I practice useful redundancy in communicating with my students. Each week, I am able to place all the various instructions and guidelines in one place. I think, especially in the online environment, that it's my responsibility to help my students stay on schedule, perhaps in line with Wiener's quoting of Lewis Carroll's principle: "What I tell you three times is true."

Week 2: January 14 to January 20

Again, simply follow the directions in order, from top to bottom.

This week, we will read a profile of a physician and work through topics for Project #1.

Note that I'm asking you to have your readings finished by Tuesday so we can get on track with our normal Discussion schedule for the rest of the term.

What do I do?

What are the specific instructions?

Where do I find the work or the assignment?

When is it due? (All times EST)

READ

Kidder, Tracy. "The Good Doctor." The New Yorker. July 10, 2000. If you wish to download this from the library, it's available via LexisNexis Academic Universe. Or, you could find the actual copy of the magazine and read it there.

WatW: Aristotle 4-6.

BH: "Using a Thesis to Shape Your Material" 28-32

You’ll want to have read by Tuesday morning, January 16, so you can complete the quiz and start thinking about the Discussions.

TAKE A

QUIZ

Quiz #2 can be found under the Quizzes organizer on the course Homepage.

For the quizzes, again remember three things:

I am looking for VERY short answers.

The quiz answers can be informal. I don’t grade them on spelling, etc.

I am not looking to trick you. If you’ve read, you should be able to complete the quiz successfully in a few minutes with no problem.

The quiz will be available Tuesday from 9:30 am to midnight. You will have 5 minutes to complete it.

WRITE

On the Discussion topic "Project #1 topics," write, in a memo addressed to me and the rest of the class, a short description of one or more topics you might write about for Project #1 and explain how you might approach the Project.

Post your topics by Wednesday, January 17.

WRITE

Follow these instructions carefully:

Post ONE "primary" post to the readings threads.

Post TWO "secondary" posts to the readings threads.

Post TWO "secondary" posts to the "Project #1 topics" Discussion thread, responding to other peoples' topics, replying to comments about your own topic, or asking questions. Let's build a conversation there.

Again, it might be useful for you to review the Discussions guidelines on the syllabus before you work on these.

Post your primary posts by Tuesday evening.

Post your secondary posts by Thursday, January 18, in the evening.

WRITE

While I want you to post this short assignment to the Discussion thread "Brief profiles," this assignment is separate from the Discussions above.

Briefly interview (a few questions will suffice) someone in a job/profession. Ideally this would be the job/profession you are going to write about for Project #1 (or something close), but I understand some of you might have difficulties doing that. If so, email me--I know people in a lot of different careers and can likely connect you with someone if you're stuck.

Ask that person a few questions about the job they have: Why they chose it? How rewarding (or unrewarding) is it? Would they choose that job again? What are they highs/lows of it? Would they recommend that others choose a similar job (and why)? etc.

There's no exact length for the profile you write. I think, given the constraints of time, that it would be fine if it were about 150 words. It's okay if it's considerably longer, especially if it helps you build your Project #1.

Please post your short profile by Saturday, January 20.

Notes:

1) Page 144.
2) Page 145 from Cybernetics. The reference is to Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark.

Keep it simple

2007-09-27T08:13:00.000-12:00

This post is especially directed to teachers who are wading into the online writing environment for the first time and are worried about the technology.

I think that one of the beautiful things about teaching writing online can be the simplicity of it. I know there is a lot of information out there about online tools. From screencasting to Second Life, the amount of tech options can seem overwhelming before you even boot up your machine. The feast of choices can make you feel like anything you try will be so inadequate that it will be almost, well, embarrassing.

Don't feel that way.

There are indeed many tech tools, tricks, and twists that can make your online course not just look good but be pedagogically innovative. However, as with any technology-related endeavor, don't let gadget distractions take you away from your core mission/goal.

When you get started, you don't need that much from your course management software/system. You need a way to

post basic class files, such as the syllabus and assignments
have written conversations in the class--and, if you've read my earlier posts, you know that message boards can do a lot of that
have students post/upload documents viewable by the whole class
deliver URLs (which can be not much different than posting files)
provide students with access to their grades
allow students to contact you for one-on-one conversations (the old telephone can work here...)

You might want a way to administer quizzes or present voiced-over Powerpoints. You might want a way to group students. You might... you get the point. As with all teaching, what you do in the online writing course environment is only bound by your imagination and energy. As a teacher using technology for the first time, you should establish the above and then have a modest goal of adding one (or maybe two) new things each term. One term perhaps you'll use online groups for peer review. The next term you'll try blogs as a journal. The next term you'll use a short video to introduce the class. Publisher course packs. Blended audio and textual learning modules--don't worry: You'll never run out of things to try.

But a very spare, clean Web space can still be the basis for a great online writing class.

I'm reaching for a term here that I'm sure someone has coined, but in many aspects of our lives, we've let the glitz of technology supersede quality content/substance (yes, I'm one of those people who loathes what I've seen of the new Star Wars trilogy when compared with the original: What happened to the story? What happened to the substance of the myth?).

Teachers who, as the chair of my department where I received my PhD once said, feel colonized by teaching technologies are often justified. We know the cart-before-the-horse cycle of selling people technologies to address problems they didn't know they had (Jason Ohler is good on this topic [1]). I obviously feel strongly that teaching technologies can strongly enhance the writing education of students, but I also feel that approaching this issue technology-first, teaching-second is the wrong way to go.

Keep it simple. Remember, in the online written environment, your teaching skills and personality (transmitted largely via your own writing) will still carry the day, and the students are provided with a unique opportunity to write, write, write. If you use the technology incrementally to help you get where you want to go, you're doing it just right.

Notes:
1) Check out Ohler's Taming The Beast: Choice & Control in the Electronic Jungle.

Our useful in-between place

2007-07-27T03:13:00.000-12:00

Last month, I presented at Distance Learning Administration about the early development of our first-year online writing course initiative at Drexel. As with most online learning gatherings, I found this to be a very stimulating conference, and as I often do when I come out of online learning conversations, I felt heartened.

Why?

Because I'm convinced that online writing teachers have a great niche. We are in a useful place between writing and online pedagogies.

Conversations about online teaching and learning frequently revolve around content. Many sessions about pedagogy wrestle with questions about how to better and more effectively deliver content. E-conversations on listservs also tend to delve into ways to get content into the hands, and minds, of students.

On the other hand, composition conversations about the pedagogical potential of writing online are still often in their early stages. Writing studies seems to continue to hold a tentative view of teaching online; it still appears that theoretical works about technology generate more interest than practical ideas and articles (with notable exceptions, of course).

Perhaps much like in the nascent days of writing across the curriculum, there is a great opportunity for those of us in writing instruction to carve out a distinctive area. We can help both our writing colleagues understand the value of the electronic environment for writing instruction while sharing with new distance learning colleagues ideas that in the online writing classroom, content is not always king, and that the learning techniques of writing courses can play a major role in helping teachers create better assessments that enhance student learning.

As you have conversations with colleagues in both camps, keep the useful tension of this position in mind. In our in-between role here lies a superb opportunity for us.

A few ideas (message boards part 4)

2007-05-10T08:03:00.000-12:00

Here is a mixed group of suggestions to help you think about managing and maximizing your message boards:

Use groups--It's easy to set up groups with most message board software. This way, groups can have their own separate threads (in Bb Vista, in the Teach tab, you can use the random group generator to quickly create as many groups as you desire with accompanying threads). Why use groups? Well, in the message board environment in a FYW class, we often want to have a conversation about a reading. However, students can quickly hit the main points, and then others feel they have nothing to say. Sometimes we want to use a message board topic that just wouldn't have enough "meat" for a whole class to respond to. Say, for instance, you want students to summarize a reading. Well, the group threads are great for this, because the students can work in teams of three or four, thus creating less redundancy--they can only see the posts on their thread, so they won't exhaust the posting possibilities. Also, you can breeze through these posts without feeling numbed by the repetition.
Scratch file--I keep a Word file open when I'm reading through message board posts, and I use that file to take quick notes about responses I might want to make or to cut and paste students' comments. This helps me keep things straight. Following the advice of Collison and his co-authors, I am thus able to synthesize the comments made in a variety of posts and respond appropriately and efficiently (1).
Grammar?--For whatever reason, I find that students are often open to conversations about the nuts and bolts of their writing when that conversation stems from their posts. If a student has a recurring issue, I will send that student an email framed as a little "Writing puzzle'' for the student to crack. I often simply cut and paste their material back to them, sometimes with an accompanying mention of an "enigmatic" grammatical area for them to think about (faulty predication, dangling modifier, etc.). I have had students respond at great length--sometimes three or four email screens--to these friendly inquiries. I have kept a grid of students with the goal of sending each student two of these "Writing puzzle" emails each term; I felt it was good teaching practice, but I must point out that it was certainly a good deal of work as well.
"My favorite post": During the course of the term, and almost always at the end, I will ask students to identify their "favorite post" written by another student and comment about it. I like the complimentary nature of this thread and the conversations that ensue, and I think this also provides additional encouragement for students to read each others' posts carefully. In a future post here, I'll describe some other informal thread starters that I have used.

As I have said several times, I find the message board environment fascinating for the teaching of writing. Every term, I find some new twist to help me manage this environment better--and to help my students write in interesting (and sometimes innovative) ways.

Notes:
1) From Collison, George et al. Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators. Madison: Atwood Publishing, 2000. (www.concord.org/books/fol)

Online is a great place to have an argument

2007-02-28T06:49:00.000-12:00

Most of us know that the textual online environment can bring out the argumentative side of almost anyone.

As teachers, we can do something with that.

Many college writing courses are about argument. A standard activity in these f2f classes is to have students debate in class. As McKeachie says, debates "can enliven your class" [1]. Indeed, they can, but many of these classes will be somewhat subdued. One or two students will take the lead while the rest hang back. Even in really energetic groups, it is difficult to get everyone involved.

I think the online environment is an ideal place to hone students' argumentation skills. Instead of their writing three or four static essay arguments over the course of the term to that ever-odd audience--the teacher-- they can engage in dozens of written, fluid arguments using course message boards. Everyone can get involved.

Rather than the kind of no-holds-barred--and thus, pointless--arguing that goes on in cyberspace, the structure of the class can keep the students focused on writing well and persuasively about complex topics while maintaining a reasonable tone.

By encouraging written, asynchronous debates in the online writing class, we are teaching them how to argue in a fast-paced electronic environment, how to argue succinctly, how to address multiple opponents in a written debate at once, how to maintain a level of correctness when arguing passionately, and how to use evidence at every step of an argument to strengthen it (I really make demands here--the Web is right at their fingertips).

You'll need to be a big part of this process, though: encourage debate while making sure things don't get ugly. But, after all, that's what online moderators do.

One strategy I have tried recently that I thought was effective was "debate the teacher." I will post an extreme position as a kind of caricature of myself (I was even calling this argumentative alter ego "The Master"). The students' task is to shoot holes in my argument. At the end of the week, I go back over the method and substance of their rebuttals so we can learn something about textual argument in this environment: Are they using the text(s) to debate me? Are they engaging in ad hominem personal attacks against me? Are they addressing carefully the flaws in my position?

I try to trap them, of course, but unlike the classic flaming war, these conversations have a constructive backbone that normally keeps things civil: We're all trying to learn something. My job is ultimately to help show them ways of honing their written arguments.

As part of that, when they eventually outmaneuver me, as they almost always do, I bow my head in defeat.

Notes:

1) See Wilbert McKeachie, ed. McKeachie's Teaching Tips.

Collaborating online

2006-12-27T03:05:00.001-12:00

Teaching writing online doesn't mean the end of collaborative learning

One concern teachers have about teaching writing online is that the collaborative aspect of their teaching--and, for many of us, collaboration is vital--will be lost.

Your online writing class can still have a great deal of collaboration, and, again highlighting an advantage of online writing instruction, that collaboration can focus closely around texts and be driven by the students' writing instead of their speaking skills.

Here are a few collaborative activities/projects that you can use in your online writing class:

Peer review

By using message boards, you can place students into three- to five-person groups and have virtual writing workshops. Ask every student to start a thread by attaching (or cut-and-pasting) their paper to a post. Then ask them, using specific questions/guidelines, to critique each paper. Require them to account for previous posts in their critiques so you won't get the same responses over and over and a workshop-type environment can develop. You can even ask students to respond to their review posts.

Team projects

Again, I use WebCT. It is easy to establish a group in WebCT and associate a message board space just for the members of that group. One team assignment I have used with success is to have students collaborate to create an argument Website. I continue to be pleasantly surprised--and I'm sometimes amazed--at the work my student teams have done strictly by collaborating electronically. I think that as long as the assignment and the students' objectives are clear, they can do excellent work together in the e-environment.

Discussion sub-groups

Many teachers like to start general class conversations by having groups of students break off and discuss specific aspects of a reading or topic before convening as a whole. This helps students talk and think in a more close-knit, and thus perhaps less intimidating, environment. You can have the same dynamic on message boards by having small break-out groups of students focus on a particular aspect of a topic before having a general conversation with the whole group. Actually, if you're finding your message boards are flat, you may also use this method to get students to come out of the woodwork and be more assertive.

Synchronous communications

I want to disclaim that I don't use chats that frequently in my classes, so I don't want to feign expertise that I don't have here, but there are lots of tools--both free-standing and within course management systems--that can provide white spaces for groups of students to work, chat areas, and even voice conferencing arrangements. You don't need to get complicated: explore around in your course management system and see what is available. Having students work together on a white board or even participate in a chat moderated by you--which will be quite different from the casual chatting they are accustomed to--can help them see how an idea can develop based on collective writing.

More than 20 years ago, Kenneth Bruffee wrote, "Knowledge is the product of human beings in a state of continual negotiation or conversation" (1), helping frame a model of composition teaching that embraced collaboration. In some ways, it was a hard-fought battle, one that we still fight today when we are faced with conceptions of plagiarism that ignore the fact that writing, thinking, and being are collaborative endeavors (for instance, Spigelman discusses how writing groups complicate the academy's concepts of plagiarism and textual ownership [2]). We don't want to lose the essence of that teaching philosophy when we teach online, and there's no reason we should.

Notes:

1) From Kenneth Bruffee, "Collaborative Learning and the Conversations of Mankind," College English, 46.7, pp. 647-8.

2) See Candace Spigelman, Across Property Lines: Textual Ownership in Writing Groups.

Responding to student papers with audiovisual feedback

2006-10-31T08:56:00.001-12:00

Especially if you are in a true distance learning environment, you may be struck by how difficult it is to communicate with your students via writing all the time. You may never see them or talk to them, so you may find yourself under significant pressure to articulate to them clearly what you think should be done to improve their writing.

Welcome to the 21 st century.

I have been experimenting with the use of audiovisual (av) responses for my students’ writing, using the program Camtasia.

Here’s an example (on this Webpage you will see two links, one for a broadband connection and one for a 56k connection; you'll need some kind of software to play the video [I use RealPlayer]): http://broadcast.drexel.edu:8080/HTTPxml/
SAMPLEVIDEOS06/SAMPLEVIDEOS06.html.

If you have the right technology, the process here is pretty clean and straightforward.

You need the students’ writing—I’ll call it a “paper” here—in electronic form. Then you open Camtasia, follow the pretty straightforward instructions to set up a recording, turn the recorder on, and then begin--almost as if you were in a conference--talking about and writing on the paper.

As you can see from the video above, any movement on the screen—highlights of blocks of text, notations made with a pen tablet, typed text—are recorded, as is the accompanying audio. Essentially, you’re talking through the student’s essay in a kind of virtual conference, commenting and annotating as you proceed. Writing teachers have long employed a similar philosophy in using tape recorders for feedback, but, as you can imagine, av feedback cranks this process up considerably by including a video of the paper.

In general, my students over the past two years have responded positively to this form of feedback, especially when asked specifically to compare it to conventional written feedback. For me, this process is much faster than evaluating papers conventionally, and I give the students more extensive feedback--perhaps saying nearly twice as many words as a I write in a written response.

One of the biggest obstacles, unsurprisingly, is the technology. You need a way to make the recordings, and then you need a way to get the file to the student. Here at Drexel, we have a cutting-edge system to solve the latter problem. The Camtasia-created video you viewed above was formatted automatically for your viewing pleasure by our Information Resources & Technology (IRT) department. All I did was load a file via the Web, and IRT took care of the rest. You could also load the file onto a course management system or even put the file on a cd; teachers who use tape recorded feedback have asked students to bring a tape to class, so you could ask them to bring a cd.

It's an intriguing technology, one that might improve the response conversation between student and teacher in a number of ways, while, not insignificantly, reducing the amount of time teachers spend responding.

Is teaching online really that different?

2006-08-11T06:43:00.000-12:00

Many people who know their stuff argue that teaching online is radically different from teaching f2f (such as Beth Hewett and Christa Ehmann, who believe “there is something fundamentally different about teaching and learning in the virtual medium” [xiii] [1]).

I don’t agree.

Now let me be clear: When people say online teaching is different from f2f, they say that for several good reasons. The skills are indeed somewhat different. Also, they are discouraging teachers from taking their lecture-based, teacher-centered f2f class, which probably isn’t that good anyway (as DEOS-L poster Brad Jensen put it, “sage-in-a-rage-on-a-stage-with-students-in-a-cage learning” [2]), simply posting bland Powerpoints online—maybe even without voiceovers—and calling that teaching.

But I think teaching online isn’t different foundationally from teaching f2f. I believe a key to teaching online is to examine closely your teaching style and then to find one of the many online tools that correspond to that style. I’m talking about translating your core philosophies to the online setting.

I’ll use myself to demonstrate. Fundamentally, in a writing class (I’m drawing here on my statement of teaching philosophy, by the way), I have several guiding principles. Here are a few:
-Conversation
-Peer review
-Accountability for readings
-Collaborative work

Here’s how I have accomplished those things online:
-Conversation—Simply put, message boards are a huge component of my courses (see earlier posts about message boards). Students converse all term via message boards with me as part of the conversation, and we build the knowledge of the course in this way.
-Peer review—I found effective ways to migrate my peer review experiences online using a Web-based software I helped create, Waypoint; message boards; and/or carefully posted criteria.
-Accountability for readings—I’m a big, but friendly, quizzer (3). I think giving user-friendly reading quizzes is a great way to boost students’ grades and morale while encouraging reading. I use WebCT’s quiz function to give a ridiculously easy timed five-minute quiz every Thursday (and I can use quiz sets to vary the questions). Students who read get a 100% almost all the time in a low-stakes environment that encourages them to stay on top of their reading.
-Collaborative work—WebCT Vista is my CMS, and it offers many student collaboration opportunities. A favorite for me is to set up students in groups with team message boards and have them create Website arguments. I have been floored at how good some of these have been (I’ll dedicate an upcoming post to this).

Teachers whose classes have always been highly teacher-centered may indeed find that teaching online requires a radical re-thinking of their core goals and philosophies; the e-environment seems to lend itself to student-centered approaches. But let’s value that re-thinking process. One of the best things about starting to teach online is that you will have a chance to question your established practice, much as you would if you began teaching students at a different level or in a different geographic area. Such questioning was helpful for my teaching, but when I migrated to the online environment I focused mainly on translating things that I felt (and my students have said) are effective and solid about my pedagogy.

When training new faculty for online teaching, I try to start with asking questions: What’s your philosophy? What do you do well? What do your students like? Then we find ways to migrate those teaching foundations to the online environment. Sure, teaching online is different, but this does not require that you alter fundamentally who you are as a teacher. That alteration my happen, but only because your self-appraisal lead you to realize the need for such change. Embrace the process; you and your students will be better for it.

Notes:
1) From their 2004 Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction: Principles and Processes.
2) From his February 5, 2005 post “Re: Lack of creative thinking among lecturing faculty” on DEOS-L - The Distance Education Online Symposium.
3) If you’re interested, see my article, “Quizzes Boost Comprehension, Confidence” in the March 2004 issue of The Teaching Professor.

Pacing and predictability

2006-06-23T06:46:00.000-12:00

I think it’s important that teachers create a sense of pacing and predictability in an online class. Students are creatures of habit. Reflect for a moment how in your f2f classes, after throwing off the shackles of assigned seating from middle and high school, your students all still sit in the same seats every class. In fact, they get annoyed if someone takes “their” spot (I think there was actually a study that verified this). In addition, the lack of deadlines in an online class can be a danger for students: They don’t have to go to class a few times a week, so sometimes they can allow the work of the course to slide away… and then they find themselves in trouble.

Use simple strategies and tools to pace the class and to give a sense of structure and consistency so students can get into the groove of the work flow and thus spend their main energies trying to succeed academically.

Posted schedule/plans: I like to use a weekly plan approach in my class. In that plan, I describe what is due using a three-column html document with the following column headings:

What do I do?
What are the specific instructions? Where do I find the work or the assignment?
When is it due?

I almost always post the plan on Friday mornings. If for some reason I’m late, I make sure to let the students know by posting an explanation on the home page.

Message board deadlines: As I’ve mentioned, I use a two-tiered deadline system for my WebCT Discussions. Since I post the weekly plan on Fridays, I have tended toward a Thursday-Saturday deadline for posts. On Thursday, several primary posts are due (see my post “Message boards [part 2]” about primary posts). On, Saturday, secondary posts are due. I ask them during the term if these deadlines are okay. If so (and they have been), I stick with them so students get used to when they are responsible for these core class conversations.

Quizzes: A weekly or bi-weekly quiz, even a ridiculously easy reading quiz, can be a mighty aid to help students have a sense of consistency in the weekly structure of the course.

Mini/informal assignments: I think it’s a mistake in an online (or f2f) writing class not to use a series of very small (maybe each worth 1% of the grade) assignments. Have students describe what they are attempting to do in each paragraph of their essays. Ask them to take a piece of writing and try to change all instances of the verb “to be.” Ask them to pick their best message board posts and comment on them. These little “metawriting” assignments are valuable for their development, but they also fill in the gaps between message board posts and the main assignments. They create a dutiful sense of work flow in the class--and you shouldn’t feel you have to grade them with more than a glance.

Videos/multi-media: In addition to the other material, creating a video every other week can help lock students back into the idea that you are a real teacher “out there.” Linking any video up to an informal assignment or message board post helps encourage them to watch these lessons.

So, in simple form, a typical (if there is such a thing) schedule for my composition class looks like this:

Friday: Weekly plan posted.
Tuesday: Informal assignment due or deadline to watch video.
Wednesday: Suggested deadline for readings so they can be ready for the quiz and message boards.
Thursday: Reading quiz (available for 18 hours or so); primary message board posts due.
Saturday: Secondary message board posts due.

While it’s a rough analogy, I think that not having a consistent set of deadlines is like asking students to attend a class in which they never know the meeting time until the class before. Obviously, we can understand this would be maddening. Keep them focused on various small, low-stakes deadlines, and they will be less likely to put off their online classwork--and they will have a better chance of succeeding.

Early message board posters and success in an online writing class

2006-04-11T07:44:00.000-12:00

I did a little analysis that showed that students who post earlier on message boards toward the end of the term tend to be the students who do better in the class grade-wise.

For this analysis, I used my recent 10-week online composition course, which focused on argument. There were 20 students in the class, and the final number of message board posts in the class was 1,619. I posted 345 of those messages, and the students posted 1,274 posts (about 64 posts per student).

I was curious to see if I could discover any correlation between posting early and overall success in the course. I looked at the first poster for each message board thread on which we talked about course readings or materials (thus leaving out threads on which students posted drafts of their essays or signed up for conferences or things like that). In a sense, these were the “conversations” of the course (my message board guidelines can be found on an earlier blog entry here).

We had 34 such threads in this 10-week course. First I noted, by grade, how many times each type of student posted first on these 34 threads:
A students=12 times
B students=12 times
C students=7 times
D students=3 times

More interestingly, I calculated the average final grade of the first posters on these 34 threads vs. the overall average grade in the course (to do this, I used the simple 4-point scale, with A=4, B=3, C=2, and D=1):

Average grade of whole class: 2.85 (yes, I know, I appear to be another professor who has succumbed to grade inflation, but I’ll weakly defend myself by saying that this was a smart group)
Average grade of first posters on all 34 threads: 2.99

While the first posters have a slightly higher average grade than that of the whole class, it is not that significant (0.14 points).

However, I wondered if students who did not procrastinate toward the end of the course, when things got tough, tended to be better students:

Average grade of first posters in the last four weeks (16 threads): 3.19

Indeed, the difference between the average grade of the whole class and those who posted first in the last four weeks is much larger: 0.34 points.

One might deduce that the better students in the class don’t run out of steam at the end of the course. In fact, no student who received a D or lower in the class was a first poster in those final four weeks, although such students had posted first several times in the first six weeks of the course.

Obviously, because this is only one class, we can’t make too much of this. Nor would we want to get caught up in faulty cause-and-effect. For instance, do they simply post first because they’re better students (I don’t know what students’ overall GPAs were)? Surely, students who post early could be the more dedicated, driven, and organized. But, on the message board, early posters also have the added advantage of being in on many of the conversations in the class from the ground level; in fact, they actually might have a bigger hand in developing the knowledge of the course.

The idea that students who post early might have better success in the course is interesting. If we knew that posting earlier helped students become more engaged, then we could encourage students who seem to be floundering to be more aggressive in their posting behaviors, getting in earlier so that when they open up the course message board they’re not faced with over one hundred unread posts (keep in mind there were an average of 160 posts per week in my course).

Perhaps posting early not only helps students feel they have a better handle on the sometimes massive amount of information in an online class, but it shows that they’re more attune to the structure and scheduling of the course.

Let them know who you are: Talk back (a lot)

2006-02-03T09:54:00.000-12:00

In my email folders for my online classes, I always include a “To” field. I can’t sort the messages by “From,” because almost all of the messages have the same sender: Me.

I nearly always have the “last word” in my email conversations with students. Why? So that they’ll know that I’ve heard their question or comment; I’m there. “Good deal,” “Gotcha,” “Thanks for the message”—even a short response helps create the communication fabric that I think is integral for developing the kind of relationship you need to help teach writers (especially first-year writers) how to improve their writing.

This might seem to contradict what I said regarding message boards and not being a “bottleneck” in the writing process, but it doesn’t. I’m talking about conversational responses to specific student messages, not assessments or evaluations or interposing myself in student-to-student dialogue. As I said, I do not at all reply to every message board post, but in the class there are four types of messages that I always respond to:
1) emails
2) posts on a message board thread like Questions about assignments
3) posts on a message board in which students introduce themselves
4) message board posts that directly address me

In the beginning of the term especially, I think teachers should respond a lot. Michael Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm say the implicit “contract” between students and their teachers includes that teachers should know students personally and care about them as individuals (1). In an online class, brief conversational links with students go a long way in making them feel more welcome and connected, and when you’re teaching writing, these feelings can build the mutual respect necessary to work with someone about their core thinking skills.

Think about what you’re really doing by responding a lot. You are fleshing yourself out as an audience for your students, an important pedagogical tool. We might take it for granted, but as students look us over in our f2f classes, they are often subtly—and perhaps subconsciously—gauging what we’ll be like when we read their essays. Online, they can feel detached, unless we actually capitalize on the textual-conversational environment of the online class and give students a perhaps even sharper view of who we are than they can get in a f2f environment.

So in week one, if you give them a message board icebreaker to introduce themselves, write back a lot. It isn’t just touchy-feely to say you have visited their home town; went to the same place for vacation; or share their interest in watching the Philadelphia Eagles, playing guitar, or reading Vonnegut; these bits of data help them get a slightly sharper focus on you as an audience. After a series of responses and a sense that you’re a real person, you will have given students a snapshot of yourself, and they’ll be better prepared for the writing ahead.

Note:
1) From Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys (2002) (see p. 99).

Message boards (part 3)

2005-12-23T08:39:00.000-12:00

The philosophy underlying the use of informal writing is simple: students need to write in low-stakes environments to improve their writing (see Peter Elbow, Chris Anson, and Toby Fulwiler).

Makes sense.

Yet many well-meaning teachers, in the heat of the semester-long battle, inadvertently short-circuit this process by becoming the bottleneck in the system. Starting with good intentions, they slow the process by trying to read every word their students write. This might seem the responsible thing to do, but the ultimate effect for most of these teachers is a reluctance to assign any more writing.

As an old commercial (I think for car batteries) used to say: “Don’t let this happen to you.”

In online, 10-week classes with about 20 students, I ask for 30 Discussions (via WebCT). Some shake their head when they hear this, envisioning an impossible amount of grading. But it isn’t.

I grade the posts quickly, only being drawn into conversations when they’re irresistibly good—which, I will warn you, does happen often.

I use a 10-point scale. The baseline is 8. If a post looks decent, it gets an 8. If it’s clearly more deeply thought out, it’s a 9. Excellent posts get a 10, but “excellence” doesn’t mean perfection. Late posts, extremely short posts, posts with myriad errors or vacuous ideas—these get 7s or lower.

Your own grading conventions will emerge. For instance, I demand that posts be more than one paragraph (I want some movement among ideas, even in these short posts). If I see one paragraph, it’s automatically an 8.

I quickly jot down grades in a hard-copy gradebook. Sometimes I keep a grade column for different threads, writing the grade for the initial post in the center of the box and then grades for responses in the corners of the box. Or I use a simple code (this works well when you have multiple thread choices so not all students will contribute to every post): I record the grade and accompany it with a single letter that differentiates that thread from others that week. Again, I record response grades in the corner. I transfer the grades all in one shot to an electronic gradebook each week. (Obviously, I could use a spreadsheet to streamline this process a bit and probably will at some point.)

To be clear, I feel strongly that I am not abandoning my responsibilities by grading so, well, efficiently. I use message boards because they create many opportunities for low-stakes writing. I feel I am recognizing that I can’t be the bottleneck, especially because the boards easily allow other students to be an immediate and often responsive audience. In fact, the paradigm of feeling professionally obligated to watch every word (it’s really more watching than reading) that students write seems hopelessly ill-conceived. Mentors and coaches don’t hawkishly watch every move their charges make. They allow them to practice, to make mistakes, and thus to develop.

The message board environment creates an ideal place to allow such writing practice to happen. Help guide conversations. Read because what they are writing is enjoyable. Clip out (easily done in the electronic environment) pieces of posts to make specific points. But don’t short-circuit this marvelous writing opportunity because you feel you don’t have time to read every word. That’s not your job. Your job is to help them develop as writers, and you don’t have to micromanage their process to do so.

Message boards (part 2)

2005-10-17T08:53:00.000-12:00

As I said, in a ten-week (again, we’re on a quarter system at Drexel) online class, my students write 30 “official” message board posts.

These conversations have been strong; in some cases, they’ve been brilliant. My first-year students crank hard on topics ranging from changes to the science curriculum to Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”

To make message boards work in your first-year writing class, first off, the conversations should have high stakes. The message board discussions in my online classes are worth 25% to 35% of the overall grade.

Also, I define carefully what I want—without being so rigid that I kill the conversation before it starts. Following are my rules for using WebCT Discussions in my online classes. I use similar rules in f2f and hybrid courses, as the Discussions still play a major role in these courses as well.

From my syllabus:
Conversations that we have via Discussions will make up a major part of the work in this course. In most cases, I will pose a question or issue to you, and then you will respond to me or to your colleagues. The responses will form a useful conversation about the issues we are tackling. Please read the material below carefully.
1) Rules for “official” posts—These posts should be:
a) Essays. Responses should not be one simple paragraph, and I expect them to reflect some reasoned thought on your part, thought beyond what you might put into a normal email or chat response. Think of them as mini-essays that help you make a clear, focused point. Remember, you’re trying to develop your writing; these posts are great practice.
b) Detailed. Each of your “official” posts must be at least 125 words. (Note: I’m not as interested in the actual word count as I am in the depth of your ideas. Obviously a post like “Me too!!!” doesn’t qualify as an “official” post.)
c) Semiformal. Your posts should contain some degree of formality: spell-checked, organized, etc. However, they will also be part of a dialogue, so in that regard, they will differ from an essay you turn in for a class. It is inevitable that we will take some time to reach a mutual understanding of the appropriate level of formality.
d) Referenced. While you won’t always need citations in your posts, you should look for opportunities to build your argument by referencing our readings, other sources, or your colleagues’ comments.
e) Courteous. We don’t always have to agree, but no one should resort to flaming.
2) Grading—I will grade your “official” posts in accordance with these rules. In total, you’ll be responsible for 30 “official” Discussion posts. I will evaluate each one on a 10-point scale:
· If you complete them adequately, you will receive 8s.
· If you go above and beyond the basic requirements of the assignments, you will receive 9s.
· Very good—completed with a great deal of effort and thought—posts will receive 10s.
A Discussion post will receive a 7 or below if it:
· Is too short.
· Shows little thought.
· Is excessively sloppy in terms of grammar, spelling, and mechanics, especially to the point that it was difficult to understand.
· Engages in personal attacks or other breaches of common online etiquette.
· Is late (see Course Policies)
3) Reading—You are responsible for reading all of the posts in the class, although you can obviously focus your attention on the threads in which you are directly engaged.
4) Shorter posts—Feel free to post as many shorter, informal comments on the Discussion threads as you like; for instance, a couple of lines to clarify a point or to state your agreement with another author’s point of view. But remember the rules for “official” posts.
5) Staying current—One of your responsibilities in taking an online version of English is that you will make it a daily habit to check the Discussion boards and stay current on the conversations taking place there.
6) Extra credit—Those of you who are diligent and become active members of these conversations will find that you will receive a high grade for the Discussion component of the course. If you post more than 30 “official” posts, you will be eligible for extra credit in the course (some of you may naturally find that you have more to say on some of our topics this term, so I want to reward you if you put in extra work on some of the Discussions).

Simple constraints like multiple paragraphs and a word count give your students a clearer idea of what you’re looking for (a word count works wonders for not only message board posts but assignments such as peer reviews as well), and if you ask them for something like references (with the occasional reminder), I’ve found they will come through quite well. Build in the rules you think appropriate—while remembering that these posts are conversational pieces of writing.

In my third and final post about message boards, I will say a few more words about how I grade these posts, following this philosophy: don’t let yourself be the bottleneck in the system.

Message boards (part I)

2005-09-21T08:53:00.000-12:00

Making the transition to teaching writing online can be nerve-wracking. Initially (much like when you first started teaching f2f), you’ll always feel like there’s something more to do. You’ll feel your novicehood acutely, and you’ll have this sense that you don’t know all the slick, complex tech tools that you should to teach effectively.

Don’t beat yourself up too much. You may find that simple message boards can provide a major vehicle for much of what you want to do. All course management packages have some form of message boards, and the boards themselves are versatile and easy to use. They provide a means of facilitating the sharing of writing in your class in ways that you may find open up incredible teaching opportunities.

As you think about using message boards, first, ask yourself a basic pedagogical question: What are my goals in the course? For me, two of my main teaching goals are conversation and writing.

Conversation. No matter how I’m teaching, I want students building knowledge in the class by talking to each other. In my first-year writing classes, the knowledge of the course is largely constructed by students. Mainly, I want to
· Create an open environment in which students feel free to contribute their ideas
· Allow all students to voice their thoughts
· Give students time to think over complex points made by me and their colleagues and respond to those points

In some ways, message boards work even more effectively than my best in-class facilitation skills. For instance, with the message boards, all students really can contribute to a conversation, and the anonymity of the boards can create, as Gail Hawisher said, an open environment with more equitable participation (1). Students also have time to think over their contributions, and, because I believe in writing to learn, I think the conversations on the boards have a level of sophistication beyond many f2f class discussions.

Writing. While saying that I have a goal of “writing” in a writing class may seem painfully obvious, I mean that I want my students to learn how to incorporate writing into various aspects of their thinking and learning—not just write papers. That goal encompasses
· Practicing the skills of invention and taking risks
· Understanding how writing can be used to learn
· Negotiating multiple audiences
· Helping students develop authority through writing, including having students use each other as sources

By using message boards, I provide students with many low-stake opportunities to write, helping them practice and refine their thinking through writing. Also, they can use their writing to develop a point, building authority while speaking not just to me but to their peers.

In a ten-week online class, my students write 30 “official” posts, creating another 3,000 to 4,000 words on top of the papers of the course. What do I mean by official? I’ll explain that next when I describe the nuts and bolts of how I use message boards.

Notes:
1) From “Electronic Meetings of the Minds” in Re-Imagining Computers and Composition (1992).

Weighting course requirements/grading

2005-08-29T06:50:00.000-12:00

The weighting of your course requirements will shift in an online writing class, if for no other reason than that some portion, and perhaps a significant portion, of the course grade will consist of message board or listserve posts or other asynchronous electronic writing. Such writing usually plays a small role, if any, in f2f classes, so you’ll need to find a way to include it in your syllabus for your online class.

If your grading always looks something like this
· Three papers: 45% (15% each)
· Final paper: 25%
· Journal: 15%
· Quizzes: 10%
· Participation: 5%
then your way of thinking about the grade percentages in your class will change. If you already use message boards in your f2f classes, you’ll perhaps have an easier time making the conceptual switch to including a chunk of this material in your grade.

As I’ve said, the sheer amount of writing in an online writing class opens up big teaching and learning possibilities for students. Students will be writing to communicate nearly every important idea they have in the class (and they’ll be reading a great deal as well). Their message board writing should be taken seriously by everyone in the class, and so you should reflect how much you expect of it by making it count for a lot.

I have no problem with making the Discussions (I use WebCT) in my class worth around 35% of the grade. I closely structure the Discussions (more on this soon), and, basically, I ask a great deal of the students in these posts. Because these posts are worth so much, I feel the students take them seriously. The payoff has been that the writing on these Discussions is some of the best I’ve ever read from my writing students.

As you think about weighting your requirements, I suggest you de-emphasize the paper/essay and journal chunks of the final grade and eliminate participation, as the spirit-of-participation components will be preserved in your message board grades. You also may find message boards do everything a journal does and more (although perhaps you still want students to do some personal, expressive writing the rest of the class won’t see).

If you’re a big quizzer (as I am), quizzes don’t have to wither in an online class. I use reading quizzes to start most of my f2f classes, and I’ve maintained that frequent quizzing practice (which is backed by a philosophy that easy, fun quizzes help students structure their reading) in online classes, but I decrease the weight of the quizzes so I don’t spend all term policing students and trying to create cheat-free quizzes.

The bottom line is to be prepared to shift your thinking about grades a bit when teaching writing online. The students will be writing out nearly all of their transactions/interactions in the class, and you’ll want a way to make that writing—which their classmates will read too—a significant part of the course.

Organization: Prepare for the information deluge

2005-06-17T04:05:00.000-12:00

Thinking about our info culture, I’ve begun to wonder if the rewards go not to the smartest or even hardest working, but instead to those who are best organized. As William Pollard said, "Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden, not a benefit." You no doubt know how hard it is to keep your info in a form that you can make sense of as well as in a place you can easily access. Still, teaching writing online requires a level of organization you might be unaccustomed to.

Remember, when teaching writing online, many of your classroom interactions will be in writing through message boards, email, and chats. You’ll need to come up with smart, simple organizational processes to keep the class communications straight.

Email: Does your Inbox have thousands of messages in it? I’m surprised how many of my colleagues don’t have even a basic email folder system. If you dump all your emails from the class into one folder (or just let them languish in your Inbox), some advantages of teaching online will be lost, because you won’t be able to draw easily on students’ day-to-day writings to help them build their skills. Oh, and you’ll also go mad trying to find old messages. Create many sub-folders, broken down as specifically as possible. Creating a folder costs little, but the time and energy savings are huge. You’ll want a general folder for conversations—call it “chit chat” or something. Create a folder where you keep responses to assignment questions. Other folders include sent messages, peer reviews, grade issues (for student questions about grades), and woes (a catch-all place for problems, both tech-related and otherwise). You can also use your email program’s message rules to direct all class emails into a particular folder.

Message boards: Spend time learning how the message board you’ll use is organized, and take advantage of its organization functions: indenting, bolding of new messages, subject naming, and alternate views (by subject or by date, for instance). Also, you’ll want to have simple-to-remember naming conventions for threads. In week one, inform students how the threads work, because if they are aware of how the threads are organized, they’ll be better able to keep the conversation flowing.

Document files: Your course will probably generate many text files, and you’ll want a good folder system like you’ve created for email. Again, use a lot of detail, and let your subfolder system go pretty deep. While it’s a good idea to call a folder “drafts” and then to save all assignment drafts into it, you should probably further subdivide into folders for each specific assignment. Also, you should give students rules for naming files: If you don’t ask otherwise, when you receive your students’ first essays, 90% of them will be named Essay 1. On your syllabus (and reiterate this several times—more on redundancy soon), ask students to use a simple file naming convention like first name, last initial, and assignment: ScottWEssay1.doc, for instance.

The issue with organization in an online writing class is that unlike face-to-face classes, you don’t have as much control over when communication occurs, as students can contact you any time. While of course this is one of the advantages to online learning, you can find yourself quickly behind when you realize you’re receiving lots of messages but don’t know where to save them.

Without question, you’ll refine your organizational approach after the first few weeks and then each time you teach, so don’t lock yourself into a rigid system. Also, pick what works for you, realizing that organization is often very individualistic. As Roger Schank said, “Memory is highly idiosyncratic. One person’s organization is not another’s” (1). Regardless, spending a few minutes before the term thinking about the information flow will save you time and reduce your stress during the term, ultimately making you a better teacher.

1) From The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind (1991).

About Beginnings

2005-04-04T08:12:00.000-12:00

Hello.

How have all these bloggers done it? How did they ever manage to get started? That first post, that initial gesture outward to an audience of, at the time, exactly zero—how did they do it?

The initial “hello” has hamstrung me for more than a year now. I always thought too much about the persona I wanted for a blog, and, as a result, several ideas for blogs and other Web texts have withered.

So I finally willed myself to beginning.

Maybe it was because I realized that my awkward start is perfect in terms of my goal with this particular blog—a marriage of form and content, if you will.

My objective with this blog is to share my experiences as an online writing teacher. I might as well start at the beginning, before you ever log on. For me, a big obstacle to teaching writing online was that I could not decide what kind of persona, what kind of voice, I was to have as an online teacher. Peter Elbow (1) once said that real voice has the power to make you pay attention and understand; of course, he also knew that using voice made you exposed and vulnerable—and that it could be painful. You spend years honing a classroom persona, and then, pow!, you’re teaching online—the (no)place where amusing teaching mannerisms are preserved, maybe forever.

Forget server woes and carpal tunnel syndrome—my main worry was about the way I would conduct myself in “front” of the online students. Those first few message posts, that initial homepage announcement, the introductory email—the text of those messages creates a personality, and I felt pressure to craft it right. Would I greet them with “Dear members of English 101”? How about “Dear students”? How about “Hi everyone”? How about “What’s up”? Could I think of a slick sign-off, something better than the stuffy “Professor Warnock”? Would I use slang and IM shortcuts?

Looking back—and not that far back, since I just started teaching online in the fall of 2004—I think, much like teaching f2f, that you can’t know exactly how you are going to come off. This is not to say that you shouldn’t try to create a distinct persona beforehand when you teach online for the first time, but, plain and simple, worries about that shouldn’t obstruct you from just getting started. The online “you” will shape itself during the course of your first term, and don’t be surprised if it’s quite different from the f2f classroom “you.”

If you want a slick signature that will save you some keystrokes, do so (I’m still fooling with this: “Prof. W.” is the best I can do right now). Think about the level of formality in your greetings and complimentary closings (and maybe you’ll have different levels depending on the purpose of your message)—but know that until you start writing to your students in the heat of the class, you won’t be sure of your teaching persona and those little words that will define it.

Carol Berkenkotter (2) once said that writing under too many constraints is a formula for writer’s block. Much as we advise frustrated, timid, or bored students, you must just get started. I haven’t followed that advice well with this blog, but I still know it to be true. And recently starting my third term of teaching online writing classes, I again felt the nervousness as introductory emails and Discussion (I use WebCT) posts came flowing in. Who am I? Better, who do I want to be? Now I realize that if I ask too many question—create too many constraints—then I won’t write at all. My identity is still taking shape—and when I think about it more broadly, that shouldn’t be surprising.

Notes:
1) From Writing with Power (1981).
2) From “Writing and Problem Solving” in Toby Fulwiler and Art Young’s Language Connections: Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum (1982).