GSOLE Principles and Tenets revision presentation at CCCC 25 in Baltimore

Since its founding in 2016, the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE) has continued to grow and evolve, expanding its membership, initiatives, and offerings.

A key example of this evolution has been a recent effort by the GSOLE leadership (you can see current leadership here) to revise GSOLE's Online Literacy Instruction (OLI) Principles and Tenets, which were approved and published by the GSOLE Executive Board on June 13, 2019. Somehow, over five years have passed since our group developed these initial guidelines for OLI.

In education generally and literacy/writing specifically, much has changed since June 2019, and many of those changes, especially pandemic-related online learning and now the impact of AI, need to be examined in terms of the way we approach OLI. 

I'm part of this revision effort, and a hardworking group mainly broke up the work into subcommittees to evaluate how the Principles and Tenets might change. My subcommittee focused on AI.

We just learned of the acceptance of our proposal for CCCC 25 in Baltimore to present both the results of this work as well as the process we took to get there. We'll be eager to share the way that what we believe were fundamentally sound--they really are!--initial Principles and Tenets have adapted in the face of major changes in the landscape of OLI.

From OWI Committee to Standing Group, but the work goes on

In April at the CCCC meeting in Houston, the CCCC Committee for Effective Practices in OWI was settling in at 9 AM for its three-hour, packed-agenda annual closed meeting, when its members abruptly learned a surprising thing: Just that Wednesday, the CCCC Executive Committee had voted not to reconstitute us!

This was a tough moment for many committee members, and emotions were visceral for a variety of reasons. We called CCCC President Joyce Carter, who showed great leadership in coming to visit us on the spot. She fielded questions and explained her approach as Chair – a new approach – to committees, and she described the logistics of what had happened. She apologized for the way this occurred, reinforced the value of OWI work, and encouraged us to re-structure the OWI Committee as a CCCC Standing Group.

I do understand it all. Nobody at CCCC was out to get our committee. As many of you know, our committee had gone well beyond the boundaries – all for the good, of course –of a charge-driven, purpose-focused group. Specific, executable charges, Joyce explained, are what should characterize committees and structure their work. Groups with ongoing interests and work need a different structure. This makes sense.

Word of this has trickled out, so I wanted to let people know that our group has been speedily reconstituted as a CCCC Standing Group. CCCC was helpful fast-tracking our group’s application. Our Expert Panel, comprised of more than 30 OWI experts, and our structure are still intact. Our numerous in-progress projects will continue on, especially the OWI bibliography, spearheaded by Heidi Harris, and the survey of student experiences in OWCs, led by Diane Martinez.

I think this moment also helped people think about some of the other new sites for community, conversation, and contact for OWI teachers and scholars, especially The OWI Community, a growing Facebook site set up by Casey McArdle and Jessie Borgman, and the recently formed Global Society for Online Literacy Education, which I'll be talking more about here soon.

For our group, the name changes, but the work goes on. With the Standing Group, we will still have a clear structural connection with CCCC and NCTE. Such a visible, tangible presence is especially valuable to those of you those investing your careers teaching, administering, and researching OWI, people who often need not only a recognizable banner under which to gather to think, talk, and work, but an identifiable gathering “spot” to become life-long friends.

OWI Committee’s activities at CCCC in Houston

This year at CCCC in Houston, our Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing Instruction will be in the final stage of a three-year plan following the publication of our Position Statement. During the past two 4Cs, we've chosen a theme/focus for our many conference activities. Year one was Institution Matters. Year two was Faculty Matters. This year we will be focusing on Student Matters.

It's important and appropriate that we're concluding with student-focused concerns about OWI. Our committee and its members have several projects underway to help sharpen the field's understanding about the student experience in OWI so we can move the overall OWI research agenda forward. A big piece is our recently piloted survey about student OWI experiences, which I wrote about a few months ago in this space.

If you're headed to Houston and interested in OWI, we have a number of activities planned for CCCC that we welcome you to take part in:

• On Wednesday, April 6 from 9:00 am to 12:30 pm, we will be offering the half-day workshop, “Taking Action with Student Retention and Success: An OWI 'Student Matters' Workshop.”
• On Thursday, April 7 from 3:15 to 4:30, our committee will offer a panel, “CCCC Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing: Student Matters”(I'm part of this panel).
• Friday night, we’ll be having our Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting from 6:30 to 7:30

We’ll also be having our closed committee meeting on Friday morning.

The Student Matters theme will run throughout the conference for us. All these student-focused activities and the accompanying dialogue with our colleagues should help us considerably with the next major tasks our committee faces, including revising the Position Statement.

Peer review in OWI: Slowing it down

I’ve written here before (but how time flies since 2008 and even 2012!) about how peer review and OWI intersect so well. I keep returning to this topic, because, for so many of us who teach writing, peer review is the thing: a central part of writing instruction.

Simply put, going online accentuates and highlights that centrality. If you teach an online writing course (OWC) asynchronously, the whole class becomes a peer review. It becomes a workshop, sometimes a cauldron, in which students' ideas come under close examination. Students can continually push each other through a textual dialogue that they, even they, the children of the electronic age they are, are unaccustomed to.

In a way that some may find paradoxical to critics of digitality, an OWC works so well in this way because it is a uniquely slowed-down course experience. Students get to think. They interact with each other in a naturally contemplative environment, one that by its nature does not reward the quickest hand or the sharpest tongue.

For many teachers in any medium, that’s what good peer review is all about. It's not about shuffling papers around a room and asking students to give each other brief comments (leading, too often, to "All you need to is __ and you'll get an A!"). It's about providing students with time, even a few structured minutes, to delve into each others' thoughts made manifest through writing.

I haven't taken video of students working on written discussions in my courses (although, at CCCC 2014 I saw a fascinating presentation by Patricia Portanova of the University of New Hampshire; she used screencasts to investigate how writers are affected by distraction). But it would be interesting to compare students' cognitive and perhaps physical behaviors when responding to a colleague's post to the behaviors when they provide face-to-face responses in a classroom. How much thinking is going on in each situation?

Online, during the routine written conversations they have, students critique each other in detailed, complex ways. They push each other to think and elucidate ideas. They often are complimentary in authentic ways to writing that moves and impresses them. Without the confines of the class space, they can slow down and really think about the piece of writing.

As I've mentioned before, this dynamic can become transparent in an asynchronous OWC. If you are building a dialogue, then all postings become a kind of peer review: Here’s what I have to say about the writing you put before me. Based on my response, you can tell if I thought it was clear, if I thought it was powerful, where I thought it might need more elaboration or even evidence.

My students push each other hundreds of times in this way in the course. I believe it tightens their writing in ways I could never do alone.

Addressing MOOCs with the CCCC OWI Position Statement

Last time, I posted about MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), suggesting some good ideas/practices that might emanate from massive courses. Now, I'm looking briefly at how writing MOOCs can be viewed in the context of A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction (OWI), published last year by our CCCC Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing Instruction (again, I'm co-chair of this hard-working group).

Many people in higher ed, of course, are up in arms over MOOCs. Many good reasons exist not to like these courses, but I think fear and helplessness driving many criticisms: People rightly feel helpless in the face of this tide of depersonalized instruction. Teachers and whole institutions are scrambling. However, as I’ve said, some of education’s resistance to MOOCs is hypocritical because we’re complaining about depersonalized learning experiences even though for decades we've herded students into 500-seat lecture halls and allowed our writing courses to be taught by people without offices who make about $150/week per course (if that).

The principles and practices in the OWI Position Statement can help writing teachers and WPAs by providing evidence and conversational scaffolding. The Position Statement, by design, can help potential writing MOOC teachers think through these courses; it might help some argue against MOOCs. Briefly, here are a few specific principles and how they might operate in this context:

OWI Principle 2: "An online writing course should focus on writing and not on technology orientation or teaching students how to use learning and other technologies." This means that for MOOC students, who are, by the definition of "open," not necessarily part of an institution, the learning platform has to be really easy to use. Students can’t spend their term figuring out how to manage the technology – there will be little teacher or IT support for them.

OWI Principle 5: "Online writing teachers should retain reasonable control over their own content and/or techniques for conveying, teaching, and assessing their students’ writing in their OWCs." Principle 5 addresses MOOCs in several ways, but especially with this: With 80,000 (or even 800) students, teachers have no control over assessing their students’ writing.

OWI Principle 6: "Alternative, self-paced, or experimental OWI models should be subject to the same principles of pedagogical soundness, teacher/designer preparation, and oversight detailed in this document." A MOOC can't result in the cutting of pedagogical corners (for those feeling institutional pressure...).

OWI Principle 13: "OWI students should be provided support components through online/digital media as a primary resource; they should have access to onsite support components as a secondary set of resources." A MOOC problem is that if you like MOOCs and work from that paradigm, you end up with support services that might replicate the same lack of institutional contact. If a 40,000 to 1 ratio is good enough for instruction, why not counseling, advising, and registrar ratios? Since the C stands for "course," institutions will have to make sure students understand what they get with "Open."

OWI Principle 9: "OWCs should be capped responsibly at 20 students per course with 15 being a preferable number." Those seeking a line-in-the-sand principle could find it here. Remember, C in MOOC is for "course." According to Principle 9, with 40,000 students, it can't be a "course." But maybe it can be a MOOE, with E for “experience.”

We designed these principles to help educators with OWI, including new approaches to teaching writing online. MOOCs are only one example. Massive courses aren’t good or bad, but teachers have to believe in a certain type of teaching to make them work. The Position Statement can help support or at least think through the kind of teaching that Massive Open Online Course represents.

Talking on Higher Ed Talk Radio about NCTE OWI Position Statement

So Larry Jacobs and I got to meet again. My colleague and CCCC Best Practices in Online Writing Instruction Committee co-chair Beth Hewett were interviewed last month by Larry on Higher Education Talk Radio about the committee's recently published "A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction (OWI)." Again, the statement can be found here: http://www.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/owiprinciples (I describe it a bit in my last post).

Larry helps us think about the goals of the Statement, its descriptive nature, similarities and differences between teaching writing online and onsite, and some of the advantages for students of OWI.

If you want to listen to an archived version, check it out here.

Publication of CCCC Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for OWI

I'm excited to announce the publication of the Conference on College Composition and Communication's (CCCC) "A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction (OWI)". The statement can be found here: http://www.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/owiprinciples

This is the product of six years of hard work by the CCCC Committee on Best Practices in Online Writing Instruction, a group I co-chair with my colleague Beth Hewett. You can find more about the committee, including its full lists of members, here: http://www.ncte.org/cccc/committees/owi

I hope this position statement help support those who administer and teach online writing courses -- and their students.

Tales of OWI

I just returned from this year's Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) (in Vegas). My friend and colleague Beth Hewett and I are co-chairs of the CCCC Committee for Best Practices in Online Writing Instruction (a group that will likely be re-named to replace the word "Best" with "Effective").
It was a busy CCCCs for our committee.

First and foremost, the practices and effective principles document that this group has developed, six years in the making, was approved by the CCCC Executive Committee. This is big news we hope not only for us but for the world of writing instruction, and the document will be on the National Council of Teachers of English site very soon. Our committee conducted a panel introducing and discussing the principles, a special interest group meeting (a SIG, in CCCCs parlance) to discuss ways of using the principles, and an open session to talk about technologies to help build conversation around them. We also had a three-hour committee meeting.

Throughout these events, we had lots of conversations with people who teach writing online. As the week went on, I was struck by not only how varied the stories are out there about people's OWI experiences but how eager they are to relate those narratives. People want to share these stories.

I guess this will not come as a surprise to anyone who teaches anything anywhere, but the differences in teaching environments and situations for online writing teachers are staggering. Of course, we have distinct pedagogies, philosophies,and strategies. Of course our institutions are different, as are our students. But I listened to people, I was struck by the vast diversity of reasons behind why they teach online and how varied their institutional and professional experiences are. And then I thought about how illuminating it might be if we could somehow capture their answers to questions like these:

• Why is your program/unit/school offering online writing courses?
• Why do you teach writing online? What got you started?
• What do you like about teaching writing online? What don't you like?
• What kind of support do you have: Technologically? Pedagogically? Administratively? Philosophically?
• What kinds of technology do you use in your courses?
• How well are you paid?
• Can you characterize the kind of students who mostly take your online courses?
• What is your teaching reality like? How are your courses assessed? Where is your office?
• Who develops your course materials?

Our principles are designed to help teachers, administrators, and institutions to address these questions. But what could we do with these stories? There are narratives out there, but most teachers and administrators aren't lucky enough to get to go to CCCCs to hear them. Like many writing teachers, they work diligently but in an often sealed world, having parallel experiences to what others are doing -- but not realizing it.

I'm going to close on an enigmatic note, because my thoughts aren't fully formed, but I'm wondering if there's a grand project here, one that tries to capture some of these narratives and share them. Stay tuned.