Publishing in OLOR: Sharing strategies for teaching writing and reading online

On July 1st I became President of the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE), succeeding my good friend Beth Hewett. GSOLE is a hard-working group of scholars and practitioners, and since our launch in spring 2016 we have accomplished a lot to support teaching and research in online literacy instruction.

Many people who would or do teach writing and reading online are looking for practical strategies to help them. GSOLE has a tremendous resource for this purpose: OLOR: Online Literacies Open Resource. This online, peer-reviewed journal, created and edited by another good friend, Jason Snart, is a place that online teachers share their practices and strategies. From the site: "The goal of the OLOR is to publish relatively brief and practical pedagogical strategies. Busy online literacy teachers can read an OLOR publication and, within a few days, try out a strategy out for themselves."

OLOR submissions are designed to be a from-reading-to-course type experience, and not only is the content created with this goal in mind, but so is the way that content is presented: Short, user-friendly, multi-media articles.

The published pieces are organized around the Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction from the NCTE/CCCC 2013 Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction.

We are encouraging online literacy teachers to submit materials to OLOR. Already published have been pieces on asynchronous conversations and community, screencast feedback, and using blogs in an OWC. 

Check out OLOR, and consider publishing. In addition to sharing your practices, it can help you join a community of like-minded educators who care about helping students learn more effectively online.

Building a prompt: Characteristics of prompts

Last time, I wrote about types of prompts that can help you be successful in starting asynchronous conversations.

As promised, in this post I want to describe several characteristics of good prompts:

1. A clear, succinct subject line. Also, if your discussion/messaging software allows it, encourage students to change the subject when appropriate, i.e., when the conversation has gone in a different direction.
2. Clear, direct language. Think about OWI Principle 3 Effective Practice 3.1: “When text is the primary medium, OWI teachers should use written language that is readable and comprehensible” (12).
3. Salutation/greeting. The salutation/greeting is valuable territory: Don’t waste it. You have a chance to use your voice. Sometimes you may be formal. Sometimes you may be welcoming, friendly, or even playful. Plus, you want students being clear about who the audience of their posts are: Often, they reply to a particular person but don't indicate this in their salutation/greeting. You should model this: “Dear students” or something similar is fine.
4. Goal or objective. With a few words,  you can make the goal of the prompt clear.
5. Specific instruction. What are students to do in this thread? Sometimes “just write” is good enough. Sometimes it’s not.
6. Context. Make it clear how the thread the prompt begins will fit into what is happening in the course.
7. Minimal number of questions and scaffolding. This is a key area in which teachers get into trouble, I find: they overdo it with prompt complexity and length, forgetting that both they and the students will build the conversation as it goes; you don’t need to front-load everything.
8. Further anchoring of prompt to material/texts in the course. Many first-year programs in particular have required, program-wide texts, and I have seen teachers struggle to find ways to use these texts in their courses. You can almost always anchor your prompts to some lesson or aspect of the writing book you are using in your course – look for ways to do that. By the way, I find this type of connecting works better in online writing courses than in onsite courses.
9. Possible broadening of topic. Students’ main goal may be analyzing an argument, but at the end of a prompt, you can also ask their stances on the argument’s subject matter. I find these subtopics get picked up at the end of the week.
10. Complimentary closing. Like the salutation/greeting, this is valuable space that is often squandered. You can overtly invite questions and comments. You can also get a lot of voice/personality mileage out of a few words: “Interested in what you have to say” can be an encouraging close to a prompt.
11. Sign off. If you're going to be "Prof. Warnock" to your class, write that. You may be "Dr. Warnock." You may be "Scott."
12. Works cited. If appropriate, do it. I ask students to cite in their posts, and I think I should model that practice.

Of course, not every characteristic will be included in every prompt. But if you consider this 11-item list as being a basis for constructing prompts, I think you’ll end up with good ways to spur your students’ writing.

Breaking the ice in your online writing course

The first week of an OWC presents teachers with some big opportunities that they can capitalize on with a good icebreaker.

An icebreaker/introduction activity can help in any course, but it's particularly valuable in the writing-focused OWC.

For one, icebreakers can be integral to constructing the author-reader relationships that drive the course; I think students need to learn quickly who the audience members (including me) are who will read them over the next few months.

Icebreakers provide students with an early low-stakes opportunity to develop their voices. Who are they in this online course? Even simple things like how they sign off on this initial post can help create the personalities the rest of the class will "see" and interact with.

Icebreakers also give teachers opportunities to develop voice and to model message board behavior. More on that in a moment.

Of course, in a broader sense, an icebreaker can help establish course community. In our committee’s A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction, Effective Practice 11.2 states: “OWC teachers should develop course community early by employing ‘icebreakers’ and other activities that make use of the LMS and that engage student writing.” Students can learn about each others' interests and make person-to-person connections while learning the course interface.

I use various icebreakers. Here is one that I think has provided good first-week results:

SUBJ: Who are you?
Dear members of English 102,
Make sure you read and follow the directions below carefully.

I'd like to get to know you a bit and, perhaps more importantly, for you to get to know each other. So, could you please let us know a few things about yourself?:

Tell us who you are and where you're from.

-What is your major? What are you interested in pursuing as a career?

-Describe one thing--and it can be anything--that you have that helps demonstrate an important aspect of you. Think of it this way: if we were in a face-to-face classroom and I asked you to bring something that demonstrates an important aspect of you, what would you bring and why?

-What are some topics that you like to debate or that you have strong feelings about? (Note: You don't even have to reveal which side you're on; just tell us what the topic/subject is.)

Please provide your email address, and sign this post the way you would like us to address you (i.e., do you go by a nickname?).

Looking forward to hearing about you,
Prof. Warnock

Some online teachers might resist the idea of going retro and asking students what they would bring to an onsite class, but this simple request has worked well. In their responses to each other, I’m struck by how many of them build connections that they sustain throughout the term. Once a student talked about loving elephants and attached a picture of an elephant figurine. Surprise, surprise, another student also expressed a love of elephants. Friends for life!

I require and grade the icebreaker post and a secondary response post (1), so they also get a sense of how the course grading works (it's all very low-stakes).

I do work hard during week 1, as I respond to every student’s icebreaker post. I think it’s important to establish connection from the go with them. I also, in this textual environment, want to establish myself as a real person and model how to engage on discussions.

So I write to them. You would bring your Philadelphia Eagles jersey? I share your pain. Live in Blackwood, South Jersey? I'm from near there. Bring in your Led Zeppelin IV vinyl? That's the first album I ever bought ($2 at the Berlin Auction). Are you an engineering major? That’s how I started out. Bring in pictures from your trip to India? I’d love to go there some day.

You no doubt could come up with cooler ideas (2), but any activity that gives students a chance to write about themselves helps them establish themselves in week one of an OWC – and allows you to do the same.

Notes
1) I discussed my grading approach a few years ago in "Rubric for evaluating message board posts."
2) A simple search for "icebreakers" will provide you with many good suggestions.

Observing and evaluating online writing courses

Conducting a course observation/evaluation of an online writing course (OWC), whether peer-to-peer or administrator-to-teacher, presents various challenges. Teaching evaluations in general, or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say the process of conducting teaching observations, can be vexed. You can run into issues ranging from the academic hierarchy to establishing fair criteria

These problems can become more complicated online, especially with OWCs. Evaluators, often administrators, may lack the expertise to "judge" online learning. We have known this about distance learning for a while; Benigno and Trentin said in 2000, “Given the special characteristics of online courses, their quantitative/qualitative evaluation calls for the adoption of specific procedures to assess both the learning process and the participant performance” (1). Our OWI Committee's Position Statement took this problem on, and in a number of Effective Practices we encourage observations specific to OWI:

• Effective Practice 7.11: Online writing teachers should be evaluated/assessed by a peer or supervisor who has similar training and equal or superior abilities/experience in writing instruction generally and OWI particularly.
• Effective Practice 7.12: OWI teacher assessment should occur in the setting and modalities that the teacher uses in the online writing course.
• Effective Practice 7.13: OWI teacher assessment should be engaged as rigorously as—and not more rigorously than—it would be in a similar traditional onsite course.

Quality Matters has a well-regarded review process. But – and I need to talk with my QM certified colleagues and friends more – my understanding is this process and rubric can be challenging to apply to OWCs (although some have made the effort [2]).

Here are some guiding ideas for me when I've observed an OWC or the online component of a hybrid:

"Movie” of the course. First off, my underlying teacher observation strategy, in any modality, is to write a "movie" of the course (I kinda took this from Peter Elbow's "movies of the mind" approach to writing critique  [3]). My letter is just that: Here is what I saw. Ultimately, I’m not the assessor. Someone up the ladder is. I think the idea of a judgment-based evaluation is a problem, so I just say what I see and provide scant editorial commentary. The resulting narrative can be judged by others, and that will help us to avoid stupid teaching observation rubrics that include things like what people are wearing when they teach.

A guided visit. I prefer that the instructor leads me through the course, even if we do that over the phone. Most instructors have been open to providing me with full access, but I'd rather not just wander through unchaperoned. Onsite, the instructor has some control of what I see, and I believe the same should apply online.

The importance of time online. I try to think about the time that both the students and instructor are putting into the work that week. This opens up tricky questions about time and learning/teaching. How much time should someone put into a class? That's tough, and the Carnegie credit is under fire, but once I observed an online course in which the only thing going on one week was that a paper was due. I talked to the instructor about it in terms of an onsite course: What would you be doing all week, sitting in the classroom waiting for students to drop off papers? What would you do with the class time? I try to look at the work of a few students and attempt to get a sense of how long I think it's taking them to read, post, review, etc. Time and space are different online, especially in an asynchronous writing environment.

What does the student see? I try to view the class design and structure from the role of a student, but I don’t obsess over those things. In short, I don’t need pretty, but I do look for function and usability.

There's more to be said about this topic. I have long believed that OWI offers great opportunity for writing instruction. In similar ways, OWCs may offer new ways to observe and understand teaching. In a recent conversation with my colleague Michael Moore from DePaul, we discussed how the “integrity” of observation can be strengthened in an online course, for a simple reason: The whole course is right in front of you. Rather than pretend that a one-shot visit to a classroom one day is good enough for us to say something general about a teacher, we instead can see a broader view of the course and that person's teaching.

Course observations raise good issues that, as I mentioned, I'm going to investigate more over the next few months.

Notes

1) V. Benigno and G. Trentin. The evaluation of online courses. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. Volume 16, Issue 3, pages 259–270, September 2000.
2) Harkness, S., Soodjinda, D., Hamilton, M., & Bolig, R. (2011, November).  Assessment of a pilot online writing program using the QM Rubric.  Paper presented at the 3rd Annual Quality Matters Conference, Baltimore, MD.
3) In Writing Without Teachers.

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.