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.

ChatGPT and online writing environments

Like many of you, I've been inundated with information about ChatGPT. For some, the sky is falling. For others, these generative AI language modeling technologies represent opportunity.

For many of us in the writing instructional world, the response is kind of this: Told ya so.

ChatGPT is more powerful than other AI apps, stretching way back to that old chatterbot Eliza. It can wow and amaze--to a point. If you ask it canned school writing topics/prompts, you'll get back canned responses. What's been surprising to me is how many people will say, "This looks like what a student could have written." That depends on what you've asked those students to write.

If you put students in conversational, multi-audience writing environments in which they write to discuss a variety of texts, not to prove knowledge mastery (or even that they've simply read), even another human trying to help a student cheater would struggle.

Such environments are the foundation of many online writing courses (OWCs).

In online writing instruction (OWI) workshops I conduct for faculty, I have a slide for when people inevitable express concerns about about plagiarism in the type of asynchronous OWCs we focused on. The slide would initially be blank, and then using a Powerpoint animation, a big red heart appears. "Colleagues," I would say, "If someone else is doing all this work, it's gotta be love!"

My point was that the work being done in my asynchronous writing courses was so extensive and involved that anyone who tried to replicate it, week in and week out, for another student would basically have to take the whole course in that student's stead. They would really have to like that person! I guess I could have alternated my big heart with a dollar sign, because such substitute studenting could only be done for love or money.

We may be worried about ChatGPT's ability to respond to writing questions/prompts such as "Describe Hamlet's indecision" or "provide reasons why you are for/against gun control," but teachers should always be concerned about student responses to these kinds of prompts.

To paraphrase crudely: It's the assignment, stupid. (I wrote about this in lay terms on my other blog.)

If you have students writing in multi-audience, multi-text environments such as class message boards, you're going to provide them with very specific rhetorical situations that it would be difficult for someone to engage in without clearly appearing out of place.

I'm back almost to day one on this blog: Use discussions/message boards and other asynchronous environments. Here is a brief example of a prompt I used in my first-year argument writing course plugged into ChatGPT and the AI model's response; I include comments in the text:

Peer review challenges [*My prompt]

Dear class, 

DePeter’s chapter focuses on providing “meaningful” peer review (Reid mentions review too). What has your experience been like through your school years as a peer reviewer? In terms of being a reviewee, what sort of specific revision challenges do you tend to encounter during the drafting process? How do you work with those challenges? 

I asked you this week to read Mai. What peer review advice might you offer this author? 

Thanks,
Prof. Warnock 

ChatGPT response 

As a language model, I do not have personal experience as a peer reviewer or reviewee [*AI honesty]. However, I can provide information on best practices for peer review. 

DePeter and Reid [These are readings from Writing Spaces, a superb anthology series designed for student writers to help them think about and study writing as subject matter] emphasize the importance of providing meaningful feedback during the peer review process [*Peer review is only mentioned tangentially in Reid's chapter]. This includes focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript [*The word "manuscript" doesn't appear in Reid or DePeter--it's a jarring, out-of-context word] , providing specific and actionable suggestions for revision, and approaching the review with a constructive and supportive attitude [*This is nice,  highly general stuff about peer review but not specific to DePeter; in short, anyone could have written it, and it doesn't answer the prompt]. 

In terms of specific revision challenges, authors may struggle with organization, clarity, and coherence of their manuscript [*Again]. They may also have difficulty with grammar and punctuation. To work with these challenges, authors should review their manuscript for these issues and consider seeking feedback from beta readers or a writing group [*Both of these terms are also jarring and acontextual considering the readings. These comments are, bluntly, much less interesting that what actual students said, some of whom had visceral, emotional experiences with peer review].

As for offering advice to Mai [*Mai is an award-winning first-year student essay found in Drexel's in-house annual publication, The 33rd], I would recommend that they [*They AI smartly chooses "they"] focus on the organization and coherence of their manuscript [Again, "manuscript"; Mai's piece is clearly an essay or even paper]. They may also consider seeking feedback from beta readers or a writing group [*Again, both of these terms are jarring considering the readings] to help identify any areas that may be confusing or unclear. Additionally, It's important for them to be open to feedback and willing to make revisions based on the feedback they receive. [This advice is obviously not specific to Mai's essay. Students in my course provided advice about her use of personal reflection as well as the kinds of sources she used. Responses like this make it evident the respondent did not read Mai's essay].

ChatGPT is indeed amazing and teachers are finding great applications for it: I've already collected scores of links. Teachers, it won't ruin our lives--but it may sharpen our teaching, if we let it.

What do they really want?

In my new position as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education in Drexel's College of Arts and Sciences, I have a renewed perspective on issues facing a university.

Our past two year's experiences with COVID-induced remote learning raised many questions, to put it mildly. A primary question we faced was what people really want from education, divided into stakeholders: What did students want? What did parents want? What did teachers want?

Seeking answers often led to difficult conversations, because, although this should be obvious, none of these groups had monolithic views of educational delivery and modality. Hearing the news, you might want to have a knee-jerk opinion and say, "Parents want their kids back in school" or "Students want to return face-to-face" or "Teachers don't want to go back into the classroom."

In truth, we saw wide variations within these populations. No question, our administration heard from parents who feel the price paid for college includes an in-person experience, even if these were "squeaky wheels" (at times it felt that every unhappy parent seemed to know our provost if not our president, and would they go right to the top with complaints). Yet other parents didn't want their students on the ground, in classrooms, dorms, and other shared spaces, while any remnants of the pandemic existed.

As I learned last fall in my own course, when we finally returned face-to-face, many students were exuberant about being back together in person. But some students have been among the most mask-conscious people I know and have been articulate about their own health concerns. Also, while some students loudly objected to they what they viewed as the lesser experience of online learning, some students loved the flexibility online and remote learning offered.

Many teachers were wary of returning to classrooms, especially being compelled to do so, but others were tired of teaching through masks and longed for the face-to-face experience that had drawn them to teaching in the first place. In terms of technology, while, sure, some instructors bumbled around in Zoom, many have learned, in ways that often surprised themselves, the advantages of remote, online, and hybrids, especially the "chrono-hybrids" I discussed previously.

COVID-19 is ongoing and will continue to present modality-based challenges. I do think we got a lot right. For instance, tough as it was, through the year we have tried to reduce the number of modality shifts after courses were listed on our term master schedule (TMS). Students are often surprisingly accommodating about these changes, but I think it is reasonable that the modality listed on the TMS should provide some level of assurance as to how a given class will be offered.

Simply, we can offer education in more ways now, so we shouldn't be surprised when it's more difficult to determine what people want. Students and faculty both realize that the old ways of teaching and studenting can yield to improved approaches. It's worth noting that I think that we have not done a great job communicating these things clearly to parents.

Education is multi-faceted and complex. Giving people what they proclaim to "want" isn't always the best solution. Part of the contract of education, one that makes it unusual, especially higher education, is that you pay someone to teach you content and in ways that challenge you. You cede to their expertise in ways that are supposed to help you be a more fulfilled person.

In general, for all demographics, we have to be clearer about articulating what it is we are doing and why, so that when our actions are not aligned with peoples' "wants," we can explain that course of action. Will this make everyone happy? Of course not! But it will help resist one overarching problem: When people feel decision-making is happening in a black box.

Fifth annual GSOLE conference this Friday

This Friday, January 28, the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE) will be conducting our fifth fully online annual international conference, "Visions and Sites of Online Literacy Education."

Conference Co-Chairs Cat Mahaffey and Tess Evans--who are also GSOLE Board Members--have assembled a terrific event, again providing an excellent opportunity for the many people interested in online learning in general and online literacy education (OLI) more specifically to gather and discuss the opportunities and challenges of online education. GSOLE is now a 500+ member-strong organization!

It's a full-day affair with over 70 presenters, as you can see in the conference program. GSOLE President Dan Seward provides a short welcome video and tour, and already available is a Praxis Poster Hall. The conference features seven concurrent sessions and plenaries by Central Michigan's Troy Hicks and the University of Florida's Laura Gonzalez. Links to all of these events will be activated on Friday. You can follow the activity and discuss your experiences using #gsole2022.

You can still register, and this event is designed to be user-friendly on the wallet: It costs $10 for GSOLE members and $5 for students and contingent faculty GSOLE members. 

This year, we're grateful to the University of Houston-Downtown Master's Programs for sponsoring our conference, and I hope attendees take a look at their programs.

GSOLE is constantly improving and evolving. Listen to Dan's welcome message to hear how the conference is responding to trends in online learning and how GSOLE is connecting both new and old voices to chart the next paths in OLI.

If you're teaching writing or literacy online, you need a second screen

There was a time when I often wrote about using audio or audiovisual tools to respond to student writing (1), and to reinforce one point about the importance of these technologies for teachers, I would draw a comparison with roofing nailers, and how, since their development, asking people to crawl around a roof with a regular old claw hammer would be inhumane; while writing teachers don't risk falling, the repetitive writing and typing of comments could lead to crippling and career-disrupting wrist and hand issues like tendonitis or carpal tunnel syndrome.

I'm starting to get to the same mindset of conviction with second screens. If you are an online writing or literacy instructor, a second screen should be standard operating procedure. I have had a second screen for years, but only recently, driven by my pandemic at-home work schedule, have I really started using that second monitor for all of my online teaching and other work.

As many of you know who regularly use a second (or perhaps third) screen, it is indeed work- (and thus, life-) changing. 

For online teachers, a second screen is especially valuable if you teach with complex asynchronous discussions. Using discussions well is a central piece of my faculty development work, and a front-and-center question from participants is how to moderate and manage these conversations. I describe a straightforward process that involves having a Word notes file open while I am reviewing student discussion posts and threads, and I use those notes to cut-and-paste student comments and help prepare my individual responses and overall thread synthesis posts. 

I would like to see a biological eye fatigue study, but anecdotally I'm sure many people would reinforce my experience: It's a whole different experience simply to glance up or over at another screen that has these notes vs. using the ALT + tab (on PCs) to move among different windows. 

This isn't purely about ease of work or eye fatigue, either: It's about being a better teacher. It's kind of like moderating an onsite class in which the students make a bunch of comments and then you must exit into another room and then return to moderate the conversation. There would be a hiccup.

With the second screen open, it's all in front of you. You don't lose track of your place.

Also, and the same goes for responding to student writing, when we're tired we can become crabby, terse, and perhaps unfocused. Students might not be getting our best selves when we're clicking through various windows on our screens. We might want not to see a great point they made, for instance, so we don't have to click back to the notes screen to compose a response.

Second screens should also be standard operating procedure for remote synchronous teaching. I have done many presentations and workshops using a small Surface screen. I like my Surface a lot and it functions well, but to have available slide note files or the Zoom gallery of faces on a separate, larger screen--such functionality makes me a better teacher and workshop facilitator.

Many people in higher education believe we will not go back, ever, to pre-pandemic teaching practices. We will all continue to incorporate more technology-driven approaches. We need to have the proper hardware to do so, and a second screen seems to me to be such an integral piece of pedagogical equipment.

Note

1) For example, “Streaming Media for Writing Instruction: Drexel’s Streaming Media Server and Novel Approaches to Course Lessons and Assessment” in Streaming Media in Higher Education, edited by Charles Wankel and J. Sibley Law (2011), or "Responding to Student Writing with Audio-Visual Feedback” in Writing and the iGeneration: Composition in the Computer-Mediated Classroom, edited by Terry Carter and Maria A. Clayton (2008).

More on modality

A few months ago, I posted thoughts about new ways to envision and describe our teaching modalities. Mainly, I introduced the term chrono-hybrid as a way to describe a fully online course that meshed regular synchronous meetings with significant, weekly asynchronous components.

I've been, I hope, refining those ideas since then; in fact, I'm polishing off my thoughts for a plenary talk this Friday at the upcoming fourth annual GSOLE annual conference, Visions and Sites. 

As I've researched that talk, I have found that others have been working on similar problems of describing course modalities. In particular, I was psyched to find this article: An EduCause piece from last September, "Bichronous Online Learning: Blending Asynchronous and Synchronous Online Learning" by Florence Martin, Drew Polly and Albert Ritzhaupt. (1)

We're discussing similar issues, but for them, the term is "Bichronous Online Learning," and they write, "Although the blending of face-to-face and online learning has been researched in many studies, the blending of synchronous and asynchronous online has not been researched to the same extent."

Citing others, they point out that online courses are being classified in an increasing variety of ways, ranging from asynchronous to synchronous to MOOC to blended/hybrid to blended synchronous. Now, HyFlex has also emerged.

Ultimately, they define bichronous online learning "as the blending of both asynchronous and synchronous online learning, where students can participate in anytime, anywhere learning during the asynchronous parts of the course but then participate in real-time activities for the synchronous sessions. The amount of the online learning blend varies by the course and the activities included in the course.” 

Interestingly, they are coming at this from the vantage of how synchronous elements can help an asynchronous online course be "more engaging" while "increasing learning outcomes, positive attitudes, and retention.” OLI and OWI doesn't start with a deficit of asynchronous experience, as our writing- and literacy-focused asynchronous courses are often rigorous and engaging and rigorous. However, introducing a terminology, whether bichronous or chrono-hybrid, that captures our balance of synchronous and asynchronous can certainly help us, and, of course, our students, understand these courses better.

In addition to Martin, Polly, and Ritzhaupt, as august a body as the Department of Education (DoE) (now freed of its hideous ex-administrators) has also re-thought modality, offering a Distance Education and Innovation Final Rule (2) that “simplifies clock-to-credit hour conversions and clarifies that homework time included in the credit hour definition do not translate to clock hours, including for the purpose of determining whether a program meets the Department’s requirements regarding maximum program length.”

Based on public comments, this language was introduced in the Final Rule:

Allowing asynchronous delivery of come courses or portions of courses delivered as part of clock hour programs. The COVID-19 pandemic coupled with new technologies have encouraged States, accrediting agencies, and licensing boards to reconsider earlier restrictions on the use of asynchronous distance learning technologies to deliver portions of programs that are typically considered to be hands-on programs. Commenters suggested that the Department permit the use of asynchronous learning in clock-hour programs, and the Department agreed , as long as licensing bodies permit the use of asynchronous learning and will include clock hours earned through asynchronous learning toward the clock hour instruction requirements.

Similar to Martin, Polly, and Ritzhaupt's article, the DoE statement works in the context of asynchronous learning being lesser or inadequate vis a vis synchronous educator. Still, it too provides guidance and a framework for understanding what students and teachers are doing in asynchronous environments.

Classwork. Homework. Time-in-seat. These one-time simple concepts continue to emerge as terms we must re-think in efforts to describe in what ways we're teaching--and in what ways our students are learning.

Notes

1) Florence Martin, Drew Polly and Albert Ritzhaupt. "Bichronous Online Learning: Blending Asynchronous and Synchronous Online Learning." EduCause, Tuesday, September 8, 2020.

2) U.S. Department of Education. “Distance Education and Innovation.” Federal Register. Vol. 85, No. 171. Wednesday, September 2, 2020 / Rules and Regulations. 34 CFR Parts 600, 602 and 668 [Docket ID ED–2018–OPE–0076] RIN 1840–AD38. 54742-54818.

Things both great and small in synchronous online writing courses

I teach my online writing courses (OWCs) asynchronously, with only touches of synchronous elements, such as a first-week meeting (that I also record for those who can't attend). I have long discussed the reasons why I teach this way, including because in an asynchronous writing course, everything students do is in writing.

Our field, however, is giving increasing attention to the possibilities of synchronous courses. I recently had the pleasure of serving as a member of the dissertation committee of Kimberly Fahle of Old Dominion University, whose dissertation, "Collaboration and Community in Undergraduate Writing Synchronous Video Courses (SVCs)" explored a number of fascinating elements about learner experiences in asynchronous courses.

Fahle, who successfully defended earlier this year and is now the writing center director at York College of Pennsylvania, raises several major considerations and observations about SVCs, including some underlying reasons for students’ general reticence for verbal participation when compared with textual communication, the need for modality-specific training, and the general impact of interfaces on learning and teaching.

These major conclusions aside, one of the many strengths of her excellent dissertation was her exploration, through discourse analysis, of detailed aspects of learning in synchronous, online meeting-based environments.

I'll give you a great example. With regard to interface, Fahle wrote that students were sometimes reluctant to speak in class because in the web meeting app for their courses, the face of the last person who spoke would stay prominently on screen until someone else spoke. One of her students said, "I think also the fact that the last person to speak [...] the camera stays on them until someone else speaks [...] makes people maybe not want to speak."

Think about this in terms of an onsite class. It would be like when someone speaks, everyone turns to look at that person, staring zombie-like, until someone else takes the initiative to speak. You could see how that would stifle class dialogue and likely course community.

Through her students, Fahle highlighted such an interesting, and easy-to-overlook, observation. When you consider such a dynamic, you can see how for many students this would be challenging and for shy students possibly withering and debilitating. It also demonstrates how a web platform suitable for business-type meetings might operate in totally different way for education, particularly in courses aiming for discussion--such as an OWC.

Addressing concerns similar to this would take some serious user-centric consideration. As we further explore SVCs and any technologically-faciliated environments, these are exactly the kind of details, from the student eyes, that we need to consider.

How much should you keep in the course?

So many apps can help us do our work as online writing and literacy instructors, and I do think it's important and valuable that you play with new tools, as such ongoing experimentation will inevitably refresh and perhaps improve your pedagogy.

But I was struck by a recent conversation with a friend of mine. His bright high school student was struggling a bit, and one of the issues was that the student had many different web sites/stops for reading, resources, and other materials for his classes. He had trouble keeping track of it all.

That made me think and reflect on my own practice. While I believe paragraph one above--after all, I wrote it!--and I am always introducing new tools outside of the LMS to students, I think sometimes we can get too fancy for our own good--perhaps to the detriment of our students' learning.

For instance, there are great meeting and appointment apps: think Doodle. But when I want to set up conferences with my students, I usually set them up right on the discussions; I list times and then have students respond, asking them to change the subject line to include their last name and time choice. It's a little clunky, but that conference conversation is right there when they do their other work in the course.

In fact, in my asynchronous course, I continue to have much of the "action" right there on those discussions. Teaching approaches that might perhaps be conducted via blogs, wikis, or even more advanced versions of discussion boards themselves (such as that solid communications app, Slack), I still often conduct on the LMS discussion board, warts and all.

I supposed this thinking drives my ongoing use of a Weekly Plan in my OWCs: I'm trying to reduce the amount of virtual "traveling" students will do so they can focus on developing their writing and literacy.

I think we have to consider critically how much we ask students to venture outside the LMS and to what ends. Hey, try cool tools, but be mindful of the student experience.

Now of course, students are whisking and cycling through social media all the time, so it might seem kind of dumb to worry about their use of a meeting app, but I continue to think that an important part of my job is to make students comfortable with the interface--and then I'll push them, often outside their comfort zone, when it comes to the writing work in the course.