A mix of approaches in this term's asynch OWC

I'm again teaching an asynchronous first-year online writing course (OWC) this term, and in an environment of increasing AI apps in which teachers not only worry about academic integrity but have more fundamental concerns about what it means to teach writing, I have found myself working from established practices while still refining them to account for the fast-paced changes we're facing.

I'm engaged in a variety of practices to try to maintain a writing-heavy class environment, some of which I've written about individually before:

• I'm again using the "textual brew" of unusual texts and discussion prompts.
• I'm trying to strengthen the relationship between the discussion posts and the major course projects.
• Speaking of discussions, I'm using them in a tried-and-true way to see a great deal of informal student writing: It's mid week 4, and in a class of 20 we're already over 550 posts (including my contributions).
• Drawing on the fundamental nature of low-stakes, informal writing, I'm having students in mini  assignments--right on the discussions!--analyze and revise their own posts; e.g., revising out instances of the verb "to be" in a post they choose.
  
• I've included the stoplight approach to AI that I mentioned last time.
• I'm asking students to include a one-page metacommentary about their use of AI in conjunction with that stoplight approach.
  
• Working with several of my colleagues in a mini teaching circle, I've assigned a fantastic book that helps students take a critical look at technology, Jason Ohler's Taming the Beast.

How's it all going? Talk to me after the quarter is over. However, I'm enjoying it: The challenge is there. These practices have created a productive pressure on my pedagogical approaches.

Generative AI and integrity concerns: More discussion board support

As I wrote a few months ago, the hand-wringing about generative AI and academic integrity that has been taking place in academia caused teacher me to return to a fundamental educational technology that has served me well: Message boards.

The writing assignment submission approach I'll briefly describe has lots of pedagogical upside, but I'm talking about it here in the context of AI-driven concerns about academic integrity.

For my current course, students submit four short writing projects in addition to many low-stakes assignments. I call these writing projects Exploration dialogues; you'll see why in a moment.

They submit these projects in two ways.

One, they submit to a Turnitin dropbox in our Blackboard (Bb) Learn course, a method I use not for plagiarism policing so much but because Turnitin has an effective audio commenting function that is great for response and is seamlessly integrated in Bb Learn. Although I don't require submitted rough drafts of every project, they also must submit rough draft material, even photos of notes from class. (The photos, by the way, are great and super fascinating.)

But they also post their final drafts to a Bb Learn Discussion, and I provide them there with these instructions:

Please cut-and-paste only your final draft of your Exploration dialogue Project 2. Do not use an attachment.

On this thread, read two of your classmates’ projects and respond to them. From the Syllabus:

On a Discussion board for each project, you will read two of your classmates’ projects and write short (at least 50 words) but meaningful Reactions. There is no fixed framework for your Reactions, but asking questions and seeking points of clarification are ideal. These Reactions may also allow you to connect the project with your own work in the course or perhaps your own experiences. The project author then will reply to these Reactions, either individually or collectively. 

Feel free to ask me questions!

Philosophically, this approach is nothing whiz bang new. Teachers do things like this. These straightforward threads have yielded interesting results in terms of student dialogue and learning for this course. I could talk more about that, as I mentioned.

But I believe this approach provides a constructive approach to academic integrity in a time when teachers are not sure what to do. Can students still misrepresent their writing, generative AI or otherwise? Of course! But there are implications if they submit a paper that is not theirs.

For one, they may reveal weak mastery of the content, which could become apparent as these message board conversations unfold.

More importantly, they are doubling down on integrity issues by writing about something that isn't theirs! I mean, they have to really have ice water in their veins to engage in a conversation about writing that is not theirs, fooling not just the professor but their own classmates. Could it happen? Does it happen? Of course it could! But shoring up against such behavior through an open course writing environment like this seems less like cheating vigilance and more like using good pedagogy for a collectively good end.

AI apps and student writing worries?: An old, reliable OWT practice can help

I wish I was writing about this cool, high-tech (and maybe high-profit!) way of dealing with the AI chatbot app storm and the implications for students submitting inauthentic texts in your courses.

But I won't leave you in suspense: I'm not.

Instead, to help increase the chances that you are reading authentic student texts, building on my last post, I suggest you lean heavily on three things:

1. A "text brew" of different, course-specific readings that students must synthesize into one piece of writing.
2. Students drawing on their personal writing and learning experiences.
3. A dialogic writing environment on message boards.

This approach won't solve all your problems, and it takes me back to one of the first posts I ever composed for this space, back in September 2005: using message boards!

During my winter '23 course, I realized what most of us have: When assigning writing assignments, we cannot now do what we've always done. Short response papers, canned/recycled essay topics, papers that are just exams-disguised-as-writing--AI chatbots can easily, and sometimes expertly, respond to them. We need to be nimbler and more innovative.

Make no mistake, these assignment adjustments will require preparation time. We need to find texts that speak to a topic you want to discuss, develop a prompt about those texts, and then have the students write and respond to each other on threads. However, we may find ourselves increasingly replacing the time we spend assessing/grading "big" papers with more closely looking at these types of student texts.

I taught a first-year writing course in the winter, and I ran some of my prompts through ChatGPT; I was struck by the inability of the app to respond. In simple terms, I knew who was on the other end: No one.

For instance, I used this combination of texts several times:

1. Two articles from the excellent anthology series Writing Spaces, which contains chapters about writing written for a student audience.
   
2. An article from The Atlantic Monthly magazine; I had assigned an issue of the magazine as a class text.
3. A student-authored reading from something special we have at Drexel: A long-standing annual publication The 33rd, which features award-winning student writing and faculty writing in various genres and disciplines.

I shook up this "brew" of texts and wrote message board prompts asking this of students:

1. Address a specific aspect of writing discussed in the Writing Spaces chapter.
2. Use the Atlantic and 33rd pieces to provide specific examples of that aspect of writing.
   
3. Describe their own specific writing experiences in the context of this conversation.
   

Of course, this was happening on message boards, so part of the writing requirements were that they respond directly to each other in context. Note that the posts are evidence-driven; I even ask that they provide brief works cited/resources lists. Also, I emphasized that message board posts are informal: I don't expect them to be mechanically perfect.

On a given thread, students wrote substantively, sometimes easily surpassing 1,000 words in multiple posts.

My prompts aren't foolproof, but based on my sample runs, ChatGPT didn't have command of Writing Spaces texts and had zero "knowledge" of The 33rd, so its efforts to respond to my prompts were awkward at best. Because of my "informal" guideline, the AI-generated texts also stood out and looked odd.

What I'm suggesting isn't perfect. Right now, nothing is. But tilting my class away from "traditional" papers to dialogic writing helps me feel that when I look at student writing, what I get is, well, theirs.

Annotate PRO for responding to student message board posts

Annotate PRO is a tool, developed by 11trees, that helps teachers streamline response to student writing by providing a library of common comments that they can easily insert into writing projects.

The Annotate PRO site asks teachers, "Do you ever feel like you say the same thing over and over again to students?" While acknowledging that of course teaching often involves repetition, the site asks what would happen if teachers could streamline that process when responding to student writing, thus putting more energy into deeper feedback and teaching. A series of screenshots show how to use Annotate PRO:

• Once downloaded as a Chrome Extension, Annotate PRO appears as a sidebar.
• Users simply click anywhere that feedback can be provided within a browser: "Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Dropbox, Box, Blackboard, Canvas, Google Classroom, Schoology, Gmail – just about anywhere you can type feedback into a webpage."
• From there, users add a comment.
• Groups of comments can be saved to create personal, program, or even institutional libraries.

Annotate PRO allows for "smart automation." Teachers can use it to reduce repetitive keystrokes, but they can customize it using a "Free Form Comment" function that pops up in sidebar when using the tool.

Annotate PRO has great functionality for helping teachers respond to digital papers, and, I suppose, such is still the traditional framework of teacher writing feedback: A teacher giving feedback to a student essay/report/paper. 11trees provides a video description of this core use here.

However, I want to focus on another aspect of Annotate PRO: Its use in developing a library of responses for electronic forums like discussion boards.

As I have written about numerous times, a large component of student writing, and not just in OWCs, involves short, informal writing on electronic platforms. In many courses, students compose most of their words in these environments.

Teachers want to encourage this, but how do they respond/moderate in ways that are helpful for student learning? I've come across and written about a number of strategies--a favorite source is the book Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators by George Collison, Bonnie Elbaum, Sarah Haavind, and Robert Tinker--and I think Annotate PRO is a smart tool that offers another possibility.

With Annotate PRO, after installation, I simply opened a Discussion in Blackboard Learn (my LMS) and clicked in a message. Voila! I could instantly drop in a comment that had been stored in a library.

It was impressive and powerful in its simplicity, and I saw immediately how Annotate PRO reduces the literal keystrokes and would free up time for for more substantive teaching. Library comments could help me with the frequent encouragement and questioning posts while I used "Free Form Comments" for more specific moderating and commenting posts.

A common--and, at times, legitimate--complaint from students is that they feel no presence from their teachers on discussions. Teachers are seeking strategies and pedagogies to work more fully and carefully with students in discussion environments. (The Community of Inquiry framework [1] offers a way to think about teacher presence.) Annotate PRO provides them with a technology to help them do that.

Note
1) As described by Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher educationmodel. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.

Updated Guidelines for Participating in Discussions

Periodically I update a document in my courses that I call Guidelines for Participating in Discussions. I'm sharing with you the latest:

Guidelines for Participating in Discussions

Conversations that we have via Discussions will make up a major part of the work in this course. Whether you are responding to a question or issue I’ve raised or you are collaborating virtually, we will be working on your thinking – and writing. A few general rules:

• Read all posts. Part of your responsibility in this class is to read every Discussion. All of them. “No boldface posts by Friday!” should be your mantra.
• Check the Discussion boards regularly. Start good habits in Week 1.
• Sign your name at the end of your post. We want to know how to respond back to you.
• Build a conversation. You will write primary, secondary, and peep posts. After reading them, I will post specific questions, especially on Wednesdays, throughout the term, as will your colleagues. Make sure you read my 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.

Each week, I will let you know how many posts are due.

1)       Description of posts. Your posts should be

-Detailed. Each post must represent a substantive piece of writing; see below for word counts, although I’m not as interested in precise word count as I am in the depth and development of your ideas. Obviously, a post like "Me too!!" doesn’t count—although it can be a peep!

- Semiformal. Your posts should contain some degree of formality: spell-checked, organized, etc. However, they will be part of a dialogue, so they will differ from major writing projects. It takes a few days for us to reach a mutual understanding of the appropriate level of formality.

-Referenced. You won't always need citations in your posts, but you should seek opportunities to reference our readings, other sources, or your colleagues' comments.

-Courteous. We don't always have to agree, but no one should resort to flaming attacks.

2)       Primary posts vs. secondary posts.

- Length. Primary posts should be at least 150 words. Secondary posts need only be 75 words. (“Argument Statements” are slightly more elaborate primary posts.)

-Organization and structure. Primary posts should not be one paragraph, and I expect them to reflect reasoned thought on your part, beyond what you might put into a normal email or chat message. My students and I have found that these mini-essays present excellent opportunities to refine the ability to make a clear, focused point when writing. In other words, these posts are great practice. Secondary posts can be one paragraph.

-Replying. Either kind of post can be used to reply to another student.

3)       Peeps. Peeps are very short posts between you and other students. They serve as conversational “glue” in the course. If you post 10 of them during the term, you get 10 points, but you cannot make up all peeps at the end of the term. Write one or two each week.

4)       Grading. Discussion work will be worth 20 to 40 points each week. To evaluate your posts, I will use the rubric below, considering these factors:

-If you complete the posts in an adequate manner, you will receive Bs.

-If you go above and beyond the basic assignment requirements, you will receive As.

- Very good posts—completed with a great deal of effort and thought—will receive full credit (e.g., 10 out of 10). 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 respond in the same way others have responded).

-are excessively sloppy in 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.

5)       Staying current. In the Weekly Plan, you will see what is due and the deadlines for primary and secondary" posts. A major responsibility for you is to check the Discussions frequently and stay current on the conversations taking place there.

6)       Reading. Again, you are also responsible for reading all posts in the class.

-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 am ignored.

-Don’t post ignorant. Be original. Read before you post. Don’t repeat other writers. Part of your job is to build dialogue with each post.

7)       Shorter posts. Remember rules for primary and secondary posts, but in the spirit of keeping the conversation flowing, feel free to post shorter, informal comments on the Discussions; for instance, writing a quick sentence to clarify a point or to state your agreement with another author’s point of view. When you’re reached the limit for peeps, you will receive…

8)       …Extra credit. Diligent, active Discussion writers will earn a high grade for this part of the course. Excellent posts or posting several on-time, extra posts in a week can earn flair points for extra credit (some of you may naturally find that you have more to say on some of our topics--you'll be rewarded!).

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.