In an OWC, reading is an inherent part of the experience

What do your students read in their writing courses, especially their first-year courses? And why are they reading those things?

As a teacher, I always assign a lot of readings in my courses. In fact, my process of designing a course usually starts with the readings; then I construct the assignments and then move on to the rest of the course.

For a variety of reasons, I’ve started wondering about this approach of using lists of prescribed readings in my courses. Particularly in an online writing course (OWC), is this really what I need to do?

This year, at Drexel we hired Irvin Peckham to direct our First-Year Writing Program. Irvin has brought some different approaches to teaching writing. He's focused on student attitudes toward writing, for one thing, and he also has a scaled-down approach to syllabi, which includes sparer required writings in these first-year courses. I’m oversimplifying his thoughts about this – check out his blog Personal Writing in the Classroom -- but he has led me to consider that in a well-run writing course, students’ earnest reading of each others' texts is plenty of great reading work for the term.

Yep. And this is particularly so in an OWC. When I looked closely at things this way, it struck me that students were doing a considerable amount of reading in my OWC courses. I’ve focused on the amounts of writing they are doing, but because so much of that writing is open to all course participants, they also read a great deal. My colleague Beth Hewett makes this argument in her new book Reading to Learn and Writing to Teach: Literacy Strategies for Online Writing Instruction. She points out that good OWI practices include a strong course culture of reading and re-reading.

Research has backed up that the reading in OWCs is quite different compared to onsite first-year writing courses; June Griffin and Deborah Minter compared the reading in fully online vs. onsite writing courses and found that the reading load online was more than 2.75 times greater. (1)

Let’s not get into the “do they read it all?” question right now, because the assumption that students ever experience everything in any class modality is flawed. (As I always say, in my many experiences observing onsite classes, I’m struck by students who aren't paying a lick of attention even though there’s some stranger in a tie sitting directly behind them.) My point here is that the literacy experience in an OWC is intense and rigorous by its very nature. Students in the course will engage in a lot of engaged reading on discussion boards and through peer reviews, reading that often turns directly into writing. They are casting their eyes over many, many words in powerfully engaged and often transactional ways.

Of course, there’s still room for those texts that I like to assign, but in an OWC, you don’t have to overburden them (or yourself) with structured reading. Really, I should have known. Writing courses are different from other courses because their syllabi emerge through the organic development of the students’ writing within them. Online, this is even more so.

Note:

1) Griffin, June & Deborah Minter. (2013). The rise of the online writing classroom. College Composition and Communication 65(1), 140-61.

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.

Online peer review writing groups

In talking with teachers about online writing courses (OWCs), I find myself circling back to some core teaching ideas, and one is that OWI appeals so strongly to me because the OWC becomes, especially when asynchronous forums are at its center, an ongoing peer review. And I sure do believe in peer review.

In OWCs, students are consistently reading, thinking about, and responding to each other’s writing. They are working with each other as writers. It’s serious work, non-surface work. In fact, an oft-encountered problem with “regular” peer review is that students who are not confident or are unsure how to respond turn into grammar guards/editors. You rarely see message board conversations that devolve into that, and when you do, it often looks like flaming.

Some of what makes peer review work so well online is simple: It’s easy to bring students together and share documents digitally. But using easy-to-facilitate groups can become an even more powerful part of the OWC experience. I often conduct my group online peer reviews similarly to how I would other peer reviews in terms of review instructions, but there are two major logistical differences: 1) reviewers are responsible for all drafts in their group, and 2) comments are not just additive; they must be cumulative. In other words, say Ariana posts her document and Alexa reviews it. Drew cannot just come along and review Ariana’s draft without also accounting for Alexa’s comments. The reviewer's writing challenge becomes more complex, and the reviewee must read and account for multiple, perhaps contradictory, comments. They can synthesize such comments and consult me – or the writing center or someone else.

Technology-wise, groups are easy. (I use Blackboard Learn in my courses and find, despite the vitriol often directed at Blackboard, that it mostly does everything I need it to do. That being said, I do think its Group function is not very good, but my understanding, based on a Bb Learn “listening session” I attended recently, is that Bb will soon improve this functionality.) In terms of group creation and maintenance, you can simply let the CMS randomly create the groups for you, or you can purposefully build groups based on various criteria, distributing students in ways you think make sense. Four is a good number of students in a group.

Exchanging documents is easy on message boards. They can simply use attachments. Or they could use Google Docs or something similar. They can respond back to drafts in a post within the group and/or make comments using Track Changes or other annotation software. 

You can also choose whether students remain in the same group all term or whether you reshuffle when a new assignment arises. There are good arguments for both.

The online peer review group is basically a writer's circle, and perhaps students who have a good experience in class will find ways to set up similar circles for their own writing projects.