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10.21.16

Online Writing Instruction

Purpose

Although online education has existed for over a century, mostly as correspondence courses through postal services, radio, and television, this pedagogical approach has proliferated over the last two decades as various digital applications have made it more manageable and accessible–not to mention cheaper and potentially more profitable. For many instructors the challenge of teaching online is figuring out how to map traditional courses onto a distance course. But this may not be the best approach. Instead, we may want to think of online writing instruction pedagogy as an approach in and of itself. Likewise, we may be able to develop better approaches for teaching aspects of our traditional courses by considering the strategies we use to teach writing online. Today we will examine the best teaching practices for online writing instruction and their implications for other teaching contexts.

Before Class

• Read DePew, "Preparing for the Rhetoricity of OWI" [FPOWI]
• Read Miller-Cochran "Multilingual Writers and OWI" [FPOWI]
• Read "Adaptability to Online Learning" [Community College Research Center]
• Submit Sample Assignment with rationale to the instructor as a hard copy at the beginning of class

FreeWrite

Answer the following questions so that you can contribute to the class discussion. You have the first ten minutes of class to skim through the CCCC OWI Principles. Then you have another ten minutes to address the following questions:

What concerns do you have about teaching a course in an online environment? (You can answer this from experience or just based upon the readings) How do these Principles and the readings help you to address these issues? How might you imagine designing your pedagogy to address them in an online class.

Discussion: Teaching with Technology & OWI

As a class, we will discuss the following questions:

• What questions or comments do you have about these articles?
• How would you achieve your individual or program's goals for your writing class while teaching with digital technologies or teaching an online writing class?
• How do digital technologies create learning opportunities for some students and limit learning opportunities for others. How might you leverage the digital technologies' affordances to mitigate these situations?
• Based upon these readings, what tips or warnings would you provide to an instructor who decided to use writing technologies in her/his curricula?
• Should access be the priority of all writing programs? Why or why not?

Thought Experiment: Teaching Disciplinary Research Papers Online

As a class, we will discuss how we might approach the following hypothetical situation:

You are assigned to teach an asynchronous (not live; any time, any place) online writing course. You have the following sequenced assignments: 1) Topic Proposal, 2) Annotated Bibliography about Topic, 3) Disciplinary Interview Proposal, 4) Informative Essay About Discipline (with a report of the interview data), 5) Research Paper about how one's discipline might contribute to addressing problems related to one's topic.

Using this scenario, we will discuss the following questions:

• What challenges do you anticipate with the activities and assignments for this curriculum being taught in an online environment?
• What are some of the activities and assignments that you would create? How would you teach them online?
• How might you use the technologies' affordances to do things that you might not be able to in a face-to-face class?