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last.updated 5.25.14

Online Writing Instruction, Part 1

Purpose

Beth Hewett's chapter provides an in-depth discussion of the "Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction" which is intended to guide administrators' and instructors' design of online writing instruction. Scott Warnock's book, Teaching Writing Online: How & Why, provides its audience of beginners with some practical strategies for designing a course with online pedagogical elements, as most distance learning have. This is a good artifact to look at from two different perspectives: a text that can help us think about how to design OWI courses and a text–and one of the few–in the field that specifically advise instructors on how to teach with the tools we use to mediate online instruction.

Since OWI is mostly synonymous with asynchronous instruction, today's class will occur asynchronously. We will, of course, debrief during the next class on your experiences.

Assignment Scenario–Developing OWI Policy

You will work in the following groups...

Each of you will have at least one student in your group who is familiar with the assigned context. If you are not familiar with the assigned context, ask questions of the people in your group who are familiar with the context.

Each group will work through the following hypothetical scenario. Your "writing program" has been handed the "CCCC Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction," and the program has tasked you and your peers as the committee to design or re-design the current courses to meet these guidelines as best as it currently can. Imagine that your institution, like many institutions, has limited financial resources. Also, like many institutions, upper administration does not want to expend too much of these resources on it writing courses. The writing program director has tasked your group with (re)designing the program to meet the CCCC guidelines as best as it can.

Assignment–Policy Statement

To get attendance credit for this class, you and your group will need to draft a 2-page recommendation to your writing program director describing what you see the program concretely needs to do to implement this position statement. Some tasks you will need to complete:

• The group will have to decide which principles to prioritize considering the limited resources
• The group will have to argue for some principles and against others considering the limited resources. Note that your audience has read these principles too, so s/he will wonder why your committee believes the program should focus on the principles it has chosen.
• The group will have to explain how it will specifically implement the principles that it has chosen considering the resources they have; consider your context. You can take "fictional" liberties here within the reasonable limitations of the realities of this context.

Tips for Organizing Work

• You will want to communicate early in this process and decide how you will do this work. Will you asynchronously dived labor? If so, what schedule will each individual be on and what tasks should people do as a result? Will you work synchronously? If so, what technology will you use? Make sure everyone agrees on the plan.
• Decide when and how you will prewrite.
• Develop a plan in which no one person is doing more than three hours of work on this.
• Decide how you will submit the work? Attached MS Word document? Google document? Something else?
• You can submit prewriting work, but it is not required.

Final Product

Submit the final product by the end of the day on Friday. A competent 2-page document which demonstrates evidence of reading and understanding the readings to this point in the class will get attendance credit. A document with little evidence of this work will receive a half attendance credit. And a document with no evidence will receive no attendance credit.