Who Wrote This Course Anyway?
Teachers and Students as Co-Authors of Online Courses
By Patricia Webb

 —Paul Beam in “breaking the spinster’s wrist”   

Course Design

Co-Authoring Content

Benefits of Expanding Course Structure

Problems with Broadening the Course's Audience

Traditionally in face-to-face classrooms, the syllabus, assignments and classroom activities are all constructed by the teacher with a particular pedagogical goal in mind. While students in writing courses may produce much writing, it is typically seen as a response to the teacher's assignments and not necessarily a part of the construction of the course. In online courses, however, students' writing is more prominently featured; while the teacher certainly still creates assignments and lesson plans, the sense of who "owns" or "controls" the course direction can greatly shift. What the teacher intends to happen in an online discussion might not happen, but something else that is very exciting and rewarding may occur. Who "wrote" the discussion, then? The teacher? The student?

After having taught "Writing in the Virtual Age," a graduate course which was featured online at Arizona State University during the fall of 2001, I contend that the writing of the course, i.e. the actual construction of course material, changes in an online course, not only in terms of the kinds of assignments we give in response to the different delivery system, but in terms of who writes the actual course content. Online courses can offer students the opportunity to actually co-author courses with their peers and their instructor, making the learning that happens based more clearly in their own goals and interests. The students in "Writing in the Virtual Age" wrote the course content just as much, if not more, than I, as the instructor did. In order to demonstrate the co-construction of the course, my segment focuses on the theoretical underpinning of the course, the curricular and pedagogical decisions that I made when constructing the frame of the course, and the changes that occurred as the course was actually taught.

In our rush to put courses online and our quick judgments about the benefits of or problems with distance education (which are, after all, driven by fears of corporatization and changing professor roles along with worries over quality of instruction), we need to take a moment to ask why and what? Why are we putting courses online? What purposes do they serve? Why should we teach in an online environment instead of a brick and mortar one? And what happens when we jump into online learning? In this paper, I want to explore the why and what of distance learning in one specific instance--an online graduate course I constructed and taught last fall.

My contention throughout this paper is that we must have some intrinsic reason for offering an online course. We should not simply teach online because of the "gee whiz, isn't technology great" impulse or because our departments or universities are promoting that we do it. Nor should we assume that every course is suitable for the online environment or that all teachers will be good online teachers, as Cynthia Selfe points out. When I created Writing in the Virtual Age, a 500-level graduate seminar in our Rhetoric/Composition/Linguistics program, I had two guiding reason for designing this particular course as an online course: 1) I wanted to offer a different kind of course than the traditional graduate seminar offered at my university and 2) I wanted to open up graduate education to a larger audience of participants. The first goal--creating a different kind of course with a different definition of graduate education--was, I feel, successful; the second goal--opening up graduate education to a larger audience--was not nearly as successful. In my conclusion, I will address what I think we need to do to address that failure.

If we are going to offer courses online, I contend that it's significant that we think about why we're offering them. The reason, I believe, should be driven by the recognition Marilyn Cooper highlights in "Postmodern Possibilities in Electronic Conversations" that "writing online sets up a different rhetorical situation and encourages different writing strategies than writing for print technology does" (141). Therefore, we shouldn't necessarily put our most successful face-to-face courses online and expect them to work the same way. The rhetorical situation, the interactions between students and teacher, and the students' engagement with the course material are all different in online environments. While we may be used to fairly structured face-to-face discussions in our graduate seminars, in an online course, that is not the case. When first faced with an online discussion, many teachers are shocked by what Cooper calls "student underlife." "Students are," she writes, "simply startled by the intermingling of post-adolescent posturing and off-topic joking with the more familiar earnest comments on teacher-initiated topics" (140). Instead of a graduate class, online discussion can feel more like a carnival. Instead of seeing this "chaos" as a hindrance to learning, Bakhtin points out, "carnival is a place for working out . . . a new mode of interrelationship between individuals, counterposed to the all-powerful socio-hierarchical relationships of noncarnival life" (123). Thus, while this carnivalesque environment may make us uncomfortable, it can serve as an important environment for creating change and action--goals which guide my teaching. The why and the what of online courses, then, are different from the why and what of face-to-face courses. And the why and the what are directly linked, as is the case with all courses.

 

Course Design [top]

Keeping these ideas in mind, I proceeded carefully with designing an online graduate course. I created a course that would serve an audience of students who were participants in our courses, but were outsiders because their goals for the course differed from the traditional graduate students' goals. These students were working full time, perhaps pursuing a degree or just searching for more information to help them with their current jobs. They tended to be older, have a great deal of work experience, and come to the classes without a solid background in the field of Rhetoric/Composition. An online course, it seemed would be the perfect space to reach this audience. Given the audience would be a mix of these non-traditional students and more traditional students, I decided to change the course content from a purely theoretical exploration of the field of computers and composition to a mix of practical and theoretical articles on what people who graduate from this field do in the various workplaces they find themselves in after graduation. The three paths we explored in this class were teaching (in the university as well as in community colleges), editing/publishing, and technical communication. To complement my limited knowledge of the areas, I invited guest experts to lead discussions on their fields.

The key components of the course were as follows:

What these varied methods of discussion/participation created were multiple paths through the material, multiple frameworks from which to understand the material, and a multiplicity of voices and perspectives that are not frequently allowed in traditional face-to-face classrooms. Given that the heart of the class was written discussion, the students had a direct impact on the "text" of the course and on how that text got used and interpreted.

In order to get a feel for the kind of interactions and collaborations that occurred in our discussions, I offer the following representative example. Readers can also read the entire Webboard discussions, if they want to. This discussion occurred approximately half way through the semester. It was an asynchronous discussion with a editing/publishing expert who had also had extensive experience with the academy. He began the discussion with a comparison between the academy and publishing by saying that "if I had to name the one biggest difference I would sum it up in one word: collaboration." The discussion proceeds from there:

Co-Authoring Content [top]

This sample discussion gives one an idea of how the course was co-authored by students in a way that allowed them to expand their understandings of their role in academia and to explore the other lives that were available to them as M.A. or Ph.D graduates. Each post builds qualitatively on the previous post, making the process of socially constructed knowledge visible, immediate, and observable. The "material" taught in this particular discussion is a mix of the students' own experiences (NM shares his experience of being a science undergraduate; LA draws upon her own editing experience.) and their questions to the expert. The learning that occurs is not so much through a lecture or IRE (Mehan 1979) format, but through a continual rubbing of ideas together, against each other. [1] They are co-constructing the learning/the lessons of the course by actively participating not just in a response to a post, but by actively directing the conversation in directions that are of interest to them. Far from a free-for-all where nothing is learned, these interchanges put the focus on the students' interpretations and skills, rather than on a prescribed set of learning outcomes. I framed the discussion by selecting the expert and by introducing a topic, but after that, the students ran with the discussion, becoming active creators of the course, rather than passive or semi-active participants. The above dialogue illustrates the careful and smart ways the students used the spaces to build their own knowledge.

I deliberately chose to not participate in the discussions in order to create a space for the visiting expert to guide and shape the flow of the exchanges. I didn't want students to feel torn between answering me and taking on my issues and addressing the issues that the expert introduced. I shouldn't have worried. One of the at-first frustrating but later rewarding parts of a fully collaborative classroom environment is that my students quite effectively ignored my questions and posts, when they wanted to. It encouraged me to look at my assumptions about what the role of the professor is--both online and in traditional classes. And it caused me to humble myself a bit. In face-to-face classes, the teacher is granted a great deal of authority, even in student-centered classes. Online, however, with multiple posts flashing on the screen all at the same time, certain kinds of messages are privileged over others, certain kinds of questions get responses. Early in the semester, my questions were often far too detailed and theoretical for students to respond to them in the fast-paced environment of an online course, especially one that was being held synchronously. I had to examine the discomfort I felt when I couldn't speak over all the other voices to get everyone's attention at once. Also, I had to analyze the kinds of questions I asked. Even if highly participatory graduate classes, which my face-to-face courses are, the teacher still wields a great deal of authority over the direction of and focus in the discussion. Online, students have much more control over the paths they/we take through the material.

Students' comfort with this type of learning shifted as the semester progressed. In the beginning, the students focused a good deal of the synchronous discussions on comparing their usual experiences with f2f learning to this situation (only one student had taken an online course before).

BP says "visual learners I think definitely have an advantage at online course, but I think anyone who has the discipline to take more of a personal role in learning, which you have to do in an online course compared to a traditional classroom setting, can do well and learn as much as in a traditional setting." KM writes "We receive certain educational benefits from being part of a FTF class. For instance, a shy person who learns auditorily benefits from listening to others ask questions and the answers. The conversation about the subject outside of class, etc. In a web-based class, we will inevitably evolve ways to recreate this community when needed." MM asks "I never thought about the fact that students do congregate before class and at breaktime and often compare thoughts, grouse with the teacher, ask for clarification. Online how do we do that? And is it important to do so? Are we missing something by not doing it?" CG muses "We can never achieve more than the beautiful messiness of language doing its own thing. Sometimes I feel obsessed with being completely understood. And when I let go of that--something else can happen and it's ok. Maybe we need to be extra aware of writing down things we wouldn't think of mentioning. Like the fact that the server is slow." JF praises the environment: "I believe that the discussions students have with each other may be more important than what they learn from the teacher. I think that online classes force all of us to be more articulate in our writing, to be more aggressive in asserting our needs. Therefore, in terms of improving communication skills--especially writing skills--these classes will change the lives of the new generation of students." KM, however, has problems with the medium: "I think one of the well known limitations with web-based learning or anything that is even if you are visual, there is always more information to experience than your brain and eyes can handle. I'm barely getting a chance to read what everyone is writing. However, in class, we often present the same amount of information but there are other things going on that reinforce our understanding and learning. For example, conversation is occurring instantly, people ask questions, paraphrase, etc."

All of these comments use the articles about online learning as a jumping off point to then analyze the experience of taking the course, participating in the course. The lens they use to understand the new experience is, predictably, the face-to-face classroom with which they are familiar. They are trying to make sense of the kinds of engagements they are having in the online course. Later in the semester, however, students have sorted through the experiences and know have a more solid grounding in how to participate in an online course. The students who were left at the end of the semester had figured out how best to engage in conversations with others and had learned effective strategies for online learning. The conversation, then, shifted to other topics that started with an acceptance of online learning as an acceptable mode of exchange. For example, in a later discussion, they began to question what kinds of writing teachers privileged and wondered how these limiting definitions of writing could be expanded by studying visual rhetorics and such. CG writes in one post: "But what IS 'writing?' is writing only arguments and essays or is writing creating a web page? And do we privilege one kind of writing over another when we only want to teach arguments in FYC?" The medium slides into the background as their ease of use (both technical and ideological) increases, but the medium still drives the discussion theoretically.

 

Benefits of Expanding Course Structure [top]

The benefits of this multi-faceted course structure:

By and large, the content expansion was successful because of the multi-faceted conversations. Now, this is my interpretation of the course and doesn't take into account students' perceptions. And it doesn't explain why all the students who remained in the course until the end still wanted to be teachers after having explored all of the paths. As Pam Takayoshi highlights, too often instructors claim that the course was either successful or not, based on their own interpretive frames, but they don't consider the students' experiences of the course. One of the strengths of our presentation, then, is that we do not stop at the instructor's perspective. Students' voices permeate (if not dominate) the conversation here.

 

Problems with Broadening the Course's Audience [top]

Trying to reach an expanded audience, however, was more problematic than I had expected. 18 students registered for the course. Of these, 5 were of the alternative population I was trying to reach. By the end of the semester, all of those 5 had dropped out, giving various reasons: 1) goals had changed; 2) professional person had problems with technology and wrote a protest letter to the college; 3) I had assigned too much reading; 4) technologies were too hard to get used to; 5) off campus access to the discussions was greatly hampered; 6) medical reasons. The 9 students who remained in the course were traditional students who had various reasons for wanting to take the course: 1) wanted experience with the technologies; 2) curious about the course; 3) fit with their time schedule; 4) thought it might be easier. I think my attempts to take graduate courses to the street and reach an alternative audience was not as successful in reaching that population because of several limitations: 1) our prevailing definitions of graduate education; 2) the limitations of technologies; 3) expectations of teacher/student roles; 4) the feeling of constantly being in school. Analyzing what works and what doesn't can and should lead us to a larger exploration of/critique of the elitism that prevails in graduate education. I encourage us to use breakdowns in technologies to reconsider what we're expecting and how we're creating graduate education.