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Articles Conference Reviews |
G.11 Is This Facebook or an Online Writing ClassIs This Facebook or an Online Writing Class?
Presenters: Roxanne Kirkwood and Kelli Prejean of Marshall University At the beginning of the session, Roxanne Kirkwood and Kelli Prejean introduced themselves and their experiences teaching online courses. Prejean introduced herself as an assistant professor who has taught online classes for several years at a university that offers monetary incentives to develop online courses. She admitted that when she first taught an online course, she did not know what she was getting herself into. Kirkwood introduced herself as an associate professor who has taught online classes for seven to eight years at three different universities in three different states. She came to the online course environment out of love for the technology not out of desperation to teach. Prejean explained the session's goals: locating how she and Kirkwood position themselves and what they saw was a gap in the research on online class environments. The first half of the session described online teaching experiences and the second half consisted of smaller breakout discussions. Kelli Prejean Prejean then outlined the March 2009 Update of the CCCC Committee on Best Practices for Online Instruction, which indicates that "discerning best practices in areas other than the superstructure and infrastructure of OWI courses might be the biggest challenge this committee faces . . . [W]e take this interesting finding to indicate that the theory and pedagogy of OWI--particularly regarding 'best practices'--likely will require ongoing research." She further stated that although there are many discussions of multimodal and digital composition, there is not enough scholarship on online instruction and pedagogy. Therefore, Prejean and Kirkwood call for more research in the area. Specifically, this session addressed methods for communicating in online environments. Prejean also provided statistics from the National Center for Education that in 2006 66% of the 4,160 2-year and 4-year Title IV degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the nation offered college-level distance education courses. Moreover, 89% of public institutions use online courses. She also cited statistics from Scott Warnock's Teaching Writing Online: How & Why on the growth rate of online enrollment versus overall higher education enrollment (12.9% vs. 1.2% in 2007) and the prevalence of online course enrollment (20% of students in 2007 were enrolled in online courses). Prejean then distributed a handout entitled "When Communication Breaks Down" that included an online exchange between her and a student from an online course. In this exchange the student was dissatisfied with a grade she received on a paper; she used all capital letters and multiple exclamation marks to argue with the comments that Prejean made about the content of the paper. After allowing attendees to quickly read through the email exchange, Prejean commented that the student was very angry and as a result, Prejean responded in a motherly way, telling the girl that she would not respond to an email that was "yelling" with exclamation marks and all caps. While she acknowledged that this was not the best pedagogical move, Prejean attributed both her own and the student's behavior to personal stressors that manifested themselves in the online classroom. Prejean recommended that instead of immediately reacting and responding to students' concerns, instructors should wait several hours and then reply for a more productive exchange. Roxanne Kirkwood Kirkwood introduced her portion of the session with some suggestions for further reading on teaching an online class: Jonathan Alexander and Marcia Dickson's Role Playing: Distance Learning and the Teaching of Writing and Ilana Snyder; and Catherine Beavis's Doing Literacy Online: Teaching, Learning and Playing in an Electronic World. Kirkwood stated that there are typically two types of online classroom instructors--those who come to online classes for the love of the technology and those whose only option for teaching is through online courses (i.e. adjunct instructors). Kirkwood was recruited by her mentor to teach an online course at Arizona State and was given the required textbook and syllabus. At Marshall, however, she did not have set guidelines and was offered financial incentives to develop online courses. A second difference between Kirkwood's past experience and her current experience with online courses is that at her current university there is no face-to-face time for online courses. At her former university, there were up to two face-to-face class periods used for teaching the technology required to operate within the online classroom. This caused Kirkwood's online pedagogy to regress. Instead of asking students to create wikis, blogs, and movies or requiring them to revise a white paper by turning it into a multimodal composition, she only required students to use word processing software. Kirkwood explains that she was ignoring her own pedagogy because she felt limited by the online space. Kirkwood also discussed the students in her online courses. She often taught non-traditional, adult, returning students who hadn't taken a class in years; they lived hours away, logged in once or twice a week, did the work, submitted, and were done. Kirkwood explained that the tide is changing. She now has twenty-year-old students sitting in the dorms and taking the online class; these students have a different set of expectations for online spaces. They want to participate, ask questions, discuss ideas with each other, and help each other with writing. They sometimes talk too much. Kirkwood referred to one recent incident in which two of her students logged in on a Saturday and got into a verbal disagreement; one called the other an idiot, and she didn't find these posts until Sunday night. That was a major moment of anxiety for her because the exchange had already happened, and she wasn't able to cut the tension immediately as she would have in a face-to-face class. To make matters worse, the WebCt space housed not one, but three sections of the class, and the post was visible to all of them. Luckily, no one else got involved, and she was able to shut down the discussion. This exchange initiated some very important issues about students using too much of their social utility experiences in the classroom. Kirkwood recommends meeting the students where they are and bringing them here by building on the strengths of their social utility skills and moving them towards success in a classroom environment by creating a block at the beginning of the course for students to explain what their expectations are and what the class space should look like. This also gives instructors time to explain their own expectations, clarifying that while this is an online space, it is still a college classroom; some behaviors are not acceptable in a college classroom. Typically, Kirkwood explains, she has those conversations in a face-to-face classroom anyway, but because of the online space, she assumes the student already has that knowledge. Discussion Kirkwood presented the following questions to the attendees for discussion:
The also asked for responses to the following questions:
One of the best responses to the questions posed was: "Play more!" The attendee explained that some lessons you must learn the hard way, but in the process, the student learns an effective lesson about rhetoric, audience, and planning. For example, when you call someone else an idiot, it is not the most rhetorically effective move. He ended his response with the advice: "allow a little chaos and see what happens." Kirkwood pointed out that similar issues arose years ago with the emergence of using MOOs in writing courses when opponents complained that students were not serious enough and went off topic. But the history of writing, Kirkwood explains, teaches us that people play with identity and boundaries whether it is online or in face-to-face classrooms. Shouldn't an online class just own that it is a place to push those boundaries? Earlier in the session, Kirkwood mentioned that she did not release all of the coursework at the beginning of the course but week by week. An attendee asked about the reasoning for this practice. Kirkwood responded that during the summer, students would do all the work for the whole semester in the first week and then go on vacation. This approach didn't work well for her process-oriented pedagogy, because students were writing before receiving any feedback. Now Kirkwood places the assignments online, but hides them, realizing each assignment one week at a time. Otherwise, the course would be distance learning. The session then broke off into smaller groups to have more in-depth discussion about answers to the aforementioned questions. |