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Articles Conference Reviews |
K.36 and FSIG.12 Online Writing InstructionK.36 Understanding State-of-the-Art Online Writing Instruction: Results from the CCCC Committee’s National Survey on Best Practices and FSIG.12 Best Practices for Online Writing Instruction: Validating Key Results of the 2010 CCCC Survey Chair: Beth Hewett Speakers:
Presented by members of the CCCC Committee on Best Practices in Online Writing Instruction (OWI), this pair of presentations fulfills two of the Committee’s charges, including conducting and reporting to NCTE General Membership at the 2011 CCCC the results of their survey of current OWI practices and directions for further research. Committee members, as listed on the CCCC website and the initial report, include Beth L. Hewett (Chair), Deborah Minter, Keith Gibson, Lisa Meloncon, Sushil Oswal, Leslie Olsen, Scott Warnock, Christa Ehmann Powers, W. Webster Newbold, Julie Drew and Kevin Eric De Pew. For the past three years, the OWI Committee has been engaged in collecting, summarizing, and examining data reflecting the current “state of the art of OWI.” They plan to spend the next three years analyzing, synthesizing, and publishing their findings. As their “November 2010 Update” notes, the “next phase of [their] research” will focus on professional development for OWI faculty, support for OWI students with disabilities and ESOL students, and training for online tutors. All of these are among the most recurrent “themes” to emerge from the data collected. The research that informs the panel and SIG presentations began with a 2009 CCCC session titled, “CCCC Committee Research into Best Practices for Online Writing Instruction (OWI),” which was reviewed for Kairos by Terry Carter. At the 2009 session, speakers Connie Mick, Beth Hewett, Deborah Minter, and Geoffrey Middlebrook announced the CCCC OWI Committee’s plan to develop and administer a national survey of OWI practices, informed by the 2005 Sloan Consortium, with the goal of producing a position statement on best practices. The Committee also planned to publish both a comprehensive report on the survey and an annotated bibliography of scholarship on OWI. These documents, on which this year’s CCCC presentations were based, are now available on the NCTE website (http://www.ncte.org/ccc/committees/owi), though analysis and synthesis of the data summarized continue. Following their 2011 CCCC presentation, the Committee plans to begin publishing their findings and to offer a Webinar related to their work. The 2011 panel began with a brief introduction to the initial findings offered by Beth Hewett, session Chair. Two national surveys—one about “fully online” courses, the other about “hybrid” courses—were developed by the Committee from a series of site visits, telephone and face-to-face interviews, and focus groups with faculty and students at “institutions ranging from two-year colleges to research universities.” The surveys included open-ended questions about online writing instruction in a variety of institutional settings and were administered via email to NCTE, WPA, and other CCCC member groups early in 2010. The surveys’ identical questions about OWI practices were based on the following criteria drawn from the 2005 Sloan Consortium:
As Hewett explained, although the Committee’s initial goal was to “articulate best practices,” the data and discursive responses they collected provided instead an overview of the current “state of the art” and revealed the extent to which best practices were far from pervasive or established. Hewett’s introduction to the project was followed by Christa Ehmann Powers’ summary of OWI courses conducted “fully online.” Data collected from the 158 respondents to this survey included student enrollment figures and attrition rates, which ranged from approximately 10-30%, depending on the type of institution. Perhaps the most significant insight resulting from this survey is that while online instructors rely on well established face-to-face writing pedagogies, informed mostly by process and constructivist theories, most find that such approaches do not translate easily or well in online contexts. As Powers explained, both surveys posed identical questions about a range of “characteristics and conditions” of OWI teaching and learning environments as well as concerns about challenges and issues facing OWI students and faculty. These included 1) demographics of respondents, 2) their preparation or training, 3) their “pedagogical choices and influences,” 4) opportunities for supplemental instruction (online tutoring, writing center, etc.), 5) student and instructor “experiences,” and 6) how CCCC might better support their efforts. As might be expected, communicating this wealth of information verbally and visually posed challenges to speakers and listeners alike, and the audience was urged to view the report soon to be available on the NCTE website. Following Powers’ selected summaries of findings from the survey of fully online courses, Deborah Minter provided an overview of the survey of OWI practices in hybrid contexts, presenting similar PowerPoint slides of charts summarizing data collected in the Committee’s report. The survey of OWI in hybrid courses represents 139 respondents. Hybrid settings are defined as writing intensive courses in disciplines other than composition or writing studies specifically. Among these respondents, as among fully online instructors surveyed, asynchronous discussions were much more widely employed than synchronous and similar assumptions about pedagogy held sway. In fact, synchronous interaction typically translated as face-to-face conferencing in hybrid contexts and was mostly absent from fully online courses. Minter further noted that, although faculty might list in their online syllabus contact information about Disability Support Services at their institution, they do not necessarily know whether they are teaching students with special needs nor whether their courses are compliant with ADA regulations for the particular students enrolled in their classes. Minter noted that this area, too, is ripe for further investigation and discussion of how to adapt or invent pedagogies to serve diverse student populations. Both speakers observed a general sense among respondents that their teaching philosophies did not transfer well into the online environment. They and the session Chair pointed to this finding as a direction for further investigation and future research, even as a call to action. Both surveys pointed to deficits in training (both technological and pedagogical) and support (both compensation and time) for instructors. Also, the survey’s highlighted problems with student orientation and access to course management systems and technology, as well as problems with access to supplemental instruction in support of student learning. Finally, both surveys indicated limited knowledge among faculty about the special needs of students enrolled in their online classes or accommodations available for students with disabilities or non-native speakers enrolled in OWI courses. In fact, faculty respondents revealed a lack of information about the specific needs of individual students in their OWI courses. As the Committee’s initial report suggests and panel members stated in both the session and the SIG, best practices for OWI might very well require inventing rather than adapting pedagogical theory and practice. For example, while survey respondents revealed a commitment to teaching writing as a process, it is not yet clear, Hewett pointed out, whether this approach is beneficial or effective for OWI, nor why we should assume that it would be. On the plus side, faculty reported that their students felt more connected to their colleagues in online settings than in their face-to-face classes, less “inhibited” and more likely to engage in online discussions than they might face-to-face. While these advantages can sometimes become disadvantages, Hewett suggested that OWI teachers “need to leverage OWI benefits beyond the practical” into the realm of learning outcomes which is likely to require the development of pedagogical “theory and practice unique to OWI.” (The initial report therefore states, “OWI needs its own study, theories, and practices” [2].) This insight will no doubt inform the Committee’s “next steps” toward articulating best practices. Transitioning from presenting survey findings to “looking ahead” at their implications for future research, Webster Newbold presented highlights from the Committee’s Executive Summary of their initial report and emphasized the need to address the “pedagogical framework” of OWI going forward, including understanding and defining the nature of OWI and “how it helps students improve their writing.” The future success of OWI, he proposed, will depend in part on understanding how class size affects teacher workload and efficacy as well as student performance. In as much as the report reveals a consensus that OWI entails a greater time commitment per student, time management guidelines and strategies might be developed and studied too. For his part, Sushil Oswal proposed that disabled students be more fully integrated into the OWI environment, not treated “differently” but accommodated more fully and appropriately. He expressed the view that current online practices (as reported in the surveys) reveal a “general indifference and neglect” toward students with disabilities, and (as earlier noted) survey responses revealed a general lack of knowledge about the needs of particular students in OWI settings. Oswal voiced the need for greater understanding of how OWI might better serve disabled students and what kinds of accommodations might be necessary to enable student access and success. (It was noted during this speaker’s presentation, as well as in the ensuing discussion, that this particular set of challenges cannot be met by instructional innovation alone, but must be addressed through administrative efforts [e.g., student screening and orientation, enrollment practices, etc.] as well.) The discussion that followed the panel’s presentation offered anecdotal support for many of the researchers’ findings and the areas of need identified in the surveys on behalf of students as well as OWI faculty. Among the topics discussed was the integral role of reading in the text-driven environment of OWI, which highlights the need for OWI instructional training, assignment design, and pedagogical practice that address and accommodate students’ need for reading instruction. As the Committee's initial report acknowledges, A recurring theme in these data is that students must access much of their interactions, instruction, orientation, supplemental assistance, and so on in text-based manners. Although intuitively this reading/writing nature of the online setting would not appear to be a problem, we think that many students are not necessarily good readers of instructional texts, which means that communicating with them textually may require different kinds of strategies than those provided by simply migrating face-to-face techniques and strategies to an online setting. Particularly for students in developmental writing and EL2 writing courses, text-based instruction may prove challenging and may require different textual strategies and technological strategies to include audio/visual interactions and instructional delivery. Even these changes may be insufficient for students with various kinds of language backgrounds and disabilities from learning issues to physical challenges; if little is known about how to provide efficacious and satisfying OWI for mainstream students, far, far less is known about providing an excellent learning opportunity for EL2 users and disabled students.
Readers may recognize that the data provided in the fully online and hybrid survey findings support an understanding of OWI that has been largely anecdotal until now. (13) Audience members and speakers agreed that OWI best practices will need to include strategies for developing and promoting the “expectation of reading” among students who enroll in online courses. As a professional community, it was suggested that we find ways to better inform prospective students of the interactive nature of the online environment and the expectation of engagement through regular and frequent reading and writing activities. Communicating how important reading is going to be for the long-term success of OWI will be yet another important area of interest, concern, and study going forward. |