Writing Technologies and the Technologies of Writing Designing a Web-Based Writing Course Catherine Gouge West Virginia University

V. Works Cited

Anson, Chris M. "Distant Voices: Teaching Writing in a Culture of Technology." College English 61.3 (1999): 1-20.

Bartolic-Zlomislic, Silvia and A.W. Bates. “Investing on On-Line Learning: Potential Benefits and Limitations,” Canadian Journal of Communication 24 (1999): 349-366.

Carus, Mieke, David Ferguson, and Glenn Gordon Smith. “On-Line vs. Face-to-Face,” The Journal 28 (2001): 18-25.

Cole, Robert, ed. Issues in Web-Based Pedagogy: A Critical Primer. Connecticut: Greenwood P, 2000.

“Evaluating Elearning: What Are the Right Questions?” Warwick’s Centre for Academic Practice. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/cap/resources/pubs/forum/archive/issue25/project/ (accessed 2/06).

Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United States, 2005. Created for the Sloan Consortium by I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seamen, 2005.

Kossmann, Dan. “Investing in Learning: Considering Value, Not Just ROI” Chief Learning Officer Magazine. Media Tec Publishing, 2002.

Marengo, Agostino and Vittorio Marengo. “Measuring the Economic Benefits of E-learning: A Proposal for a New Index for Academic Environments,” Journal of Information Technology Education. 4 (2005).

Palloff, Rena and Keith Pratt. Lessons from the Cyberspace Classroom: The Realities of Online Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.

Rumble, Grenville. “The Costs and Costing of Networked Learning” Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks. 5:2 (September 2001).

Website for “ICON” at Texas Tech. <http://ttopic.english.ttu.edu/manual/manualframe.asp?typeof=icon> (accessed 2/06)

Website for California National University for Advanced Studies <http://www.cnuas.edu/ (accessed 2/06)

Williams, V. and K. Peters, “Faculty Incentives for the Preparations of Web-Based Instruction,” Web-Based Instruction, ed. B. H. Khan. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications, 1997.

©2006 Catherine Gouge

West Virginia University

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[1] Studies of the economic benefits of online learning to institutions are still inconclusive. Though many attempts have been made, researchers are still trying to come up with an equation which accurately measures and/or can reasonably predict the long-term costs and savings to institutions. While student “seat-space” issues are mediated by having fewer students in the classroom, the costs of training and maintaining the technological support infrastructures at institutions are still somewhat difficult to calculate. For more on this, see “Measuring the Economic Benefits of E-learning: A Proposal for a New Index for Academic Environments,” by Agostino Marengo and Vittorio Marengo in the Journal of Information Technology Education. Vol. 4 (2005); “Investing in Learning: Considering Value, Not Just ROI,” by Dan Kossmann (2002); “The Costs and Costing of Networked Learning,” by Grenville Rumble (2001); Lessons from the Cyberspace Classroom: The Realities of Online Teaching by Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt (2001); "Evaluating Elearning: What Are the Right Questions?” at Warwick’s Centre for Academic Practice website http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/cap/resources/pubs/forum/archive/issue25/project/ (accessed 2/06); and “Investing on On-Line Learning: Potential Benefits and Limitations,” by Silvia Bartolic-Zlomislic and A.W. Bates (1999).

[2] Interestingly, only 13.1% of schools actually disagreed with the statement that online learning is “critical to long-term strategy.” For the full report, see Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United States, 2005. Created for the Sloan Consortium by I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seamen, 2005. [return to text]

[3] More details of the course pedagogy and set-up can be found on Texas Tech’s website: http://ttopic.english.ttu.edu/manual/manualframe.asp?typeof=icon. [return to text]

[4] Anson, Chris M. "Distant Voices: Teaching Writing in a Culture of Technology." College English 61.3 (1999): 1-20. [return to text]

[5] A number of articles on the differences between online and face-to-face courses argue that there is a shift from content provider to content facilitator: V. Williams and K. Peters, “Faculty Incentives for the Preparations of Web-Based Instruction,” Web-Based Instruction, ed. B. H. Khan, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications, 1997) and Glenn Gordon Smith, David Ferguson, and Mieke Caris, “On-Line vs. Face-to-Face,” The Journal 28 (April 2001), pg. 18-25. I agree that the online instructor’s role becomes more of a content facilitator than a conventional face-to-face lecturer, but most face-to-face writing instructors assume the role of content facilitator. In this way, the transition to web-based content for writing classes might be thought not to alter the relationship between the instructor and course content to as large a degree as it would for an instructor of a lecture class. [return to text]

[6] N. Dabbagh discusses this in “Web-Based Learning Framework on Mapping Instructional Strategies to Web Features” on a George Mason University-based web-site about distance learning instruction at http://mason.gmu.edu/~ndabbagh/wblg/wblframework.html (accessed 2/2002). [return to text]

[7] Palloff and Pratt argue that not only do students need to be trained to learn online faculty are not automatically reading to work in an online environment either. They list seven qualities in faculty members that determine their readiness to teach online. Of those seven, the willingness for faculty to work with others at their home institution (both peers and instructional technology support staff) are emphasized as absolutely essential to the success of the course.

[8] Hillman, D.C., Willis, D.J., & Gunawardena, C.N., “Learner Interface Interaction in Distance Education: An Extension of Contemporary Models and Strategies for Practitioners,” The American Journal of Distance Education 8:2 (1994), 3-42; and Moore, M.G. “Three Types of Interaction,” The American Journal of Distance Education 3:2 (1989), 1-6.[return to text]