Teaching Professional Writing via the Internet/Web

Mark Mabrito
Associate Professor of English
Department of English/Philosophy
Purdue University Calumet
Hammond, IN 46323
mmabrito@purdue.edu

Overview

During this semester, I am teaching the first writing course offered exclusively via the Internet/Web at Purdue University Calumet. Much preparation went into designing/preparing the course for Web delivery, and much revision of the course is taking place as it begins to evolve and more is learned about the benefits/limitations of the medium and how students interact with the technology. In an attempt to provide some initial insight to those contemplating the teaching of a writing course via Web delivery, this paper addresses course design and planning, strategies for managing the flow of information in an online writing course, the positive outcomes, and some potential areas for concern.

Description of Course/Student Population

The course is English 220: Technical Writing, a course primarily required for students pursuing an associate's degree in the technologies (e.g., Construction Technology, Information Science and Computer Programming). Most students are at the sophomore level and have taken one semester of composition prior to enrolling in this course. The focus of English 220 is on preparing students to write the types of documents they would commonly encounter in their chosen fields, including routine correspondence (memos and letters), technical descriptions and instructions, and brief technical reports.

Many students at Purdue Calumet are "non-traditional" – that is, adult learners – including those who enrolled in this course. All but three of the twenty students were working full-time and taking classes either part- or full-time. Most cited convenience and incompatible work schedules as primary reasons why they chose to enroll in an online technical writing course. Six of the students had previously taken an online course through another department.

Course Design

Several factors went into redesigning the course for Web delivery. First and foremost, I wanted to maintain the same support for student learning that existed in the face-to-face classroom, as well as a pedagogy that supported development of writing skills. When I teach technical writing in the classroom, discussion, student-student interaction/collaboration, and various forms of written and oral feedback are major features of the course. When converting class materials for Web delivery, certainly issues of Web-page design – i.e., layout, appropriateness of materials, accessibility, navigation – are important considerations. Not to be overlooked in the process, however, is the idea that in order for the instructional experience to be a positive one for both students and instructor, the emphasis cannot be solely on transmitting information. In other words, if not careful, one can easily fall into the "pulpit" mode of teaching, where the instructor is viewed as the preacher handing down the word to the seated congregation (Jennings, 1987).

Therefore, the emphasis clearly has to be on exploiting the technology to support and enhance pedagogy, rather than the other way around. To that end, the planning stage for this course focused on developing course content as well as strategies for promoting interaction and collaboration among students.

The primary vehicle for delivering the course to students was the class Web site. This site contained the course syllabus/policies, a detailed weekly schedule, a description of all the writing assignments and discussion assignments, instructional documents on how to configure different types of browsers, e-mail programs, newsreaders, and summary notes for different reading assignments. Essentially, the main content of the course could be found at the Web site.

Since I was familiar with HTML (hypertext markup language, the language used to code documents on the Web), the technical challenge of creating the Web site was not a difficult one. For those faculty who lack such experience, however, designing a course Web site may be more problematic. Although one can get assistance from computer support staff, leaving the actual creation of the site to others does raise some issues: it becomes very difficult to add or delete content at will or fix errors without having to rely on someone else, and it becomes more difficult to envision how the course should appear on the Web without the technical knowledge of the strengths and limitations of the medium. One need not learn how to code HTML directly, since there are many editors available (Netscape, for example, has a built in editor). Many of the higher-end editors, such as FrontPage or Hotmetal Pro, can produce very sophisticated Web pages with a minimal learning curve.

Although I had the resources available to incorporate all the latest "bells and whistles," such as Java and JavaScript, I intentionally created a sparse-looking site. My emphasis was not on bandwidth-heavy Java applets, elaborate graphics, or huge amounts of text. Large graphic files and Java applets would have taken a long time to download with a slow modem connection, which I assumed most students would have from home. Text-intensive pages also would have been clearly inappropriate because the medium does not lend itself to reading large amounts of text on the screen. To further complicate matters, experience has taught me that the students majoring in technology who typically take this course tend to be not very text-oriented: many seldom thoroughly read the assignments in the textbook.

With this in mind, I decided to create a functional, task-oriented site. The homepage for the course simply provided links to various tasks the student would need to accomplish at any given time--e.g., a detailed week-by-week schedule, descriptions of each of the writing assignments with related links to resources available on the Web, study notes for reading assignments, and information on how to send assignments and respond to the newsgroup.

Providing the course content was only half the challenge of designing the course. The other major concern of course design here was to promote class discussions, interaction among students, and collaboration on some assignments for the course. Distance learning may also bring with it a sense of isolation on the part of the students who do not enjoy the same level of interaction with each other as their face-to-face counterparts. To minimize this effect and to avoid a situation in which all communication in the course would take place between instructor and students, I made a concerted effort to build collaboration and a sense of community into every aspect of the course. The main vehicle by which students communicated with each other became the class newsgroup. The newsgroup was password-protected and therefore available only to the students in the class.

Much of the discussion that occurred in the newsgroup focused on analyzing readings and rhetorical situations related to writing assignments – i.e., audience, purpose, context as well as on providing feedback to topic ideas and drafts of documents in progress. The newsgroup proved to be an invaluable tool in two respects. First, it provided a comfortable space for students to interact with each other and thus extended classroom communication/collaboration beyond just the instructor/student relationship. It also made available a "low-risk" environment whereby students could function as writers, collaborators, and reviewers of writing. Although the newsgroup clearly lacked the immediacy of the face-to-face classroom experience, it was a useful prewriting tool. While communicating via the newsgroup, students discussed writing through writing, thus honing their writing skills even further.

Additionally, since communication in the newsgroup was asynchronous (not constrained to real-time interaction), the pattern of these conversations also differed from those in the face-to-face classroom. Research has shown that, unlike communication occurring in real time, e-mail discussion tends to be more non-sequential by nature (Black, Levin, & Mehan, 1983). In other words, rather than following a pattern of "topic and then comment on that topic" as is typical in real-time conversations, e-mail generally produces a less linear form of discourse, marked by simultaneous, multiple comments on different subjects, some of which may receive many or few comments in turn. Such was the pattern found among my students. Although their conversations lacked the familiar coherence of face-to-face exchanges, they did allow students rich opportunities to explore ideas through writing.

Other features which I initially considered in the planning stages of the course to promote collaboration and communication among students included establishing an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel for real-time (synchronous) communication and using a software conferencing program such as Webcrossings (http://www.webcrossing.com), which features an online conference system via the Web. I abandoned the idea of using IRC because, after reviewing student schedules, I saw that it would be difficult to schedule large enough groups of students to be online simultaneously. Not surprisingly, many of the students' reasons for taking an online class rather than a face-to-face one (conflicting work or personal schedules) also prevented us from meeting in significantly large numbers online. Time constraints, unfortunately, prevented a thorough enough review of the conferencing program to determine its adequacy and whether appropriate technical support would be available; such a program is under consideration for the next edition of the course. I also investigated other conferencing programs but did not adopt them for the present because they would have required students to have special software/hardware available on their computers.

Managing the Flow

In a writing course such as this one, a never-ending flow of drafts and documents goes back and forth. In the face-to-face classroom, responding to drafts in time, distributing drafts to peer review groups, and grading and returning final reports can be a challenge. Trying to manage the stream of documents online is even more problematic. Consider what is involved in receiving an e-mail attached document. You have to save that attachment as a file, rename it if necessary, e-mail the student to confirm having received the file, open the file and determine if you have the required software to convert/read the file, and then contact the student again if the file can't be read. Having accomplished all this, you still have the task of reading the document, commenting on it, and then sending it back to the student as another e-mail attachment. When you multiply this process by dozens of e-mail messages, the task can become a major time consumer.

I have found several ways to cope with this so that more of my time can be devoted to making substantive comments in student documents, rather than moving/copying files back and forth. I have found that the rather simple approach of requiring the following from students goes a long way toward easing the burden. First, I request that students follow a strict file-naming scheme, whereby they name their documents with their last name, the number of the writing assignment, and whether the file is a draft or final document – e.g., Smith1draft.doc. This guideline helps me to identify readily what the document is and who it belongs to and saves the trouble of having to open it, rename the file, and then save it to my folder. Furthermore, I request that students not include any messages in the e-mail that includes their assignment and that they clearly identify what they are sending in the subject line of the message – e.g., "Writing Assignment 1--final." This procedure allows me to distinguish between writing assignments and other communication from the student, such as a question about the course or an assignment.

Another problem posed by the exchange of electronic documents is compatibility. Different students work with different word processing programs and different versions of these programs. I worked with Word 97, a word processing program able to open and edit many different types of files. I published a list of those different file types on the class Web site and made it the responsibility of students to see that they worked with a word processing program that matched one on the list. I could have avoided this problem altogether by allowing students to send ASCII (.txt) files of their documents, but chose not to because some formatting elements would have been lost, and formatting was an important feature of these documents. All the students were able to work within these constraints, eliminating the compatibility problem on my end. However, a problem did arise when students sent drafts to one another for review, since some of them were working with much older versions of word processing programs and were not able to handle the same wide range of file types that I could. This problem necessitated communication back and forth among students and much trial and error to save documents in a format acceptable to the peer reviewer. A possible solution to this problem in the future that I will explore will be to have students submit drafts only to me, and I will convert them to HTML and post them directly to the class Web site for all to see via their Web browsers.

One last component that helped to make the class flow smoothly was insisting that students follow a detailed schedule and assigning penalties to those who did not. My main concern in teaching online was that students not equate a "distance learning" class with a "self-paced" one. If students did not adhere to the schedule, it would have been difficult not only for me as the instructor trying to keep track of where everyone was, but also for other students in the class. Since the class was designed to be highly interactive and to include collaboration among students, those not working at the same pace as their peers would create anxiety for others who needed to rely on these procrastinators for input, either by providing comments to a draft in progress or by contributing to a joint assignment. Every component of the course factored into students' final grades, including class discussions and writing assignments, and late penalties were assessed against those students who did not contribute on time. So far, these "incentives" have proven to work successfully.

Positive Outcomes

This online class has produced several positive outcomes. Perhaps the most important of these was that it fostered more equal levels of participation among students than I usually encounter in face-to-face classes. There was little of the "lurking" – members viewing interchanges without participating – that normally marks electronic conferences. In part, the more egalitarian nature of this online classroom was influenced artificially by the evaluation criteria built into the course (although students could clearly have skipped several discussions without it having a significant impact on their grade). But, to some degree, greater levels of participation are a natural outcome of the medium. In the face-to-face classroom, some students inevitably "lurk" and do not participate in class discussions because of anxiety about communicating in the public forum of the classroom. Such a situation places the instructor in the awkward position of wondering whether to or how to draw these students into participating. Even those who feel comfortable participating in the classroom participate in ways that to some extent are shaped (directly or indirectly) by the presence of the instructor and past experiences with other classroom situations.

Research has indicated that the online classroom, on the other hand, represents a more level playing field. "De-centralization" is one of its key characteristics. Models for these classrooms displace the authority of the instructor, moving away from a model of top-down transfer of information from instructor to student (Barker & Kemp, 1990); instead, the online classroom focuses on intensive exchanges of text among students and instructors (Peyton, 1990; Thompson, 1988). Additionally, the less threatening nature of electronic communication in general provides increased opportunities for collaboration and participation (Rice, 1987) and thus more equal levels of participation among students.

An additional benefit to the online classroom was that because all communication in the classroom occurred electronically, a form of discourse that is somewhere between speech and writing (Spitzer, 1986), students spent their time online interacting through writing. Thus, they were provided with additional experiences in formulating text so that the entire classroom experience became a type of "prewriting" exercise. Clearly, students wrote more and spent more time using written text as a vehicle for communication in the online classroom than students in a face-to-face class.

Areas for Concern

Although this online teaching experience has proven to be a positive one thus far, there are several areas of concern worth mentioning. First, students' varying degrees of expertise with the technology did prove problematic at first. I had created and posted help files on the class Web site before the class began, yet it became necessary to furnish additional documentation quickly once the class was underway. Although many students were experienced using e-mail, reading/posting to newsgroups, and navigating the Web, some were not. To help these students, it became necessary to create help files and tutorials so that they were able to use and configure their software. Because students were not using a common software program for mail/news/Web browsing, it was necessary to provide tutorials and help files for a variety of different packages as well as providing individual assistance via e-mail for some. I learned from this experience not to make assumptions, next time, about the technical backgrounds and knowledge of participating students and to provide extensive support as a matter of course.

Another area of concern for teaching online, and one that does not receive much attention in the literature, is the recognition that the online learning may not be suitable for every type of student learner. Of the few students who have had difficulty in the course so far, at least several seem to have problems attributable largely to the fact that they lacked the academic skills and preparation needed to succeed in an online environment. My experience suggests that online learners need the following characteristics to succeed:

It may not be practical to screen students in ways we would like or require certain prerequisites from them before they participate in an online course. We can, however, be aware of the challenges certain learners will face in these courses and continue to research ways to make the experience a more positive and productive one for them.

Changes for the Future

Although at this writing I am still teaching the course and thus do not have the results of the formal evaluation that will occur at its end, I have already planned several changes for the next offering of the course based on experiences so far. The first revision will be a mandatory orientation for students on campus. The purpose of this one-time, two-hour orientation session will be to assess how adept students are at using the necessary technology for the course. For those students having difficulty, immediate support can be offered so that they will be able to participate with little difficulty when the course begins.

On a similar note, once the course is underway, I plan on offering students more online assistance, both in terms of writing and technical assistance. To accomplish the former, I will provide access to on-campus writing tutors who are familiar with the course and the types of assignments students are working on, and who will be available via e-mail for tutorial assistance. For additional technical support, I similarly will provide students with online access to one of our computer lab consultants. This support person will be available via e-mail to assist a student having difficulty with the technology, in much the same way the student would receive support in one of the on-campus computer labs.

Finally, I will explore different types of media for presentation of class material. One approach I am considering involves presenting class lectures and discussion of readings via audio as a supplement to text files. The advantage to such an approach is that it could serve as a reinforcement of text-based materials. In the case of students who lack the text-oriented characteristic discussed above, audio support could provide a useful alternative. Unfortunately, audio cannot be the primary vehicle for presenting information to the class for two important reasons: (1) I cannot assume that every student will have a multimedia-equipped computer, and students who do not would automatically be excluded from listening to the audio files. (2) The current limitations of bandwidth on the Internet would make downloading even a thirty-second sound clip a painfully slow experience for students trying to retrieve the files at home via modem. In the case of the first problem, as the cost of hardware drops over time, more students will be able to upgrade their existing computers or to purchase newer multimedia computers at a reasonable cost.

The problem of slower modem connections may not be as readily solved, since cable or satellite delivery of Internet service still remains experimental and either unavailable or cost-prohibitive to most individuals. There are, however, continuous streaming audio software packages, such as RealAudio (www.realaudio.com), that provide for quick, on-demand presentation of audio which require users to have only a free plug-in for their browsers. Although such packages are commonly found on commercial servers, colleges and universities may not support them because of considerations of cost, increased technical support, and server security. Java-based technology does provide some alternatives, however, for those seeking continuous streaming audio without the use of plug-ins or server-side support. One such software package is Emblaze Audio (www.emblaze.com), which uses Java technology to create "near" continuous-streaming audio accessible to any user without the use of plug-ins. Both software packages also provide video counterparts for those interested in incorporating video into their online courses.

Conclusion

Teaching courses via the Internet/Web represents an evolving pedagogy. We are only at the beginning stages of understanding how instructional strategies used in the face-to-face classroom should be adapted for delivery over the Internet. We need to understand more and experiment more with different approaches to delivering content online while making certain that these courses provide viable learning opportunities for our students. Rapidly changing technology makes this task an even more challenging one. Whatever medium we may use for course delivery, we should continually seek to understand ways in which the technology can more fully enhance the learning experience for our students. As long as we remain focused on shaping technology to support our instructional goals and striving to meet the needs of diverse learners, online classrooms have the potential of becoming important and rewarding spaces for teaching and for learning.

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