paper (advance writing)

Chapter 8

Do Students Lose More than They Gain in Online Writing Classes?

Kate Kiefer

Why do we teach writing in relatively small classes? Certainly there are practical reasons having to do with workload and classroom management issues,1 but most of our reasons flow from pedagogical and theoretical concerns. Pedagogically, we know that students are likely to learn most effectively from multiple opportunities to practice with timely feedback on their effectiveness in writing. Even more important, the most influential theories of language use and development posit the situatedness of language—how it is shaped by and shapes its users and contexts of its use. Cultural, rhetorical, and sociocognitive perspectives all emphasize the construction of meaning in context. Our goals in teaching writing explicitly include helping students become aware of writing as situated communication. The rhetorical principles embodied in most widely used writing texts consistently encourage writers to adapt to the specific writing context. Contemporary writing theory and language theory (as well as much cultural criticism) develop in even greater detail the crucial roles of language in context: for identity formation, for cultural work, and for community building. Little wonder, then, that teachers of writing insist that students are best able to learn to write most effectively when they can create and respond to specific language contexts in small groups of students (15–25 students in the class as a whole, with smaller groupings of 2–5 students working on targeted collaborative activities). Do these theoretical assumptions about language preclude teaching writing online? Proponents of online writing courses argue that textual interactions can immerse students more fully in situated writing than face-to-face courses in which few classroom interactions involve writing. But despite what could be an advantage, online classes often fail students precisely because all interactions are

142 Online Writing Classes textual. Unless students are sensitive to or willing to examine the different functions of text in an online class, they can be trapped by their constrained understanding of writing and finish the course with less awareness of the contexts of writing than their counterparts in a traditional classroom. Admittedly, my view of the potential shortcomings of online writing instruction is in the minority. In 1992, Gail Hawisher summed up a prevailing positive view of electronic discourses and their extension into virtual classrooms: “As a result of our work with computers over the past decade, we can begin to imagine teaching and writing in a virtual age where a meeting of the minds might well occur without the physical presence of students and teachers.” Minock and Shor (1995) discuss at length an example of a curriculum that exploits all the positive elements of computer-mediated discussion, even for students in a hybrid class which typically meets in face-to-face settings for a few sessions, and at most once per week, during the term and functions as an online course the rest of the term. Similarly, Fey (1998) reports her research on a “distance” collaboration that effectively paired college and high school students in a critical inquiry about gender roles, and Faigley (1999) offers an example of what he calls “the best possible learning environment with technology” that shows “students who use telecommunications across different geographic locations are more motivated and learn more” (138). In these instances, online textual interactions not only enhanced individual learning about substantive issues but also created opportunities for students to practice writing for specific rhetorical contexts. Off-setting these positive results are concerns about flaming and other negative power differentials that emerge in some electronic conversations (among others, Faigley 1992; Janangelo 1991), crushing all possibility for positive student–student interactions. Furthermore, the work of Gaddis et al. (2000), who note that the online students in their study were more independent as learners and tended to value collaboration to a lesser extent than students in their on-campus classes, suggests that students may reject opportunities to interact meaningfully even when it might otherwise contribute to positive learning outcomes. Despite this apparent lack of consensus among teachers and researchers about whether online classes can function as learning contexts equivalent to traditional classrooms for students, political and economic realities are pushing more and more students into online education. In many cases, questions about the efficacy of online education have been ignored in the face of pressures to offer a quick response to student demand and to attract the largest possible number of students to online classes. In some places, like in my state of Colorado as part of a Western Governors’ initiative, legislative action is pending

Kiefer 143 to reward community colleges and four-year institutions that attract large number of online students. (The clear implication is that institutions with largely on-campus instruction might well suffer in future budget allocations from the state.) Yet we do not have large-scale, objective evidence that writing teachers can maintain key instructional techniques and values in the writing classes we teach online. Our emphasis on the situatedness of writing has long moved teachers of writing beyond the immediate classroom context. Scholars as varied in their theoretical perspectives as Miller, Moffat, Elbow, and Freire have pointed out that writing instruction cannot succeed when students do not engage in writing for at least one of several non-academic goals—personal expression, social consciousness, post-academic writing in the disciplines or in a workplace, critical literacy, or lifelong learning. More recently, pedagogies that emphasize service learning or community action have continued this trend toward focusing on writing beyond the classroom. As a profession, our history in the last 50 years has emphasized the importance of engaging students in more than individual, iterated practice of formulaic academic responses. But when we move the classroom online, are we actually expanding the boundaries of the classroom to take advantage of the larger world of varied rhetorical contexts? Or does the focus of instruction in online courses differ so greatly from that of face-to-face courses that it diminishes the richness of interactions among class members?

Deficit 1: Classroom Support Software

Anyone who has taught a distance education writing course with widely available classroom support software knows that such software, WebCT and Blackboard, was not designed with writing teachers in mind. Rather, assuming that lecture courses were the norm for higher education, most classroom support software was designed to support lecture classes. WebCT, for instance, provides a number of ways for teachers to post lecture material—as readings, notes, PowerPoint slides, or links to other textual material or websites. Materials that are created within the electronic course can be “released” to students with set starting and end dates and times so that students can be encouraged to stay on track with the syllabus. Similarly, teachers can use a test bank of questions to create randomized multiple choice quizzes and examinations that, again, are available to students for only a set amount of time. Students see only their own scores on quizzes and grades on papers or examinations. It is possible for online courses, then, to exist as individual tutorials in which students have no sense that the course exists for anyone else.

144 Online Writing Classes Understandably, most online course designs transferred from lecture classes feature instruction that requires almost no interaction between students. Students can retrieve the assigned materials, read and study them, take online quizzes or tests, and even write a paper without engaging other students in the course in any sustained or significant conversation. The computer in this instance not only wipes out any sense that students in the course might be “other,” but also that other students in the course even exist. Students have no way of knowing how many other students are even enrolled in the same course, unless they are savvy enough to count the number of students on the class email list or pay very careful attention to discussion forum postings, should any be required. But assume that a teacher does not want to organize the class as a “lecture” or a correspondence course with no interactions except those between the teacher and each individual student. The typical classroom support system modeled on lecture courses also includes a chat room, an asynchronous bulletin board or discussion forum, and an internal email system for communicating with all members of the course. Using the chat room requires that all students be able to log into the “classroom” website at the same time, a remarkably difficult chore given constraints on students’ time (see below). And the asynchronous bulletin board is not necessarily a friendly community forum for posting messages. In WebCT, for instance, the threaded discussions on the asynchronous bulletin board are difficult to negotiate. My students have told me that they are often confused about how to read postings, and they can respond to only one posting at a time because WebCT has no option for opening two screens at the same time to view multiple texts. As it was not designed for groups of students interacting about texts, lecture-modeled classroom support software can make student dialog or other textual interactions needlessly difficult. Furthermore, although it is possible to work around the design of WebCT to create discussion forums for smaller working groups of students, the software provides no easy way for students to exchange drafts of papers except to attach the papers to forum postings or email messages. Email at least has the advantage of being private within most classroom support software. Only the designated recipient within the class can read the email, so students who use this method of exchanging papers can comment on each other’s work without worrying about who else might be reading their comments. Papers attached to bulletin board postings are available to all unless the teacher sets up privacy restrictions required for each separate bulletin board for a pair or group of students, an awkward solution at best.

Kiefer 145 Downloading from even the best classroom support software can be time consuming, moreover, if the school server is overloaded, as ours often is. Sometimes, our server is so busy that students cannot log on at the times they have available to work on a computer. At other times, the load on the server is such that any new request to the server takes a minute or more to execute (on a high-speed line on campus; access time is often tripled for students working at a distance over modems). Retrieving a paper attached to a forum posting or email can take students up to 20 minutes, often time that students do not have to sit staring at an unresponsive computer screen. So my students have tried to work outside WebCT by exchanging papers through other email programs. Almost all my students have discovered, at one time or another, that email programs have limits on the size of attached files. They try to send a draft of a paper to me or to a peer reviewer only to have the attachment deleted from the email because it exceeds size restrictions. While it is true that some students experience stumbling blocks in our face- to-face classrooms and thus we should not assume that physical environments are all and always “student-friendly,” the limitations built into lecture-modeled classroom support software make it much less welcoming than the worst physical space to students of writing. In short, many online classroom “environments” work against the notion of a writing class as a nexus of situated interactions through and about writing.

Deficit 2: Students’ Time Constraints

Students’ situations differ, of course, but most of my students work full-time and take one or two online courses at a time. Due to the other commitments, my students tend to work on their courses on weekends, often only on Sundays. (When I first started teaching online writing courses, I did not realize this trend until well into the first semester. I have since revised my syllabus and work plans to accommodate this student reality.) I still advise students to work in smaller chunks of time, even if they have to do the week’s worth of reading and writing on the weekend, but students tell me they often only have one large block of time for completing the work on my course. Imagine, then, the frustrations students face. First, they need to retrieve the assigned texts from their classroom management software—typically in my classes a short introduction to the week’s work, several student samples, and a specific writing task, sometimes to be completed immediately and sometimes to feed into a longer paper or portfolio collection. Students log onto the classroom support system, download the texts, and either save them to read on the screen or to print later. They log off to complete the reading and any preliminary

146 Online Writing Classes writing they need to do. At this point, they log back onto the classroom support system and post to the discussion forum or send a draft to a peer for review. Students also need to complete some writing for me every week, so they send that file to me, usually through email. If other students have posted on the bulletin board for electronic conversation, they will sometimes read those postings and sometimes not, depending on how much time they have to be online. If they do respond to each other’s postings or to questions I raise in my postings, the responses are often short and unelaborated because they have little time to read online. When I respond to their postings or when a peer responds after they have logged off for the weekend, students will not read that response for another week, at which point the issue seems dead. If, as is often the case, a student is juggling a busy family life, then multiple interruptions have also distracted her or him from the week’s work of a writing class, even on a given Sunday. Add to these constraints that some of my students are borrowing computer time from a friend or using a public computer at a coffee house or library. One recent student could only check back in on the course when he was not flying missions for his military service unit. In short, many students who take online courses would not complete their education in such a haphazard format if they had a choice. But family, work, and other obligations keep them tied to places and time schedules that do not allow for frequent trips to a college campus, much less a good library. When students have to add to these constraints the lack of computer access, the chances of spending enough time online to engage in extended interactions with me or with peers about the nuances of situated texts and rhetorical responses to varied writing contexts diminish even more. Granted, not all students fall back on the Sunday-only work pattern, and all students take away from online classes some measure of writing instruction they would not have without access to writing courses. But I am frustrated by what so many students miss in my online classes, and I have to ask if I really provide comparable instruction to my online and face-to-face students.

Deficit 3: “Market” Models of Education

Many students registering for online courses are already well established in jobs and family life. Online courses appeal to them as a way to further their education while still giving priority to 40-hour work weeks and/or family commitments. But these priorities result in students coming into hybrid or online courses with an approach that emphasizes pragmatic goals. In my experience teaching both hybrid and online writing classes, students are most concerned with getting feedback from me as a teacher. Granted, they

Kiefer 147 are focused on improving their writing, and we should applaud their willingness to engage in the hard work of a writing course. But the focus of their attention is on completing writing assignments as efficiently as possible. Two examples from one of my recent distance education courses illustrate this point. At the beginning of the term, I asked students to introduce themselves to me and to each other by posting a short biography, including their majors and main interests, on the discussion forum. I use this task both to allow students to get to know each other and to establish a sense of who we are as a group and how our varied backgrounds can contribute to shared knowledge in the group. This activity in a face-to-face classroom almost always establishes a range of interests and shared experiences that students can use to forge connections. But of the 10 students registered in this particular online class, only two posted their biographies, and when I posted responses to these two, my questions and invitations for more biographies were ignored. One might argue that perhaps this particular group of students resisted revealing anything about themselves, but my experiences with both hybrid and online classes have been consistent. Students typically ignore those activities that seem to them unrelated to what they perceive as the central work of the course—writing academic papers that comprise most of the graded work in the course. And how students define what is central to the course is also a concern for me as I think of classroom interactions. Each time that I teach an online course, at least one student (and sometimes as many as half of the students registered) will get in touch with me before the beginning of the semester. Students ask what they can read in advance or how they might otherwise get a head start on the class. When a student first approached me with this question before my first offering of the online writing class, I assumed she was motivated by nervousness about taking an upper-division writing course. I have since learned from email exchanges with these students that they simply want to be able to work on the class on their own schedules. The most recent request of this sort came from a student who planned to spend her semester in Thailand with, as she puts it, “limited Internet access.” When I point out that much of the course work depends on shared discussion of readings, of group activities, of peer review, the response is consistent and discouraging: “But why can’t I just work on my writing?” In these specific online classes, my students have been remarkably reluctant to participate in collaborative knowledge building. Discussions of readings are perfunctory at best with almost no student interest in how writers both react to and shape the writing context, and peer reviews are often disappointing, even when as a teacher I prod students to participate and critique as fully as possible.

148 Online Writing Classes Standard techniques—modeling good behavior, directed questions to elicit in- depth response, evaluative response—all seem ineffective in the face of students’ determined pragmatic desire to improve their own writing skills without investing in community knowledge or practice. Learning from each other, then, is such a distant concern of these students that they resist most efforts to introduce genuine interaction with other students. Of course, writing teachers do not encounter the pragmatic student only in online classes. We have all dealt with and continue to work against current models of education that emphasize the degree as a commodity. Student comments more and more often reflect the notion that the “customer is always right,” and if the student is the customer of education then the teacher is at fault if the student is not satisfied with the product (the grade). When the metaphor of the marketplace becomes the model of learning, then interactions among shared knowledge builders become less and less important. Instead, students see themselves as the consumers of disposable units of education (credits) that ultimately add up to the marketable prize—the degree that will lead to a higher- paying job and financial success. Learning as an end in itself does not enter into this picture of student education, and learning that has long-term benefit (being able to understand and adapt to local literacies as parents, workers, and community members) is too removed from the immediate needs of the consumer need to be of interest or value. These attitudes now pervade both distance and on-campus student populations, but as teachers having face-to-face contact with on-campus students, we can more effectively combat these attitudes in a physical classroom setting. We can carefully design and insist on participation in shared activities that meet our pedagogical and theoretical goals because students and teacher share the same space and time for conversations, discussions, and even in-class writing. But the distances of space and time that make online classes possible also diminish severely our chances of working effectively against a model of education that promotes pragmatic thinking and short-term goals—finishing the course as quickly as possible to check the requirement of the list of courses needed for graduation.

Summing Up the Deficits: Students Lose

Taken individually, the difficulties created by the factors above do not account for the lack of significant and sustained student–student interaction in online writing courses. We have all had moments when we question why technology, especially software, seems to distract energy away from the focus of our work as writers and teachers. We have all dealt with constraints on time and energy as

Kiefer 149 students and teachers. And as teachers, we have all had students in classes who seem reluctant to participate in group activities, class discussions, or peer-review workshops, claiming that their peers have nothing of value to share with them. In a classroom setting, though, experienced teachers can deal with all of these factors and still shape a class that works more rather than less to build shared knowledge important to the class. Even if students at first only go through the motions to appear cooperative, small-group activities, peer-review workshops, and engaging full-class discussions do eventually create face-to-face classes of students who attend to the multiple functions of language in its full range of contexts. Not all face-to-face classes are equally successful in meeting these goals, but even the most dysfunctional group I worked with a few years ago developed a core of highly committed students who worked closely and productively together. In over 25 years of teaching, my students have never ended a semester unable to express in conversation and in writing more knowledge about how writing works than they began the course with. Unfortunately, in the online writing courses I have taught, my experience has been quite different: I have not yet forged anything like a working group sharing knowledge. When only a few students complete the activities designed to help them get to know each other, those who do so feel that they have put in time on a task that does not pay off for them. When students respond perfunctorily if at all in online discussions of rhetorical contexts for writing, then their understanding of writing is seriously diminished. When students do not know each other or rhetorical principles very well, they are less likely to trust the commentary on peer reviews of drafts or to give commentary that will appreciably improve a peer’s understanding of rhetorical choices. Without significant interactions about how writing works in context, students simply take much less away from online courses. In addition, my experience and that of teachers I have talked to from several institutions and in several disciplines is equally discouraging on another point: the drop-out rate for students in distance courses averages from 30% to 50%. This high attrition rate also works as a disincentive for students in online classes: after all, why put in the extra effort to get to know or to interact with someone never seen who might drop out of the course at any moment? Two students in my class last year started to work productively together on peer reviews, but then one of those students “disappeared” for two weeks and left the other student feeling abandoned. Her sense of the advantages of working with a peer disappeared in light of her experience, and she expressed very pointedly to me that she felt her best investment of time was in working directly with me rather than waiting for peer reviews that never seemed to materialize.

150 Online Writing Classes Although I am sure that the students who have completed my online writing courses have learned more about writing from their interactions with me than they could have learned solely by reading a textbook or handbook, I am equally certain that they have shortchanged themselves by failing to learn from their peers. They have not had opportunities to interact with peers in small- group work on audience analysis, genre conventions, introductions, evidence, source citation—the kinds of activities, both planned and spontaneous, that fill my classroom sessions. As I teach in a networked computer classroom, I also see face-to-face students reading each other’s work online, helping each other “speak” to audiences, suggesting ways to integrate visual information, and so on—all because both the students and their writing are visible in the same place at the same time. What may seem incidental to the online students is not incidental from my view. The interactions between students in a face-to-face writing class may not always result in utopian ideals of learning for learning’s sake, but they do result in important learning about how writing works. And what students learn from each other about reading and writing simply cannot be replaced with tutorial instruction from the single voice of a writing teacher.

What Have We Lost? What Are We Losing?

Marilyn Cooper (1999) argues persuasively that electronic conversations can be productive in engaging students and creating shared community knowledge if we deal with them as reflective of postmodern complexity:

Because synchronous in-class electronic discussions contain many more strands than face-to-face class discussions and move so much faster, teachers have learned that, in order to allow for the kind of reflection that is necessary to reveal complexities, problems must be re-presented to students in succeeding discussions […] Teachers can bring transcripts of electronic conversations to class and ask students to talk about what happened in them—and everyone, especially the teacher, can be enlightened about the intentions and effect of what went on. Students can also be asked to respond in writing, individually or in groups, in hard copy or in further electronic conversations, to whole or partial transcripts of electronic conversations that have taken place in class. And teachers can simply re-present in face-to-face discussions problems that arose in electronic conversations. (160)

But in all these options for dealing with the lost opportunities of electronic discourse, Cooper relies on face-to-face solutions not available for the online writing teacher trying to foster student–student interactions with no resources other than electronic discourse. We have an obligation as writing teachers to analyze the shortcomings of our courses and to try to solve the problems that arise. Explaining the motives for certain activities will often encourage students to participate more

Kiefer 151 significantly in online discussions. Exposing the flaws of current models of education can also help students to see how they might have adopted viewpoints that work against their education in both the short and long run. Even incorporating mundane solutions such as assigning points to all the writing, peer review, and discussion forums as well as informal and formal writing projects, can encourage some students to participate more fully in student–student interactions in online classes. All of these solutions have helped somewhat in my online classes, but the combination of forces mentioned above—technological impediments, time constraints, attitudes toward education—still keeps many students from learning as much about writing in my online classes as in my face-to-face classrooms. Writing teachers value shared interactions in the classroom for a range of reasons. Writing does not happen in a vacuum, and when students recognize a learning community in the classroom they are more likely to speak to that community with rhetorical sophistication. Interaction and engagement with others in the class also imply that students will learn from each other and help each other to improve as readers and writers. The depth of conversation about writing and about texts further develops each writer’s potential. And engagement with writing as rhetorically situated communication fosters richer writing skills for all classrooms, not just writing classrooms, as well as for contexts beyond the academy. But students’ preconceptions of their roles in online courses and the limitations of technology combine to work against significant interactions in online classes. As teachers of writing who believe that students learn not only by writing thoughtfully but also by reading carefully—and in particular by participating in discussions that foster original ideas and elicit well-considered responses and critiques about the situatedness of writing—we should consider the extent to which students in our online and hybrid classes are willing to participate in the exchanges of ideas and insights that we so value. And, by extension, we should question the claims of efficacy for online and hybrid classes. We must ask ourselves, finally, whether we should continue to teach writing through an instructional mode that seems so much at odds with our full range of goals for writing instruction. Note 1. The National Council of Teachers of English Guideline, “More than a Number: Why Class

Size Matters” (NCTE, n.d.), includes these practical points as well as several others that cross boundaries between pedagogical and theoretical rationales. Although a theoretical context is not explicit in the guideline, sources include key thinkers representing varied perspectives.