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In designing web-based courses for WVU, I have closely investigated the social and cultural contexts of learning for my online students. Through surveys and other means, I now know that my student population consists primarily of part-time students returning to school, often after many years. They are sometimes local, sometimes from around the state and, increasing, from around the country. Some are members of the military. Most have full-time jobs. Many have families. Their ages tend to range from 25-45. More than 80% are women. In an effort to ease this specific adult-learner student population's anxiety about taking a writing course without conventional face-to-face interaction with an instructor and other students, I developed ways of using simple communication course technologies to provide students with a variety of feedback on their writing: peer to peer, small peer group, instructor to individual student, instructor to small student group, and instructor to whole class--both synchronous and asynchronous versions of each. Designing the class so that it was not largely dependent on any one communication technology also had the added benefit of ensuring the course could continue in the event of a technology S.N.A.F.U. Student responses to this approach in course evaluations overwhelmingly suggest that this decreases anxiety. Furthermore, feedback from other instructors who have since taught the courses I have designed indicates that managing the courses is much easier with this approach--since spending less time on tech support means that they can spend more time giving students meaningful feedback on their writing. One of the most useful "technologies" we used in the first couple years the courses ran was "regular" or "snail" mail to exchange hard-copies of major papers. This is now an optional way of sending in papers for students who would like hand-written instructor feedback or for students who are uncomfortable with sending attachments. Increasingly, more students choose to send papers via email attachment and get feedback from instructors with Microsoft Word's "tracking changes" or "comment" functions; however, students report that having the flexibility to send them via snail mail should they experience technical difficulties appeals to them. I find that some students also like the idea of calling me during office hours, so the telephone is a technology I will continue to use to support the web-based instruction. A listserv can also be useful should there be a problem with the course web-page. When WebCT crashed during the pilot term for English 101, a listserv was able to patch the course for a week with relatively little interference with the course schedule. According to the extensive final evaluations the students completed during pilot terms, using relatively simple and stable web-based communication technologies both decreased the anxiety of the adult-learners who make up our target student population and allowed them to feel closer to their instructor and other students in the course. Because the variety of tools enabled frequent and regular communication--both synchronous in the chat room or over the phone and asynchronous on the bulletin board and via email--many students have reported getting more feedback and more personalized feedback from the web-based writing courses than they experience in many of the on-site courses they have taken. And because I have tried to be sensitive to the specific challenges and needs of our target population so that I can design courses which serve them well, I have experienced a kind of community with each of these courses that is much more than a version of the on-site course experience mediated through web-based course technologies. The interactivity afforded by the wide variety of communication tools chosen for our sequence of web-based writing courses has helped to create courses with a broad, richly layered community that is text-based, very different than what develops in an on-site course with recourse to face-to-face interaction. Robert Cole argues in his introduction to Issues in Web-Based Pedagogy (2000) that it is “to the students’ disadvantage [that] in a Web-based course virtually all communication must pass through the portal of the written word” (x). However, I would argue that the written word isn’t the portal in web-based courses; the technologies used to teach the course are. For students in a web-based course, the words are the building blocks they must use to communicate, and so taking a web-based writing course for them is similar to taking a course in a foreign language for which students may only speak the language being taught. Having to rely so heavily on their writing to communicate both questions and ideas in their writing class helps students learn, very quickly, the value of what the course was designed to teach them. In fact, because web-based writing students must use writing for nearly all communication with instructors and their peers, the web-based writing course environment has the potential to be a powerful and empowering writing community unlike any the students will have experienced in on-site writing classes. In order for this to be achieved, however, the technologies used to exchange and share writing must not get in the way of the communication. A relatively low-tech approach to designing these courses, therefore, keeps the focus on the students and their writing, not the texts or technologies used to facilitate instruction. Next. . . |
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©2006 Catherine Gouge |