Writing Online in the Disciplines
Overview
Writing is among the most common activities in college courses across the curriculum. From lab reports to responses to assigned readings to papers or presentations of all kinds to year-long thesis projects, students develop and demonstrate their learning by writing. Those assignments also help them develop as writers. Faculty support students by providing clear instructions, discussing expectations and strategies for developing projects in class, talking with students as they develop their papers, and providing feedback on their work. Much of that moves online easily. We can post assignment instructions in Canvas, in writing or as a short video. We can include time for students to ask questions about assignments during Zoom classes or in a discussion thread. Online office hours provide opportunities for individual consultation, and Word, Google docs, PDFs, and Canvas all provide options for faculty to comment on students’ writing.
That said, online teaching presents some challenges and opportunities for faculty and students. How can you most effectively support students as writers in an online course?
Embrace Writing as a Tool for Learning
Writing can help students learn the content of your course and your discipline in two ways. First, writing helps students make sense of course materials and figure out points of confusion or uncertainty. When they write about a concept, an experiment, a reading, or a lecture, they make meaning, translating what they’ve heard, read, or observed into their own words. In this way, writing makes thinking active and concrete. It also makes it visible. Informal writing assignments can help students and you recognize what they understand well and what’s still fuzzy.
Second, papers and projects ask students to apply course content, and that can deepen their understanding and help them see how your course connects with their own experience, the world around them, and other courses. Papers and projects can also help students understand how people in your discipline think. A good project doesn’t begin when a student sits down to write; it begins with identifying and then exploring questions or problems. This, in turn, helps students learn how to develop analyses and arguments in your field.
How to do this online
- Use discussion boards for informal writing-to-learn activities. You could, for example, ask students to suggest questions for the class to explore, suggest ways of applying a new concept or reading to course materials, or offer examples to illustrate key concepts. This gives you a glimpse of what they understand and what confuses them, and using their questions or observations can prompt a more engaged real-time discussion. Remember that you don’t have to grade or write comments on everything students write. Some writing can be required but ungraded. In fact, you might not even have to read every post in a discussion board. In a large class, assign a few students each week to summarize the discussion and suggest questions or issues for a follow-up class discussion.
- Online discussions also provide openings for us to teach students how to frame good questions, how to develop a discussion, and how to respond to other people’s ideas. Discussion prompts can model generative questioning, but we can also encourage students to think about what they can add to a discussion, how other people’s comments confirm or contradict ideas, how a specific reading or problem builds on or complicates material covered earlier, and so on.
- To foster interaction among students, structure discussion boards to encourage or require students to read and respond to each other’s discussion posts. One way to do that is to assign students different roles over the course of a discussion.
- To help students learn to see disciplinary thinking and writing practices at work, ask them to “reverse outline” a scholarly article or to annotate how a scholar presents evidence or methods in an article, using tools like Hypothes.is or Google docs.
Design Engaging Assignments
One of the biggest challenges of online teaching is keeping students engaged. Projects that connect course material to students’ lives, current issues, or specific examples can help motivate students to engage with the course while also helping them develop their understanding of why course materials and concepts matter.
How to do this online
- Be consistent in how you communicate and organize course materials, and limit the number of different tools and platforms you use. You can also build consistency into the course schedule. Make every Tuesday a real-time Zoom session and every Thursday a time for off-line, individual, and small group work. Or post an update to your class every Monday, outlining the work for the week.
- While email is the easiest tool for communicating with your class, it might not be the best way to reach students now. Some have reported feeling overwhelmed by the flood of emails during spring term. Canvas announcements or modules, a course blog, a discussion board thread, a course Facebook group or Twitter hashtag, or collaboration software like Slack give us lots of options.
- Keep course materials neatly organized, and embed links in messages, assignment sheets, and elsewhere to make it easy for students to find the documents or resources they need without searching. You can also help students keep their work organized by having them collect their materials in a course blog or Google folder that they share with you and possibly with the rest of the class.
- Regardless of what form you use, break materials up into manageable chunks. Keep the Twitter abbreviation TLDR — “too long didn’t read” — in mind. Break written explanations and instructions into multiple pieces, and keep recorded presentations short. Consider posting a separate assignment in Canvas for each part of a larger project.
- Explore the capabilities of Zoom or any other tool to find out what you can do and prepare to use the technology with ease. The more comfortable you are, the better prepared you’ll be to help students learn to use these tools and to focus your attention on the material or ideas of the course, not the technology.
- On the other hand, don’t be afraid to give students space to figure things out on their own. For example, you can assign students to work in small groups and suggest some tools they could use, but let them decide whether to meet in Zoom or via chat or some other way.
Communicate Clearly and Effectively
Teaching well always requires good communication, but this is even more true for online courses. Put simply, your skills as a writer matter more than ever. Give yourself time to plan, draft, revise, and edit.
How to do this online
- Be consistent in how you communicate and organize course materials, and limit the number of different tools and platforms you use. You can also build consistency into the course schedule. Make every Tuesday a real-time Zoom session and every Thursday a time for off-line, individual, and small group work. Or post an update to your class every Monday, outlining the work for the week.
- While email is the easiest tool for communicating with your class, it might not be the best way to reach students now. Some have reported feeling overwhelmed by the flood of emails during spring term. Canvas announcements or modules, a course blog, a discussion board thread, a course Facebook group or Twitter hashtag, or collaboration software like Slack give us lots of options.
- Keep course materials neatly organized, and embed links in messages, assignment sheets, and elsewhere to make it easy for students to find the documents or resources they need without searching. You can also help students keep their work organized by having them collect their materials in a course blog or Google folder that they share with you and possibly with the rest of the class.
- Regardless of what form you use, break materials up into manageable chunks. Keep the Twitter abbreviation TLDR — “too long didn’t read” — in mind. Break written explanations and instructions into multiple pieces, and keep recorded presentations short. Consider posting a separate assignment in Canvas for each part of a larger project.
- Explore the capabilities of Zoom or any other tool to find out what you can do and prepare to use the technology with ease. The more comfortable you are, the better prepared you’ll be to help students learn to use these tools and to focus your attention on the material or ideas of the course, not the technology.
- On the other hand, don’t be afraid to give students space to figure things out on their own. For example, you can assign students to work in small groups and suggest some tools they could use, but let them decide whether to meet in Zoom or via chat or some other way.
Remember that Writing Is Social
While people sometimes write just for themselves, most of the time, we are writing to influence or connect with others. Like all communication, it is inherently social. But so is learning to write. Students benefit from opportunities to talk with each other and you about their projects, and in an online course, that may require more planning.
How to do this online
- Many faculty ask students to read and comment on each other’s outlines or drafts, and peer review works quite well online. Students can post drafts in Canvas or Google docs for other students’ comments. To make peer review work well, give students specific questions to focus on. Encourage students to consider how their peers responded to the assignment, how they use evidence or course ideas, how they’ve organized their papers, or other specific strategies. Also, remember that the point of peer review is not (just) for students to give and receive advice. Reading and critiquing other students’ drafts also lets students consider other ways of approaching an assignment.
- Be accessible — but strategically. Let students know your practice for reading and responding to email queries. Canvas tools can also help you manage students’ access to you. For example, create a discussion board thread where students can post questions, so you can respond to common questions publicly and save the answers to enable students to find answers on their own. Schedule individual appointments using the “Appointment Group” tab in Canvas calendar, or hold open drop-in office hours in Zoom. You can record and share drop-in office hours, if students agree, so others can review to hear your advice or answers to questions.
Provide Focused, Strategic Feedback
Commenting on students’ writing is a key method for helping them understand how people in a discipline think and present their ideas. The challenge is figuring out how to comment productively but also efficiently. That’s true when we’re teaching regular courses, but the online environment adds to the challenge, because teaching and learning online requires more time and effort, including more reading and writing, than a regular course.
How to do this online
- Having students submit their work online can tempt us to comment far more than we should. Not only does this take a lot of time, it also doesn’t work well for our students. Research in Writing Studies tells us that students may be overwhelmed if they receive too much feedback, may not read our comments closely, and often feel confused by what we write. If we want students to read and use our comments, we need to focus our attention on a few big issues. If a project aims to help students learn how to use evidence, focus your comments on that. If you’re interested in how well students apply a core concept, that’s what you should comment on.
- Many faculty find rubrics helpful as tools to keep them focused and make grading easier. Some faculty have developed rubrics for projects with their students, an exercise that helps students understand the goals and expectations for the assignment.
- Consider using audio or screencasting tools to comment on students’ work. This can make your advice clearer and more personal, and some research shows that students respond more productively to this kind of feedback. They not only like it more, they are more likely to apply the advice they receive in this format.
- Ask students to respond to your feedback. This can ensure that they read your comments, but their responses can also you and them determine if your feedback was clear.
Bibliography
Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, Wiley, 2011. (Available online through Lauinger)
“Facilitating Digital Peer Review,” TeachingWriting, Stanford University.
“Links for Teaching During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” WAC Clearinghouse, Colorado State University
“Open-Access Textbooks,” WAC Clearinghouse, Colorado State University.
“Using Student Peer Review,” WAC Clearinghouse, Colorado State University.
