Should you teach online?

Rob Jenkins, a frequent commentator in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and an Associate Professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College offers this somewhat tongue-in-cheek advice for instructors who are considering teaching online courses.

What are your thoughts? Post your comments here.

The Question of Multimodal Composing: What’s That (Visual) Argument? (Part 2 of 2)

This post continues the discussion begun in Part One of the article, published on March 14, 2011.

Cynthia Haller (2010) conducted a study on three student research papers in an upper division research—junior level—writing course. She questioned the manner in which students learn to recognize academic arguments in source materials and how they integrate and use them in their own writing. She asks, “What does it mean to construct an academic argument using disciplinary discourse?” (p. 34). Haller found that “[o]nly students who had had extensive experience with reading and writing within their disciplines and across a range of disciplinary contexts were able to successfully identify, explain, and engage discipline-based criteria for writing” (p. 36). Her focus on an upper-division course is relevant to a study that focuses on FYC because it is in FYC where students begin to learn their way around the academic discourse community to then compose for their specific disciplines. If they continue to present with problems understanding academic arguments beyond FYC, then it is possible that educators are not approaching the subject in a way that encourages students to retain knowledge to carry forward into their disciplinary studies. Haller addresses to some degree the Toulmin method of argumentation when identifying the logos of academic arguments (p. 35). This is perhaps a good place to start addressing the validity of asking FYC students to conduct a rhetorical analysis of visual argument in the form of print ads, televised ads, magazine covers, movie posters, etc. to then compose and produce their own.

The Question of Multimodal Composing: What’s That (Visual) Argument? (Part 1 of 2)

Currently, multimodal composing is ongoing and is becoming more accepted in the academy. However, there is still some suggestion that the primary goal in first year composition (FYC) is to produce alphabetic [written] texts that look and feel much like the texts today’s educators produced in their undergraduate years. Pamela Takayoshi and Cynthia Selfe (2007) argue the point that conventional print texts “do not resemble many of the documents we now see in digital environments that use multiple modalities to convey meaning [. . .] and that are distributed primarily, albeit not exclusively, via digital media” (p. 1).  Scholars such as Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen offer a social semiotic approach to multimodality through the lens of visual rhetoric and visual literacy.  More recently, Anne Wysocki offers a definition of new media that also encourages a social element to composing in new media. If writing instructors are to welcome and encourage the use of technologies in the classroom, it is imperative they assume a critical stance themselves, encouraging students to develop technological literacy skills while composing multimodal texts.

Preliminary Results of the College’s Application of SmarterMeasure

As part of its Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College adopted SmarterMeasure, an assessment tool that assesses student readiness for learning within the online classroom.  SmarterMeasure evaluates students’ skills and attributes in seven distinct areas: Life Factors, Personal Attributes, Technical Competency, Technical Knowledge, Reading Rate and Recall, Learning Styles, and Typing Speed and Accuracy. After piloting SmarterMeasure in Spring 2010 through volunteer faculty in online courses, the College fully implemented the assessment in Summer 2010. At present SmarterMeasure is delivered to incoming students as a part of placement evaluations, and distance learning faculty are also asked to integrate the tool within their first-week assignments in order to reach returning students. Since its incorporation at the College, close to 4000 students have completed the SmarterMeasure assessment.

The QEP Team has begun its principal analyses of SmarterMeasure and what it reveals about JSRCC students. Information gleaned from these analyses will guide the team in its development of a comprehensive student orientation to learning online and in its development of remediation modules that will help students to bolster their areas of weakness. The first round of data focuses upon all of the distance learning students who both completed the SmarterMeasure assessment and enrolled in at least one online course.  In the next few weeks, the data will be investigated further as the team evaluates first-time distance learners, various demographic factors, and displaced workers (the specific focus of the College’s FIPSE grant).