Research Questions
To begin this research, the team developed the following questions:
- How can changes in a ‘C’ course better prepare students for their later disciplinary ‘W’ course(s)?
- Can an ePortfolio and related digital literacy skills provide support for ongoing digital composition and effectively bridge the writing gap between ‘C’ and ‘W’ courses?
- How might the use of a collaboratively-designed (WordPress) template reduce potential instructor anxiety regarding digital technology being incorporated in their own course design?
- How might a (WordPress) template create opportunities for and foster reflective practices that result in closer alignment with learning outcomes in ‘W’ courses?
Project Reflection
In the course of this project, we discovered many of the writing program instructors were unfamiliar with the IDW outcomes. However, during training, they were able to see the transition and overlap between ‘C’ and ‘W’-course outcomes. In many cases, the instructors were already addressing these later IDW outcomes, though often unintentionally. Thus, our workshops and the WordPress template created an awareness of these overlapping outcomes and allowed the instructors to alter their courses to foreground skills that students will be called upon to use again throughout their time at ODU.
With this shift in outcomes, writing instructors could visualize more clearly the ways in which their course could potentially initiate a purposeful pathway in terms of writing skills. If the instructor understands the placement of their course within a curriculum, then they can better convey to students why these early writing classes offer lasting value and the important of writing within their later studies.
When faculty are trained in reflective and portfolio pedagogy, they can begin to train students in those habits of mind, emphasizing archiving, reflection, and identity construction in digital spaces and helping such practices become more naturalized behaviors. Stronger assignment design paired with clear outcomes connected to the larger university curriculum can better prompt a transfer of skills and knowledge across courses and help prepare students to develop stronger writing habits over time
In terms of addressing faculty anxiety in connection to technology integration, the template provided a streamlined process for creating consistent portfolio structures for a large number of students in multiple courses (approximately 280 students). In this way, faculty unfamiliar with ePortfolio technology did not have to become experts in WordPress; they only needed to have a passing understanding of how to activate, share, and edit content within the template.
The technological burden of ePortfolios was first reduced through pre-existing tutorials and ePortfolio Assistants. The template itself was designed to lessen anxiety through outlining common expectations for writing courses, sharing the writing program’s idea for “average” content from a writing student’s perspective. In this way, the template provided a kind of asynchronous mentorship, especially for newer instructors, where the the design of the site helped both instructors and students see general expectations.
After completing the initial implementation, many of the instructors reported the desire for their own course template, indicating they valued the consistency, ease of use, and immediacy of instruction and tutorials contained within the template. It also shows that a program template can act as a training ground for instructors and a springboard for conceptualizing one’s own course within a structure that fosters synthesis between assignments.
After this initial pilot, we envision the template and training we designed, implemented, and revised with faculty input could be implemented in additional ‘C’ sections to continue to prepare students of various majors for the disciplinary writing they will encounter in their ‘W’ courses. We also recommend the involvement of additional sections of upper-level disciplinary writing in the English Department. The Writing Program Administrator (WPA) could condense the initial training developed for this pilot into a half-day session during the yearly New Faculty Orientation for new and returning faculty and graduate teaching assistants, inviting template-using faculty from this pilot to mentor their colleagues in adopting the templates in Fall 2018 (and beyond).