Kairotic Design: Building Flexible Networks for Online Composition

• Intro
• Design Process
• Instructor Perspectives
• Student Perspectives
• Implications
• References

• Intro
  • Premises
  • English111
  • Methods
• Design Process
  • Starting Assumptions and Assets
  • Dissonances
  • Space Decisions
  • Kairotic Design
• Instructor Perspectives
  • Making Space Work (Lance)
  • Making Space for Collaboration (Renea)
  • Party Time at Burke's Place (Ryan)
• Student Perspectives
  • Initial Nervousness and Uncertainty
  • Interacting Online
  • Agency in the Timing of Learning Activities
  • Challenges
• Implications
  • Principles of Online Course Design
  • Rethinking Traditional Writing Instruction
• References

Dissonances

The process of making the artifacts and designing the course raised some interesting issues around the nature of "the course" and different models for online education.

The Nature of "the Course"

We encountered an interesting dissonance about what, exactly, a "course" is and how it should be developed. The instructional designer who consulted with our team initially presented a design model that the course should be thoroughly planned and every distinct class module—every activity of every day—fully developed before the beginning of the course. Our view—more of a composition view—was that the course plan, while developed, would also have a great deal of flexibility built in so that instructors and students could fill in specific activities and interactions as the class unfolded. For example, an instructor may have in mind an activity for "responding to drafts," but what specifically the content of that response will be is unknown at the start of the class because the students haven't yet written the drafts to be responded to. Sure, we may know the drafts are rhetorical analyses, but we may need to discuss rhetorical appeals, kairos, integration of quotations, or a myriad of other things depending on what they write in their drafts and what their learning needs are. This open-ended planning may strike some as not a sensible approach to course planning—as being unplanned, in effect—while it struck us as. . . well, the way we always planned composition courses.

Content-Transfer Models and Constructivist Models

At the same time that we were designing and researching the online courses, one member of our team (Jim) completed certification from two popular programs for online learning that universities are adopting—Sloan Consortium and Quality Matters. In his work with those programs, Jim found that there existed in the literature about distance learning and online course design a predominant content-transfer model of what constituted a "course" and how it should it be offered online, and that this model conflicted with, was actually incommensurate with, well-accepted pedagogies and practices for teaching composition (Porter 2013). This predominant model assumes that content pre-exists the course and that the instructor’s job is to assemble the content prior to the course, to deliver it to students during the course, and to test to ensure student mastery of the content by the end of the course.

Certainly, a composition course does have some preexisting content (e.g., rhetorical theory and methodologies, strategies and heuristics for composing). But that preexisting content is not the entirety of the course content because the students themselves contribute a good amount of the content—for example, when their own writing itself becomes the primary content for a class discussion about a certain rhetorical approach or technique. In fact, for a composition course, the primary content is (or should be) students’ own writing—and that writing does not exist until the course is under way. As composition instructors, we scaffold assignments and plan a process for writing, but the primary content appears in the unfolding of the course, as the students write, exchange writing, discuss their writing, and reflect on their writing. But how can you fully organize the content for a composition course when the primary content—the students’ own writing—doesn’t yet exist?

Our recognition of students as cocreators of content explains some of the dissonance we had, as composition instructors, with aspects of the content-transfer design assumptions that we were reading and hearing about, particularly these: that the online course should be fully designed and developed as a complete package; that the primary "content" was the materials delivered by the instructor through textbooks, handouts, readings, and lectures; that "content" pre-exists the start date for the course (corollary: students don't contribute content); and that once a course starts, an instructor merely launches content and administers testing measures at appropriate times.

As we designed the course and made decisions about course delivery and platforms, we resisted a content-transfer model and instead worked very much from an organic, process-based, kairos-based model of course development.