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

Kairotic Design

What we came to realize was that our process of design—both before the classes started and during the classes themselves—was very much a process of kairotic design.

Kairos, a rhetorical term deriving from the Greek Sophists (particularly Protagoras, Gorgias, Isocrates, and the anonymous author of Dissoi Logoi), refers to "the opportune moment" (Poulakos, 1983; see also Doherty, 1996), to the time, timing, and appropriateness of a discourse, for both its rhetorical and cultural context. It is a concept that emphasizes the situated, dynamic, contingent, and interactional nature of communication: how communication is a time-bound, unfolding interaction with an audience. What a communicative act means today for you is not what it will mean for us tomorrow.

Kairotic design, as applied to the development of online courses, means an approach to course planning that arises with a keen sense of timeliness—for this moment at this time. It is one that allows for flexibility and adaptability for audience and context (that is, to a particular group of students taking the course at a particular time and place, for a particular set of outcomes and expectations). It is an acknowledgment that the instructor cannot—and indeed, should not—try to control and orchestrate every step of the students’ writing and learning in a course. The course should, rather, prompt opportunities and leave open spaces for students to invent and contribute their own content.

Certainly, as we describe, we had frames and some preexisting content for the course, but we resisted planning out every detail of every day and every artifact for every module (to use the language of online instructional design). As composition instructors and program administrators, we recognized students as cocontributors of course content.

This explains the dissonance we felt, as composition teachers, with some 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" preexists the start date for the course (corollary: students don't contribute content); and that, once the course was launched, the instructors' role during the course was primarily as a launcher of premade content and collector of work to be graded, with perhaps some roles as cheerleader or motivator to keep students engaged and progressing through the preset modules.

What we eventually came to realize is that we had to abandon much of the advice we were getting about online course design and go with our own instincts, experience, and knowledge as composition instructors. We needed a design process for online courses that was more reflective of composition pedagogy and, importantly, one that was more rhetorical. Certainly, as we describe in the "Space Decisions" section, instructors can prepare some content in advance of the course—and we certainly did that, for instance, in creating in advance reusable video lectures for key rhetorical topics, principles, and processes. But we also had to plan for the unplanned in the respect that we had to leave spaces in the schedule for content that was yet to be created—referring to student writing, to be sure, but also to unknown topics and discussions, to unplanned "content" that would emerge from the course and that could not be specifically collected in advance. We sought what Carl Whithaus and Joyce Magnotto Neff (2006) called "moments of liveliness [that] did not emerge from planned discussion points; they resulted from spontaneous student concerns" (449). Our development of kairotic videos, our use of synchronous conferencing, and our integration of collaborative communication tools were key features enabling our approach to kairotic design, as Lance, Renea, and Ryan describe in the "Instructor Perspectives" section.

Our kairotic design process began with our resistance to providing lock-step, pre-packaged materials and continued into the course as instructors responded specifically to students’ questions and concerns at the, and in the, moment. But interestingly, what also arose, was more kairotic learning, where students were able to access course materials and course discussions at times and places convenient to them when they felt they most needed them to aid their learning and composing process.