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

Rethinking Traditional Writing Instruction

In the process of hacking our online writing courses, we came to rethink many of the sedimented pedagogical assumptions that had governed our work in traditional classrooms. Although the number of students who have directly benefited from enrolling in fully online sections of English 111 is quite small, our online spatial design process has ultimately led us to transform the ways in which we conceptualize and deliver the English 111 curriculum in "traditional" sections; in this sense, the online 111 sections have served as a kind of experimental pedagogical laboratory that has enabled us to employ digital technologies to hack our brick-and-mortar classes in ways that enhance student engagement and collaborative inquiry.

Below are four key ways that the online course design process has transformed how we conceptualize and deliver composition in "traditional" classroom environments.

1. Embracing video lectures as a valuable pedagogical tool.
   In our traditional composition classrooms, we try to lecture as little as possible because we have found that student engagement often wanes when they are simply listening passively. When we have given lectures in traditional classrooms, we have often found that we had to repeat the content of our lectures in individual conferences, small group conversations, and feedback on writing to get the message through. And, not surprisingly, students rarely ever mentioned "lecture" as the most valuable contribution to their learning when we administered anonymous midterm evaluations.

   In the online courses, however, we discovered that video lectures were more beneficial for student learning than traditional lectures for several reasons. First, because we shared the labor of producing our reusable lectures, we were able to spend much more time composing and delivering them than we usually can when prepping a one-off lecture for a traditional classroom. We could tweak the visual design to make it more engaging and clear; we could revise our oral presentation for concision; and, we could practice our delivery so that it was more polished. Because the process of digital collaboration allowed us to spend more time on developing and revising lectures (and to get feedback on our lecturing from other experienced teachers), we were able to deliver rhetorically powerful presentations to students more consistently than we had previously in traditional classroom environments.

   Most importantly, students in online classes were able to review the content of both our reusable and ad hoc video lectures while they were actually writing—encountering our advice at just the kairotic time when it was most needed. While many of us had been sharing our PowerPoints or Prezis with traditional classroom students for later review, our oral presentations were often ephemeral—captured only in the fragmentary notes taken by a few diligent students. In contrast, the online video lectures enabled us to re-deliver a fully multimodal presentation to a student at whatever time he or she decided it would be best to engage it. Based on this experience, we have come to realize that we should consider replacing at least some of our traditional classroom lectures with video lectures, and we have begun to assemble a curated collection of reusable media for our composition teacher's guide for use in traditional composition sections. Not only will video lectures enable us to free up more time in class for collaborative work, but they will also enable us to deliver information and advice to students in a more engaging, rhetorically meaningful, and timely way.

2. Questioning the value of whole-class discussion.
   In the six weeks of the online English 111 class, the instructors never held a single whole class discussion, though they did have numerous synchronous, small-group video chats through Google Hangouts. Although our choice to eliminate whole-class discussion was initially driven by practical concerns of scheduling and interface (Google Hangout could only accommodate ten students at a time), we found that we didn't miss the whole-class discussions and that students still learned as much if not more about writing than they had in our traditional classes in which whole-class discussion played a more central role.

   Although we still believe that whole-class discussion has pedagogical value for some students, we also have come to recognize that it may not be the most effective way to use class time in a writing class (whether online or traditional). In a class of twenty-three, a whole-class discussion is very rarely going to deeply engage all the students at the same time. Even in a whole-class discussion in which a teacher succeeds in breaking the interrogate-respond-evaluate format (Cazden 2001) and gets students to talk directly to one another, it is still not uncommon for some students in the room to zone out or engage in various forms of digital underlife (Mueller 2009). In contrast, when we assign a writing task to a group of twenty-three (e.g., revising a paragraph of a rhetorical analysis draft to add more textual evidence), we can much more clearly see twenty-three students all actively engaging in learning a writing strategy, and we can also assess effectively how well they learned what we hoped to teach. Similarly, when we assign students to collaboratively compose a text in Google Docs or to participate in a small group Google Hangouts, we are much better able to ensure engagement and formatively assess student learning.

   Although we have all experienced some whole-class discussions that were deeply transformative and engaging for both students and teachers alike, we increasingly have come to realize that whole-class discussion may not be the best pedagogical strategy for an inquiry-based writing class (whether online or not). As a result, we'll be revising our composition teacher's guide to include a much more critical discussion of limitations of whole-class discussion along with suggestions for other strategies for fostering student engagement.

3. Reaffirming the importance of appropriate composition class size.
   One reason our online classes were so successful is because students all received copious, individual feedback and guidance from their instructors. Indeed, our move to dispense with whole-class discussion was transformative precisely because our enrollment limits allowed for even more individualized interaction between teacher and student. In a cultural moment in which online learning is often imagined as a cost-saving way to deliver instruction to large numbers of students with minimal teacher interaction, our experience teaching online suggests that we should be wary of any vision of online writing instruction that foregrounds a labor model that does not allow for close teacher-student interaction. Although there are many differences between traditional and online writing classes, there is one constant: Effective writing instruction requires small class size (Horning, 2007). Certainly, we can learn much as a field by engaging with and designing MOOCs, but we also need to work hard to articulate why and how individualized teacher response and guidance continues to matter in online writing courses, and we hope this chapter provides further support for writing program administrators seeking to make that argument.

4. Re-imagining the traditional classroom as one node in a larger digital, distributed network.
   Although group work in the traditional class necessarily must be organized somewhat differently than in an online class, we still believe that many of our online collaborative pedagogical practices can be adapted productively for traditional, classroom-based instruction. For example, we are transforming program policies to allow teachers to replace two class sessions each term with small-group, instructor-facilitated Google Hangouts sessions as a way to maximize student–teacher interaction and collaboration. Furthermore, in designing group work and modeling it in teacher training, we have moved toward a programmatic expectation that most small-group collaborative activities should result in the production of a digital text (e.g., a Google Doc, a slideshow presentation, contributions to a discussion board or blog post, an audio file). Although we still do some "reporting back to the whole group" in our traditional classes, our increasing emphasis on collaborative in-class writing means that we still have a record of each group's conversation (and if one group is unable to finish a task, they can collaboratively complete it for homework).

   In our online classes, we did not begin with the question, "What are we going to do in class today?" Instead, we began with the question, "What do students need to learn to do with writing this week and how can we design scaffolded collaborative activities to help them achieve the outcomes of this week's assignment?" Rather than centering our attention on our teacherly performance in a time- and place-bound class session, we instead centered our attention on designing and hacking a diffuse network of digital spaces to support the students' own writing and textually mediated collaboration. We believe this kind of shift of frame is key for all writing pedagogy (in both on- and offline environments). In  the "traditional" composition class, the physical space and time of the course session is one node in the distributed network, but we would argue that it is not the most important one. As we approach designing instruction for our "traditional" composition sections, we need to stay alert to the many ways we can employ digital tools both in and outside of the set "time for the class" in order to place student writing and collaborative inquiry at the center of the course.