Kairotic Design: Building Flexible Networks for Online Composition
Space Decisions
We faced a number of decisions in the process of designing the course, including whether to hold synchronous class sessions, what platforms to use, and how to present lecture/presentation materials in the course.
Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Class Sessions
We pondered whether to teach the class using only asynchronous discussion (e.g., discussion boards)—or whether it was important to have synchronous discussion spaces in the class as well (e.g., video conferencing, chats). Given the compressed six-week time frame of the course in the summer, we thought that synchronous class sessions would be very difficult to arrange—and perhaps even unfair to require. At the same time, we were committed to the value of synchronous discussion, both from our teaching experiences and also from the advice of research.
Our experiences as writing teachers told us, and research confirms, that "asynchronous and synchronous e-learning complement each other" (Hrastinski 2008, 55). Synchronous discussion helps build social rapport and supports social interaction that is particularly important for building strong communities. According to Stefan Hrastinski (2008), synchronous interaction enhances student motivation to respond to others and increases personal commitment to others (see also Hrastinski 2007; Hipanis, Kordaki, and Dimitrakopoulou 2006). Synchronous interaction can help create social "glue" that can make asynchronous exchange more productive (see Robert and Dennis 2005).
We finally decided that it was important not only to have synchronous class sessions for our English 111 classes, but it was important enough to require them. But, rather than have a whole-class synchronous video discussion, which was not likely to be feasible given student schedules, we aimed for small-group synchronous discussions, not only because they would be easier to schedule and facilitate, but because they would provide more opportunities for students to participate and engage with each other and with the course materials. In what follows, each instructor briefly reflects on some aspect of their design and use of small group synchronous discussions. (It's important to note that although a specific platform is named—Google Hangouts—many of these findings carry over to other video-conferencing platforms as well.)
Renea's perspective: For synchronous group meetings, I used Google Hangouts, largely because of feedback and input from the other instructors. I was not all that familiar with Hangouts going into the design process, and I felt uncertain at first about how well it would work. I was convinced of its usability after trying it out with the rest of the research team in meetings, and by the time the summer course started, I felt proficient and ready to use Google Hangouts as the space for small-group synchronous meetings. Something that really surprised me about it was that meeting in that space allowed me to feel more a part of the group, more like I was leading a workshop than having the sense that I was "The Instructor In Charge." I wasn’t expecting that, but it was a very pleasant surprise.
Ryan's perspective: Because of the technology limitations of Google Hangouts (only a maximum of ten participants in a hangout at a time), I would schedule two hangouts per day based on results from a survey I sent out a day or two ahead of time. Typically students would end up in a.m. and p.m. groups. Having the two meeting times proved beneficial on several levels. First, it allowed my students to choose when it was best for them to learn. It sounds insignificant until you begin to reflect on the lack of student (and, at times, teacher) energy during a mandatory 8:00 a.m. class. Second, students had the flexibility to fit the Google Hangouts times into their schedules. Several students worked part-time during the summer—and one non-traditional student was working full-time. Making the class meetings flexible avoided pitting school against work; and for the one non-traditional student in my class it meant he could earn his bachelor's degree after several years of waiting for the opportunity. There were also pedagogical benefits. Smaller class discussions were of course more intimate and each student had more time to speak. But, as we know from having class conversations in the traditional class, the discussion carves out its own path. Despite posing the same prefacing questions for discussion in both of my hangouts, some very different points were made in each one. I recognized this as a learning opportunity and created blog posts for students to reflect on the discussions and then communicate with the peers who were not present in their hangout. The results were notable—students engaged other students, provided summaries, pulled out the key ideas based on summaries, and asked the questions needed to illuminate their ideas.
Lance's perspective: Though I tried several different ways of using the Google Hangouts space, I found these synchronous meetings most conducive to group activities and discussions. One of my favorite aspects of teaching writing is having students write or revise in class, usually in groups, then talk about some of that writing as a whole class. I mostly followed this model. For example, I might screenshare a document to analyze rhetorically, performing in a sense the act of rhetorical analysis, then let students analyze their own text or texts, while writing up a paragraph together in Google Docs. We could then talk about what they wrote as a group, but they could also share these thoughts with the rest of the class in the Google+ Stream.
The hangouts space is a good example of the flexibility of online spaces, but also shows that they may need to be "hacked." For example, in the summer courses, I simply scheduled several time and dates and allowed students to sign up for the one that best fit their schedule. But in the fall, when students had a full load of courses, I found it useful to have a scheduled class time where I knew everyone was available. In this case, I scheduled hangouts during "class time" and rotated through each group, much like I would do in a traditional classroom. Certainly I took time for questions and clarifications, but I did not necessarily have to worry about lecturing or giving instructions, because students had already been assigned to read or watch those before coming to the hangout.
Synchronous hangout discussions were not just held in small groups with the instructor present; students also had synchronous discussions among themselves as they worked on team projects. And Lance, Renea, and Ryan held office hours and individual conferences with students in video conferencing.
As we describe in the "Student Perspectives" section, once students got over their initial uncertainty about how to interact in video discussions, they found them, for the most part, beneficial.
The Platform Decision
In the design process, the question of platform arose. First came the question of centralized platforms: Would the instructors use a single online location for all class activities and materials? We quickly decided against that. We wanted instructors and students to have the flexibility to use the best interface they could find for different class activities. We also felt that such a constrained, lock-step narrowing of platforms would merely reify the challenges we often face in the brick-and-mortar spaces in which we teach. Quite simply, it made no sense to straitjacket students or instructors to one platform. The Sakai gradebook works well? Then use it. Prefer WordPress blogs over Sakai’s blog feature? No problem. Facebook is too crowded and too intertwined with most people’s lives? Then use Google+, the network that provides the affordances of a social platform but that can be used in classes because, well, few people and even fewer students really use Google+ for sharing. (As a "failed" social network in terms of number of users and their usage, we discovered Google+ is actually ideal for integration into pedagogy.)
But, without that one platform, would students feel lost and confused? So much of the materials for how online pedagogy (e.g., from Quality Matters, from SLOAN) advocate having a central location. So we did worry and wonder—would students need a central location, a homebase, to help orient themselves? What we found, and as we describe in the "Student Perspectives" section, what students needed was not a technological home base, but rather an instructorial home base—they needed to know that their instructor was available regardless of platforms being used.
What we came to is what we think of as a network approach to online platforms and interfaces—using different ones for different kinds of instruction. Lance, Renea, and Ryan had their students using WordPress, our Sakai learning platform, Google, and more. But the instructors also found that Google became the primary linking network, in part because of Miami's move to Gmail—thus all students had easily usable (and findable) accounts for Google Drive, Google+, and so on. The Google interface proved to be a compromise between centralization and networking. No single interface necessarily became the center; however, the applications and materials would be housed mainly under the Google umbrella. This allowed instructors to create curricula that would be easy to navigate and share, as each instructor explains from an individual perspective.
Renea's perspective: When choosing the online spaces we would use for this class, I ultimately settled upon a variety of sites, each with a different purpose. For more traditional or linear reading responses, as well as for turning in assignments and doing peer review, I chose the Sakai/Niihka site through Miami. This was largely because of my initial unfamiliarity with all of the Google applications—in the future, I will probably choose to use Google Docs for peer review, as I have seen how well it can work. The Niihka site worked well for "individual" responses—writing that expressed a student's view but that did not really require feedback from the group. In retrospect, I think this process could have been improved in a more open space, such as Google Drive. I also used a WordPress site to keep the syllabus, schedule, and assignments. My favorite aspect of this was the ability to embed links—students could just click on the assignment and be taken to a reusable video lecture on YouTube, or to the assignment prompt, or to the reading. We also used blogs for research and student-to-student feedback, which seemed to work well. Overall, I’m pleased with the spaces we chose, though in the future I am more likely to utilize spaces that are more "open"—that don’t have to be accessed in a sequential or linear way (and that don’t involve as much downloading and uploading). The more cloud-computing spaces of Google encouraged a networked approach to interaction that I found to be much more productive than the more traditional methods of online textual communication.
Ryan's perspective: My class space centralized around blogs. Class assignments and the schedule were housed at my Blogger site. Students also composed and maintained their own blogs that were in conversation with other students' blogs through extensive use of the comment features. For logistical purposes all of the class space elements were housed in the Google network (blogs through Blogger, lectures through YouTube, email in the form of Gmail, discussions in hangouts).
The movement of students inside the (semiclosed) networked classroom familiarized them with how networks can be navigated. The inquiry assignments I describe in my "Instructor Perspective section" asked students to move outside the "boundaries" of the class space and into another community of their choosing and then report back. The platform decision, I believe, became one of the first steps in scaffolding one of the goals of my course—realizing web sites and their networks as community.
Lance's perspective: I decided to design my entire course in Google Apps, simply because of how interconnected each of these apps are. In the past, I integrated technology for my face-to-face classroom in somewhat of a hodgepodge style, because no single platform provides the affordances of both a blog and a wiki, for example. I had to balance the affordances I wanted for my class that semester with the amount of required logins and the ability to integrate such spaces into a homebase like Sakai/Niihka or Blackboard. I tried the best I could to create the illusion that all these different online apps were interconnected, but most of these sites required separate logins.
Since Miami student IDs and logins are integrated with Gmail, I decided to design my course entirely within the Google system. Instead of using Niihka, I created my coursesite in Blogger (Google’s blog tool), and the students used Blogger for their own blogs. For the most part, Blogger is not as robust as WordPress, but many of its features are easier to use and the integration with other Google Apps was crucial. Once students publish a blog post, for example, Google automatically asks if they would like to share the post on Google+. This interconnectedness made it easier to discuss specific blogs in the stream, rather than having to click through a list of blogs and comment on each site. Students still tended to complain about how many windows they had to have open at one time, an issue I’m not sure can be solved, but my sense was that once they became acclimated to navigating the network, they began to see the advantages for interactivity and workflow.
While we firmly believe that the primary focus and content of a composition class is the students' writing and that we are against the banking model of education, we also recognize that there are times in the composition classroom when brief lectures and presentations by instructors can articulate and clarify foundational concepts in rhetoric and composition. Thus, as we planned the course, we also knew that we had to develop some online instructional resources, some artifacts, that would help build foundational knowledge both for students and with students that they could then develop further in their writing projects and class activities.
Video Lectures
We didn't want to create just static alphabetic text materials for students, so using integrated screencapture, voice, and video platform software (either Screenflow or Camtasia), we developed a series of videos—both what we came to call reusable video lectures and what we came to call ad hoc video lectures.
Reusable video lectures were just that—five- or ten-minute presentations by instructors on specific topics (e.g., rhetorical context, strategies for effective peer response, methodologies for audience analysis). Video 7.1 is an example of a reusable video lecture that Renea made called "Introduction to Rhetorical Analysis":
Video 7.1. Video lecture on rhetorical analysis
These reusable video lectures were developed within the program context but are not what we would think of as specific to that one classroom or one instructor. That is, Renea's video on rhetorical analysis was designed to be used not just in Renea's class, but also in Ryan’s class and Lance’s class. Even as we designed these videos, we had hopes that they might be used and reused in traditional classrooms as well, and, as we discuss in the "Implications" section, this has indeed turned out to be the case.
The ad hoc video lectures, on the other hand, were not starting assets because instructors could not make them until the course was in progress. These videos are not designed to be reusable across sections in the Composition Program. Rather, these presentations were tailored to the specific classroom and the specific students in that classroom at that specific moment in their learning process. For example, after Lance's students made their first few blog posts, he made an ad hoc video lecture, discussing and highlighting strategies different students employed. This type of specific feedback to students is not reusable across sections but, importantly, it is reusable by students during the course (and subsequently). Video 7.2 is an example of a kairotic video.
Video 7.2. Kairotic video on reflective essay
When to make what type of video was a crucial decision for instructors as articulated in their individual perspectives.
Renea's perspective: Before the term began, I was really nervous about making videos of both types—it was the source of my biggest concern and anxiety at the beginning of our course design discussions. However, it also turned out to be less difficult than I first imagined, and, I found, incredibly productive for students and for the class dynamic. Instead of sitting in a group passively listening to me, students could listen to what I had to say before we all got together so that, when we were in a class meeting together, students could interact with one another through their shared knowledge. When designing the course, I thought about the topics that I typically covered through lecture and presentation when I was in a traditional classroom, and then I designed reusable video lectures around these areas. When I would make ad hoc video lectures, it was often because students expressed—either through the Niihka discussion board posts or in emails to me—that they were having difficulty understanding a concept or applying it. An example was an ad hoc video lecture that I made about rhetorical analysis. This was an idea that students were having difficulty applying, so I chose a text similar to the ones that they were examining, and made a video of my brainstorming session, picking out the different appeals in the text and highlighting those areas as I went along. This was a much less formal video and not "reusable" in another class, but it helped my students understand how to do a rhetorical analysis in that moment, when they most needed guidance.
Lance's perspective: Designing this online course has helped me think more deeply about spatial modalities in composition classrooms that I don't always explicitly think about when teaching in traditional, brick-and-mortar classrooms. For example, how do I use space or course design to help students make the connections between the theory and ideas that we discuss in lecture with their actual writing? Creating the space online for this transfer and connections in learning required me to use all the tools of kairotic design available, including ad hoc video lectures. For example, I might build an ad hoc video using the different student blogs I read that week to directly apply the more general ideas discussed in other lectures. Or I might encounter a really interesting student blog and share with the entire class, so they pay special attention to that particular blog. Or I might decide to discuss bits of writing in Google Hangouts. All these are different ways (and in different places) to accomplish this more collaborative aspect of the writing classroom.
Ryan's perspective: The range of videos we as a group made fall within the two general categories—reusable video lectures and ad hoc video lectures—but each instructor brought his or her own style and aesthetic to the video—thus enabling for students the sort of change up in lecture (both in terms of style and delivery from one person and in terms of delivery across persons) that rarely happens in the physical classroom. Before the class started, we realized the need for certain “big” videos and divided up the reusable video lectures based on our interest. These were often more formal and polished.
At the other end of the spectrum were the off-the-cuff video responses. After releasing my first response to students—a video I shot late at night with poor lighting and almost no editing—the response was clear: students found that sort of feedback to be helpful and genuine. While the amateur filmmaker part of me cringed, the teacher part of me loved that students saw this as meaningful and kairotic conversation.
Video 7.3. Video update
Another type of ad hoc video found its way into my collection. This sort of video acted in response to conversations generated in Google Hangouts conversations. Current topics at the time of the course included the Jerry Sandusky rape case and comedian Jason Alexander’s apology for his remarks on a late night show. I began to weave these ongoing conversations into my more complex ad hoc videos. While I realized this limited the audience to my class—and essentially put an expiration date on the video—these videos helped shape classroom conversation.
Video 7.4. Web traffic and screen capture
Classroom conversation was not only shaped by these ad hoc videos. The impact of the ability to view and review both reusable video lectures and ad hoc video lectures was key to students’ learning, as they discuss in the "Student Perspectives" section.