Developing and Assessing Hybrid and Online Composition Courses at USF

1
Developing and Assessing Hybrid and Online
Composition Courses at USF

• New Tools, New Genres, and Distributed Assessment

2
Our Four Goals

• Build a comprehensive online composition course
• Make use of collaborative technology and advanced
  online writing
• Prepare students to participate in and analyze
  new online genres
• Grow as teachers of writing and critical users of
  technology

3
Distributed Assessment

• The five instructors in this project took
  advantage of Blackboard to create a shared
  learning and teaching space
• We graded each others students, but negotiated
  our evaluation and criteria
• One teacher evaluated the paper another reviewed
  the evaluation
• Thus, each student document was examined by at
  least two instructors.

4
Sharing the Teaching Space

• The five instructors collaborated on teaching
  materials, course syllabi, assignments, and
  presentations
• We taught each other strategies for getting the
  most of SharePoint, Blackboard, and Weblogs
• We had online discussions about our problems and
  shared our insights
• We used advanced Word features to facilitate the
  peer review and revision processes

5
SharePoint

• SharePoint is a Microsoft product that
  facilitates online collaboration
• The advantage of SharePoint is its modular
  structure, which allows teachers to easily share
  teaching materials
• We used SharePoint to create and edit important
  course documents and assignments

6
Sharing with SharePoint
7
Blackboard

• Blackboard made it easy to share assessmentwe
  could see each others grades and privately
  discuss student work
• Blackboard allowed us to keep student work secure
  and private
• Blackboard provided us with a forum for
  interacting with students and colleagues

8
Blackboard forums and grade discussion
9
Weblogs

• Weblogs, or simply Blogs, are journals that are
  published to the web rather than kept in a
  notebook
• We directed student blogging by providing
  students with prompts pertaining to the readings
• We enhanced student involvement by asking them to
  comment on each others blogs

10
Student and Teacher Blogs
11
Microsoft Word

• Many Microsoft Word users are unfamiliar with its
  powerful peer reviewing features
• These features, called Track Changes and
  Comments, allow students to comment on each
  others work
• They also allow students to preserve the changes
  so teachers can later review them to get insight
  into the students writing process.

12
Word Comments
Word makes it easy to record frequently used
comments and easily copy them wherever they are
useful
13
Successes

• Students improved their writing by
• Helping each other with online collaborative
  software
• Preserving an easily accessible record of all
  changes, comments, and graded comments
• Creating a final portfolio of their revised
  documents

14
What We Learned

• Communication is key we would advise other
  teachers to carefully discuss their plans and
  methods well in advance of the course
• Sharing Authority is key we must not make
  decisions that affect the course without first
  discussing them with the group
• Monitoring Students is key we learned that some
  students in online courses need personal
  attention via email and possibly phone calls if
  they are to stay on task
• Keeping it Simple is key we learned that the
  best technologies are also the easiest to use.

15
Checklist for Online Students

• __ Students should be comfortable working in an
  online environment and dealing with inevitable
  technical difficulties.
• __ Students should understand that online classes
  are not easier or less intense than traditional,
  face-to-face courses
• __ Students should be self-motivated and not
  require the social pressure of a physical
  classroom and teacher to do their work.

16
The Future

• Better integration
• Students and teachers desire a one-stop shop
  instead of relying on multiple of websites and
  resources
• Better accommodation
• Online courses should be more flexible to better
  serve non-traditional or working students with
  unpredictable schedules
• Better portability
• Teachers should have access to high quality
  laptops that allow them to teach-on-the-go and
  not worry about sharing computer time with
  students and colleagues in the campus computer
  labs

17
Thank You

• Thanks for visiting our booth and viewing our
  presentation!
• Contact us
• Matt Barton mdbarto2_at_mail.usf.edu
• Daisy Pignetti dpignett_at_taa.usf.edu
• Greg Smith gregvsmith_at_tampabay.rr.com
• Patty Remmell premmell_at_tampabay.rr.com
• Wed love to hear from you!