Teaching Writing in a Distance Learning Environment
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My name is Robbin Zeff and I am an assistant professor of writing and professional technology fellow in the university writing program. The course I teach is UW 20, which is University Writing 20, a freshman composition course in the distance learning program. I teach it as a hybrid, my audience is freshmen. During the year, there are incoming freshmen and during the summer they are usually transfers or students who did not pass the course the first time around.
In designing my distance learning course, I thought “What do the students need me to work one on one with?” and “What can I set up for them that they can do on their own?”
So one is, in writing, I have the students work on their writing on the sentence level. This means working on grammar, punctuation, clarity, and conciseness. I do this by having them take what I call, “Toolbox quizzes”. They take a series of grammar, punctuation, and sentence variety quizzes online. They all take them and are allowed to take them again and again because I am more interested in them learning the task than the score they receive. After they take the quiz, they immediately find out their scores and they can take the quiz again and again until they get 100% by following the model you learn by doing.
I also have them do what I call “Writing exercises”. These are exercises that stretch their look at writing on the sentence level, on the paragraph level, on the section level. Some of them are touchy feeling exercises, but they get them to look at their writing so they push themselves in a low-stake, non threatening way. I have them post the exercises on a discussion board so the students can see how the other students responded to the exercises.
Then, in terms of research, since research is a very important part of UW 20, I have them read the Bedford Researcher book that goes through how to research in today’s digital world. Then they do a series of tutorials that walk them through looking at how to find information online, how to evaluate the credibility of sources, how to quote, paraphrase, and summarize. I do find that students can find information, but the problem is that A) if the information is good information, B) what to do with the information, and C) how to integrate that into my writing.
Another part of UW 20 is critical thinking and reading. I have them read a critical thinking book called “Asking the Right Questions”. Then they do thought problems that have them apply some of the learning in that. The students do all of that without me interacting with them directly. The other students do get to see some of their responses, but it gets them to read and apply what they are learning. In terms of the quizzes, they can do them over and over again to get perfect scores. In terms of the exercises and thought problems, if they do the exercises seriously, they get full point credit for it. Return to our teaching tips showcase |
