Leah Soule 27 March 2010 Virtual Writing Center 2.0 A virtual - - PDF document

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Leah Soule 27 March 2010 Virtual Writing Center 2.0 A virtual writing center, or online writing lab, is an ethereal service website designed around the writing center it represents, the resources available to the writing center, and the needs of the institution‟s students. It may include some or all (or more) of the following services: email tutorials, live chat, video chat, quick question hotlines, handouts, workshops, blogs, discussion boards, podcasts, video tutorials, links to other writing resources, pre and post tutorial assessments, and lists of useful books.1 While the appearance and services of virtual writing centers may differ from one to another, the goal of all OWLs (regardless of budget, tech savviness, and flash) is to offer resources sustained by, yet outside, the actual writing center. A virtual writing center coupled with an actual writing center will accommodate the learning styles and needs of most of our students, and both types of Centers become increasingly important as the student body continues to diversify. In this presentation, I will discuss the definition of virtual writing centers and specifically address the structure, purpose, and outlook of the Tennessee State University Virtual Writing Center. Because the definition of virtual writing center is so flexible, I reviewed several virtual centers recommended by the International Writing Center Association, including the OWL at Purdue, the Writing Center website at Chapel Hill, NC, the University of Louisville Virtual Writing Center, the Oregon State OWL, the Colorado State University Writing Studio, and the University of Richmond Writing Center website. I determined whether or not the writing centers

• ffered email tutorials, live chat tutorials, handouts, workshops, and assessments. To clarify,

1 Beth Hewitt, a professional development consultant for NCTE, claims “There is no such bird as „the Online

Writing Lab‟ (OWL) because, in fact, there are as many variations of an OWL as there are OWLs. Each institution with an OWL has developed it to reflect its own vision of how the virtual writing center should look and how it should serve its clients . . . . Thus, there are as many OWLs as there are institutions claiming one.”

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handouts are printable, written material that can be reviewed and kept; workshops are interactive presentations of material; and assessments are evaluations of the information the student has learned from the handout and/or workshop. I wanted to examine the commonalities between the sites, the services they provide, and their ease of use. By doing so, I can compare the work we have done to ensure its appropriateness and strength and determine the kinds of services we should provide in the future. Most of the VWCs reviewed provided some kind of email or chat service, and a couple of them provided both. Purdue‟s email tutorial service is separated from their OWL and included specifically on the Writing Center website; however, the Oregon State OWL consists only of email tutorials which are capped at 25 emails per week. Colorado State University and the University of Louisville offer both email and chat sessions, and these do not seem to be capped. The University of Richmond provides a service called “Consultants on Call” which appears to be an email service because the email addresses of tutors are provided, but there is no instruction or actual description of the service. All of the writing centers reviewed offer handouts. The content of the Purdue handouts is vast, covering the very basics of comma usage to the demanding intricacies of visual rhetoric.2 The University of Richmond also offers a large number of direct and easy-to-use handouts published in manual format under the title “The Writer‟s Web.” Some OWLs (like UNC Chapel Hill and the Oregon State OWL) provide in-depth material geared to an audience with a strong knowledge base. Other websites have limited handouts or simply provide links to a separate virtual writing center (usually the OWL at Purdue) to borrow its resources. In addition to handouts, I determined if the virtual writing centers include interactive workshop-like tutorials. Only two of the websites reviewed did so: OWL at Purdue and the

2 The large numbers or handouts may make OWL at Purdue difficult to navigate at times. OWL at Purdue also

provides other writing centers a service by allowing their materials to be published and posted for common use.

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University of Louisville. The workshops provided by the OWL at Purdue are listed under “teacher resources” because they are intended to be used by teachers in class rather than for individual student resources. The University of Louisville posts three interactive workshops on MLA, APA, and plagiarism. They incorporate sound, motion, and depiction to provide detailed, yet understandable, information regarding citation. Finally, I determined which of OWLs offered assessments of their handouts and/or

• tutorials. Again, only two of the websites did so: the OWL at Purdue and the University of
• Richmond. The OWL at Purdue provides a handout for the student to review; next, the student

performs an exercise; and finally, the correct answers are provided. The assessments are created so that they can be printed and distributed. The University of Richmond provides assessments to some of their handouts, but does not provide suggestions or answers for those assessments. Email and chat sessions, handouts, workshops, and assessments should be based on the capability of the writing center and the needs of the students at the institution. This includes the funding provided for the development of a virtual writing center, the technology provided to the writing center, and the technological proficiency of the writing center employees. Furthermore, the writing center must take into account the size of the institution, the access the students have to technology, and the number of students living on and off campus. A VWC with a successful email or chat tutorial function balances the needs of the students with the workload of the tutors, and a writing center creates strong supplemental resources based on the level of students it serves and is prepared to update those resources as information changes.3 Because handouts may be considered a prescriptivist practice, some virtual writing centers may deem them less important

• r useful than actual tutorial sessions; however, handouts and tutorials should be designed to be

3 A writing center director must be willing to schedule the appropriate amount of time for both online training and

virtual tutoring. Part of a tutor‟s work time must be used for training because email and chat tutorials require different kinds of responses than face-to-face tutorials. Additionally, time for email responses or virtual tutoring chats must be scheduled in the same way as face-to-face time is scheduled.

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used in conjunction with sessions or student writing rather than as an isolated tool. Furthermore, many virtual writing centers do not see the need for creating their own handouts since so many excellent online resources already exist.4 However, this is problematic because students differ greatly from school to school, and the resources should reflect the needs of a particular

• institution. Regardless of the amount of work and training an OWL requires, it should be seen as

a venue for serving students who may be unable to attend sessions at the actual writing center or who may simply need to refresh at their own pace. The Tennessee State University Virtual Writing Center was redeveloped beginning in summer 2009 and is built around the incredible diversity found on TSU‟s campus. The majority

• f the students we serve are not conventional. They are non-traditional students, first generation

students, developmental students, and non-native speakers; they commute to campus; they are enrolled part-time; they have full-time jobs and full-time families. To provide our students with easy access to useful resources, the Virtual Writing Center must be flexible, direct, and

• informative. I will discuss the intent and design of the virtual writing center, the challenges

created by building a VWC in a course interface, and finally, other services we intend to pursue. TSU‟s Virtual Writing Center is designed to be used by tutors during appointments in the actual TSU Writing Center and by individual students outside the Writing Center. It is interfaced in the online course software Desire 2 Learn, and it consists of 42 interactive tutorials5 in the categories of grammar, punctuation, writing, research and writing across the disciplines, business, and computer skills. Each module within the categories consists of a list of learning

• utcomes, an interactive presentation built in PowerPoint, and a printable pdf handout. In

writing center sessions, the tutorials can be used as aids alongside discussion of a piece of student writing, whether to build editing skills or structure a research project. After the session is

4 “The quality of existing OWLs [is] the best argument for not making their own,” as Mark Shadle writes in “The

Spotted OWL: Online Writing Labs as Sites of Diversity, Controversy, and Identity” (5).

5 Since this presentation, the VWC now consists of over 50 tutorials

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• ver, the student can print the handout and use it as a reference while he/she continues to work
• n the assignment. Students working independently can consider the VWC either a writing

course or a writing manual: the tutorials are designed so that a user can work through every tutorial to develop stronger writing skills, or the user can choose tutorials to refresh specific writing skills. When using the VWC as a course, the student performs a multiple-choice self- assessment to determine weak areas, reviews the tutorials in those areas, and takes a post test to determine what he/she has learned. Let‟s have a closer look at a couple of these modules. I want to focus on a presentation

• f a lower-order concern and a presentation of a higher-order concern, so we will briefly look at

the tutorials for colon usage and finding reputable sources. I have provided the learning

• utcomes to show the actual contents of the tutorials, but the tutorials themselves have been

condensed considerably. Still, the abridged versions provide a general idea of the look and content of our tutorials. The Colon Usage tutorial describes the various ways to use colons as indicated by the learning outcomes. First, the tutorial lists the ways colons can be used; then, each way is defined and examples are provided. In this particular tutorial, a list of incorrect colon uses is also

• provided. These incorrect uses are defined, and an example of both incorrect use and correct use

are provided. Finally, an exercise is embedded in the tutorial itself. If a student were to review the tutorial independently, he/she could complete the presentation and work on practice exercises in the handbook or apply the information directly to a previously written paper. If a student were to work on the colons tutorial with a tutor, the student and tutor would create their own examples

• f correct usage in the first half, correct the incorrect uses in the second half, complete the

exercise together, and then apply the new ideas to a piece of the student‟s writing.

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According to the learning outcomes, the Finding Reputable Sources tutorial describes how to use both our campus library and internet resources to find and interpret research sources. The library website is hyperlinked directly into the presentation so the student can perform the steps while receiving simultaneous instruction. A practice keyword is also provided in case the student has not yet determined his/her own research topic. Because TSU has two campuses with a library on each campus, finding a book location can be challenging, so the various potential locations of books are described. Finally, the status of the books is defined as well because many students, particularly those new to research, may not understand that they can access certain books online or that other books cannot be checked out of the library. If a student completed this tutorial alone, he/she would have all of the necessary steps to research strong

• sources. If a student completed this tutorial with a tutor, the student and tutor could find sources

together, and the tutor could then allow the student to find sources on his/her own and review with the student why the sources are reputable. Building the Virtual Writing Center in the Desire2Learn course interface both prevented and created various challenges. D2L provides more space for uploading than a traditional website, and we are able to maintain the materials‟ original document types, namely Word, PowerPoint, and pdf. Regardless of the freedom these document types provide, we realized quickly the need for formatting regulations to promote cohesion and professionalism. At one point, we printed a copy of every handout we created, laid them on the floor, and debated the formatting elements that should be included on each one. Furthermore, building in D2L instead

• f in a traditional website format restricts the organization of the materials we post. As such, we

have to view our materials linearly and establish connections between tutorials through careful grouping of tutorials and deliberate referencing within tutorials. This organization actually encourages use of the VWC as a supplemental course material because it follows the same

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pattern that a handbook might. Designing a Virtual Writing Center in D2L may not be ideal, but it provides our students with the materials and information they need to boost their writing skills. More excitingly, the VWC is still growing, and we know that growth can be managed within the interface. We still have far to go with the TSU Virtual Writing Center. Perhaps the greatest problem with building the VWC in a course interface is that students have to be admitted into the “course” to view the content. There is no way around this, so heavy promotion of the VWC is

• essential. We plan on doing this by including a sampling of tutorials on an updated writing

center website, providing information about being enrolled in the VWC on the writing center website, recommending the VWC to students with long-term appointments and students who struggle to attend sessions during normal hours, and sending flyers and emails to faculty across

• campus. Besides the obstacle of admitting students into the VWC, our assessments need further
• development. Presently, a student can test only for an entire group of tutorials (i.e. grammar,

punctuation, etc.) instead of testing only a specific concept.6 We hope to refine our tests as interest in the VWC grows. In addition to enrollment and testing, we do not yet have email or chat features. D2L allows students to email the “instructor” within the course; however, before allowing students to email the Virtual Writing Center, we will need to establish guidelines for emailing and train at least one tutor in email response. Because the VWC is very new, we have not yet determined the number of students who would be interested in an email tutorial service, and we do not know the volume we would be able to handle. Eventually, we envision including videos or podcasts in our tutorials and linking to a blog and a Facebook group. We have high hopes for the TSU Virtual Writing Center. It is already being used as a supplemental material in our online developmental writing courses (though not RODP courses) and in our flexible delivery courses with good results, and these results will be shared across

6 Since this presentation, we have developed individual assessments for each tutorial

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campus as more writing intensive courses are introduced. Furthermore, the diagnostic and post test materials are excellent methods for determining student strengths and weaknesses in grammar and punctuation, which is particularly important in developmental and lower level writing courses. We have also been deliberate in the development of our cross-disciplinary resources, including information on lab reports, cover letters, literature reviews, and writing in the disciplines, among others, to encourage student to use the VWC beyond freshman

• composition. This is particularly important because TSU is currently developing more cross-

disciplinary writing intensive courses at the sophomore, junior, and senior level. As more faculty become interested in the Virtual Writing Center, we hope for suggestions of additional

• material. We want to mold the VWC around the writing needs of Tennessee State students and

faculty and provide them with the strongest resources we can create. Our Center, whether virtual

• r actual, should be the first place students turn to for aid in their writing.

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References Balkus, Beth, et al. “A Rhetorical Evaluation of OWLs or OWLs: Who Gives a Hoot?” Kairos 3.1. Texas Tech University. Web. 4 Mar. 2010. Hewett, Beth L. “Theoretical Underpinnings of Online Writing Labs (OWLs).” Defend and Publish Academic Writing, 2007. Web. 4 Mar. 2010. Hobson, Eric H. Wiring the Writing Center. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 1998. Print. Inman, James A., and Donna N. Sewell, eds. Taking Flight with OWLs: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2000. Print. Shadle, Mark. “The Spotted OWL: Online Writing Labs as Sites of Diversity, Controversy, and Identity.” Taking Flight with OWLs: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work. Eds. James A. Inman, and Donna N. Sewell. Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2000. Print. International Writing Center Association http://writingcenters.org/ OWL at Purdue http://owl.english.purdue.edu/ Writing Center at Chapel Hill, NC http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/ University of Louisville Virtual Writing Center http://louisville.edu/writingcenter/virtual- writing-center.html Oregon State OWL http://cwl.oregonstate.edu/owl.php Colorado State University Writing Studio http://writing.colostate.edu/ University of Richmond Writing Center http://writing.richmond.edu/