Without face-to-face interactions, OWI instructors need to employ different strategies to ensure students understand what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how it connects to the main goals of the course. In other words, online instructors need to make sure students understand the “how” and the “why” of pedagogy without hearing the instructor say it verbally. One way to combat the loss of in-class connections is by asking students to engage in reflection.

The OWI’s October professional development (PD) session discussed converting face-to-face courses for hybrid and online courses. The lively conversations in both meetings led to some interesting ideas around hybrid and online course set up. 

Two main ideas came out of PD: consistency and use of modules.

Consistency: We know that students want the same due dates each week. They also want a reliable way to interact with the class. Some suggestions to make the class more consistent are: 

Accessibility is about much more than just following the law. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, nearly 20% of all college students have a disability. Many students do not formally disclose their disability with student services. With a growing number of online writing courses, instructors need to take the initiative to adequately address accessibility in the design of their online courses.

Instructors of online and hybrid writing courses face an uphill battle of encouraging student engagement in discussion boards. As most instructors realize, recreating in-person interactions via online discussion boards is difficult. While hybrid and synchronous courses have more options for engagement, there is still a need for improving discussion boards for student learning. 

From conversations with seasoned online instructors, we’ve rounded up the top three tactics for cultivating student engagement in discussion boards.

In this episode, Kory and Theresa are responding to issues and themes raised in a discussion board for OWI instructors. The topic for the discussion was "access and inclusion," but much of the discussion had to do with the concepts of "meta-commentary" and challenges with discussion boards.

Here are the texts referenced in this episode: 

In this podcast episode, Kory and Theresa are joined by Sabina Simon, a PhD student in the School of Education, who is in the midst of collecting and analyzing interview data with students in hybrid writing courses at UC Davis.

After we share a little about the history of hybrid writing courses in the program, Sabina walks us through some of the more interesting and surprising themes to emerge out of student interviews and focus groups so far. 

Stay tuned (er, subscribed) for more exciting developments on this project!

The UWP OWI team has started a podcast to discuss "online writing instruction at UC Davis and beyond"! 

The first episode (embedded here) is just kind of a test (which is why we called it episode "0"), and it's just us reacting to stuff we're seeing in the hybrid course design workshops we're running this quarter. Still, it was a good conversation, so maybe other UWP instructors will find it useful.

Hi everyone,

I've made a video explaining contract grading, so I thought I would share it here with all of you:

Link to video

Link to resources

I’m sharing what I have learned at the Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC) about composing in Google Maps (My Maps Google). This program allows you to:

This video covers the Group tools in Canvas, and discusses a few different ways you might use them.