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The Composition Program will use the proposed funding to establish a research base in distance learning and develop on-line instructional materials that will be broadly useful in advancing instructional innovation and improving student writing across the university.
The development process will include time for research, development, testing and revision to establish generally useful models for related curricular innovations. The development process will include strategic collaborations with local business and agencies. In the summer of 2000, we will research on-line materials and courses offered elsewhere to explore opportunities in distance learning related to workplace literacy. This research will be helpful in advancing the mission of the Extended University and serve as a nucleus for a website on distance learning opportunities and concerns that would serve as a resource for other faculty venturing into this expanding area.
In the fall of 2000, we will develop the on-line materials that will be used to create a website on professional writing and pilot web-based business and technical writing courses in the spring of 2001. In the summer of 2001, we will use the evaluations of the instructors and students to revise the courses and publish the website, and in the fall of 2001, web-based technical and business writing courses will be offered through Extended University.
Total Funds Requested: $20,000 Cost Share by Department, College or Unit: $10,000 Total Project Cost: $ 30,000
Thomas P. Miller and Ken McAllister
This project serves pressing instructional needs as well as broader strategic purposes. Business and technical writing (English 307 and 308) are required in many majors, but the demand for these courses continually outstrips available resources, resulting in students being unable to register for the courses each semester. Workplace writing courses also have broad potential for distance learning offerings in continuing education programs in various professional areas. The proposed funding will be used to develop on-line resources that will help streamline instruction in all sections of these courses (serving 200 students in 8 sections per semester), and these resources will form the foundation for additional sections that will be offered via the web through Extended University. The course revisions will utilize existing materials on the web as well as the Computer-Based Tutorials that will be a much more valuable resource for students if integrated into required courses. The website that will be developed with the proposed funding will not only be used by students in on-line and classroom based sections of business and technical writing but also by students working on professional writing projects in other courses.
The proposed funding will thus help ease enrollment pressures in a high demand course, create distance learning offerings in a very marketable area, and enable students to improve their work-related writing skills. The proposed project will also serve more general strategic purposes because it will include research on local and regional business needs in the area of writing at work, and on-line resources and course offerings will be developed to suit those public needs. Building such collaborations are a major priority for the university, and distance learning efforts have the potential to serve this public mission by making the practical expertise offered by academic units such as the Composition Program more accessible to people writing at work.
Business and technical writing courses provide important opportunities for curricular innovations of the sort specifically envisioned by the call for proposals. The courses closely fit the criteria set out in the call for distance learning proposals, as well as the criteria in other categories that will make use of existing resources such as the Computer-Based Tutorials to serve broad strategic needs. First, since current modes of instruction cannot meet student demand with available funding, a "bottleneck" has been created for students in not just one but many majors. Second, the external markets for workplace writing instruction "have a high likelihood of return on investment." Third, the proposed online resources on professional writing will serve as "support structures that can be extended to the whole campus" and to the general community. Finally, and most importantly, the online innovations advanced by the initiative aptly suit the learning objectives of the courses themselves. Business and technical writing courses emphasize specific formats such as resumes, proposals, and memos that can be presented efficiently online, and the courses emphasize teamwork of the sort that can be facilitated by group work in the Old Pueblo MOO and university-sponsored web boards that can be used in collaborations with local and regional businesses as well as in the courses themselves.
The strategic benefits of the proposed project have broad institutional importance. The courses in business and technical writing will be developed in collaboration with human resource managers in business and social agencies. We will ask practical questions about how new technologies are changing writing at work and use the input to develop learning outcomes and assignments for the courses. We also hope to use the contacts to integrate practical cases and materials from local situations into the courses. These collaborations should also help establish partnerships for the further development of credit and noncredit courses on workplace writing.
The funding will be used to research and develop on-line courses and instructional materials to meet the business and technical writing needs of students and local professionals. A website will be developed to provide assignments, models, and strategies for composing work-related writing, including peer-group work on writing. Parts of this website will be available to students as well as the public, and part will be password protected. The protected areas will provide tutorials for the various assignments that will make up the distance learning courses. The publicly accessible part of the website will also include materials on professional writing that will be useful to any students working on technical reports, resumes, memos, abstracts and business letters. These resources will be useful for people at work and these pages will be linked to Extended University sites to encourage local professionals to take advantage of credit and noncredit courses. The publicly accessible part of the website will also include a page for teachers and administrators on distance learning strategies and pedagogical concerns, including links drawn from the research that will be done in the first stage of the development process.
The funding will thus enable us to implement these specific goals:
Building on its outstanding record of efficient and effective curriculum development, the Composition Program has become a leader in integrating technologies into general education. For over twenty years, the Composition Program has been publishing student-centered textbooks and innovative curricular materials, and the collaborative structures developed through these efforts have helped make the Program a center for institutional efforts to use new technologies to reform general education. The Program will use the proposed funding to establish a research base in distance learning and develop online instructional materials that will be broadly useful in advancing instructional innovation and improving student writing across the university. The proposed development process will include time for research, development, testing and revision to establish generally useful models for related curricular innovations.
The implementation process will base the reforms of general education on research on national trends and regional needs, fostering collaborations with local professionals and using online technologies to expand public access to the practical expertise offered of the university. In the summer of 2000, we will research local business needs and professional writing courses already available online to learn from what is already being done and assess what needs to be done here. This research will be useful for strategic planning as well as designing the courses themselves, and the general research on distance learning opportunities and concerns will be a resource for other faculty venturing into this expanding area of instruction. In the fall of 2000, in collaboration with our community partners, we will develop the online materials that will be used to create a website on professional writing, and in spring of 2001 we will pilot web-based business and technical writing courses. In the summer of 2001, we will use the evaluations of the instructors, students, and local professionals to revise the courses and website, and in fall 2001, web-based technical and business writing courses will become part of regular offerings.
Because of its central role in general education and its faculty's involvement in national research on writing, the Composition Program is positioned to play a leading role in collaborations on developing distributed and distance learning courses to suit the needs of local business and agencies as well as students at the university. Faculty in the Composition Program have played leadership roles in the national association of Writing Program Administrators that will provide essential contacts for learning about how professional writing is being taught online elsewhere. While the websites for the Composition Program and Writing Center already include links to online resources developed by other institutions, our initial research suggests that few such resources have been developed for business and technical writing on the scale that we are planning, as can be seen by assessing two of the best at: http://www.wfi.fr/est/est1.html and http://www.io.com/~hcexres/tcm1603/acchtml/acctoc.html.
Since most of the materials we develop will be specifically designed around the assignments in our business and technical writing courses, we will not be duplicating efforts elsewhere. While much can be learned from related course offerings at other universities and colleges, we will work in collaboration with human resource managers in local business and agencies to develop materials that will prepare our students to meet the practical needs that they will face upon graduation.
The principal collaborators on the project have extensive experience with developing curricular materials, including online technologies, and have published research on writing at work that have won national scholarly awards. Drawing on the experiences that are detailed at the end of this proposal, the development of this project will synthesize research, teaching and service into a comprehensive approach to integrating new technologies into general education to prepare students to meet the needs of the changing workplace.
Assessment will be integrated into the development process from its inception to ensure that the assignments and goals for the online courses are consistent with what is needed in the changing workplaces that our students will face upon graduation. We will survey local and regional human resource managers to get their input on professional writing needs, and we will use focus groups of such professionals as well as students and instructors to assess the pilots. Such collaborations have already been established by Dr. Yvonne Merrill of the Composition Board, who created the Writing Advisory Council of local professionals and has included them in discussions of the goals for undergraduate writing instruction at the university and in statewide articulation forums. Collaborations with business and government agencies have been set as a major strategic priority for the university, and we believe that the impact of online technologies on writing at work is an area where such collaborations are particularly strategic to enable us to assess the changing needs of writers at work, and develop courses that address those needs.
The proposed reforms' impact on student writing will be evaluated through portfolio assessments similar to those that have been established by the Composition Board. The Composition Board has used portfolio assessments as a means to involve teachers, students, and other collaborators in discussions of students' writing. A dozen high schools collaborate with the Composition Board to have students submit portfolios of their writings for placement into first-year composition courses, and the Board has worked with faculty from across campus to develop portfolio assessments as an alternative to the Upper-Division-Writing-Proficiency Essay that is required of all undergraduates as they enter upper-division studies. The organizational and assessment expertise that has been gained through these projects will be applied to assessments of the portfolios produced by students in the online courses.