Sample Status Report: Profcomm

Date: January 30, 2001
To: New Learning Environments and Instructional Technology Grants Program
From: Professors Ken McAllister and Thomas P. Miller
Subject: Status Report on Development of Distributed Learning Resources in Professional Writing

Work Completed

Since July, 2000, we have been working with a highly collaborative team to develop the Professional writing website for which we received a $20,000 grant from the New Learning Environments and Instructional Technology Grants Program. The website is available at http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~profcomm/index.html

As you can see, we are on schedule in having fully developed the pilot phase of this project. We are in fact using the website for an online section and a regularly scheduled section of English 307. We have consulted with the Writing Advisory Council to get input from community partners, and plan to expand these collaborations this semester after we have gotten student and instructor feedback to the materials. This development process follows the project outline that we submitted in our proposal.

As proposed, the website is intended to serve several purposes: It will serve as the means to offer professional writing courses completely online, and it will also be a resource with instructional materials for students in regularly scheduled classes. The website will also serve as an outreach vehicle by providing people with resources on writing at work. This outreach purpose should support the mission of the Extended University, and we anticipate working with them to link up the site to their other resources so that the website can serve as a portal for the courses and other resources that are offered by Extended University.

As part of their work in the course, students will develop community partnerships that will provide opportunities for students to analyze the constraints faced by people writing at work. Students will not simply compose documents for their partners because we do not believe that simply putting students into such client relationships is the best way for them to develop a critical awareness of how complex organizational environments shape writing. Rather than trying to throw up websites or draft documents for workplaces that they barely know, students will collaborate with varied organizations to analyze their communication needs. To foster students' critical thinking on such practical experiences, we have developed a scenario-based component for the website known as "The Center." (See http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~profcomm/center/center.html ). The Center is intended to provide students with a practical sense of audience and purpose for the writings that they are doing as part of the work of the course in tandem with their community-based collaborations.

Work To Be Completed

The outreach portion of the website will be developed as redesign the site in the coming weeks to more clearly foreground resources for people writing at work. We do not plan on developing yet another website on how to write business letters, resumes and other work-related documents. Those materials are already abundantly available on the web. We will provide a rhetorically-oriented set of strategies related to how to analyze situations to meet the needs of audiences and accomplish one's purposes, with links to other sites that include document templates and related strategies. Some of these links are already up on the site, but we are working to create an interface that is organized around the sort of questions that are faced by people writing at work so that they will see how the website can serve their needs. In conjunction with this redesign, we will expand our community partnerships through the Society for Technical Communicators, a national professional association with a large local chapter that has agreed to set up a special committee to work with us on the project.

In tandem with this ongoing redesign process, we will be gathering input from the instructors and students in the pilot courses this semester. We have integrated ongoing assessments into the course itself to foster students' critical reflections on how and what they are learning. We believe that such critical assessments are essential to students' becoming independent learners with a rhetorical awareness of how to negotiate the constraints of a situation and the needs of an audience to accomplish their purposes.

In these and other ways, we are creating a website that fosters collaborative work and uses it to enrich the learning environment. As students create documents, forge relationships with community partners, and reflect upon their own learning processes, these documents, relationships and reflections will become part of the website, and thereby serve as resources and models for students and people writing at work. We have in fact used the development of the website itself as a model for the sort of collaborative inquiries that are undertaken at work and have shared the proposal and other documents with students enrolled in the class to serve as models for the work that they are doing. In these ways, we have tried to make the process of developing online learning environments into a collaborative process that involves students themselves, for we believe that an active involvement in such collaborations can help students develop the practical skills and critical awareness they will need to become effective agents not only at work but in their public encounters with technologies and organizations.

To achieve these complex purposes, we have decided to focus our work on developing online resources for business writing (English 307) and defer work on developing resources for technical writing (English 308) until we have successfully completed the process of developing the website for 307. We do not envision that the additional development process will be too time-consuming because of the closely related nature of materials on business and technical writing.

Thank you for your support for this project, which promises to become an important resource for students enrolled in online and regularly scheduled business writing classes and for people writing at work. As promised, the website is developing into a rich resource for collaborations among students, faculty and the external constituencies that we need to serve if this is to be a truly public university. We welcome any feedback that you have on the progress of this project.