Handbook of Research on Writing and Composing in the Age of MOOCs 9781522517184, 9781522517191, 1522517189

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Handbook of Research on Writing and Composing in the Age of MOOCs Elizabeth A. Monske Northern Michigan University, USA Kristine L. Blair Youngstown State University, USA

A volume in the Advances in Educational Technologies and Instructional Design (AETID) Book Series

Published in the United States of America by IGI Global Information Science Reference (an imprint of IGI Global) 701 E. Chocolate Avenue Hershey PA, USA 17033 Tel: 717-533-8845 Fax: 717-533-8661 E-mail: [email protected] Web site: http://www.igi-global.com Copyright © 2017 by IGI Global. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without written permission from the publisher. Product or company names used in this set are for identification purposes only. Inclusion of the names of the products or companies does not indicate a claim of ownership by IGI Global of the trademark or registered trademark. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP Data Pending ISBN: 978-1-5225-1718-4 eISBN: 978-1-5225-1719-1 This book is published in the IGI Global book series Advances in Educational Technologies and Instructional Design (AETID) (ISSN: 2326-8905; eISSN: 2326-8913)

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Advances in Educational Technologies and Instructional Design (AETID) Book Series Lawrence A. Tomei Robert Morris University, USA

ISSN:2326-8905 EISSN:2326-8913 Mission

Education has undergone, and continues to undergo, immense changes in the way it is enacted and distributed to both child and adult learners. From distance education, Massive-Open-Online-Courses (MOOCs), and electronic tablets in the classroom, technology is now an integral part of the educational experience and is also affecting the way educators communicate information to students. The Advances in Educational Technologies & Instructional Design (AETID) Book Series is a resource where researchers, students, administrators, and educators alike can find the most updated research and theories regarding technology’s integration within education and its effect on teaching as a practice.

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• Collaboration Tools • Web 2.0 and Education • Social Media Effects on Education • Classroom Response Systems • E-Learning • Hybrid Learning • Virtual School Environments • Digital Divide in Education • Online Media in Classrooms • Curriculum Development

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The Advances in Educational Technologies and Instructional Design (AETID) Book Series (ISSN 2326-8905) is published by IGI Global, 701 E. Chocolate Avenue, Hershey, PA 17033-1240, USA, www.igi-global.com. This series is composed of titles available for purchase individually; each title is edited to be contextually exclusive from any other title within the series. For pricing and ordering information please visit http://www.igi-global.com/book-series/advances-educational-technologies-instructional-design/73678. Postmaster: Send all address changes to above address. Copyright © 2017 IGI Global. All rights, including translation in other languages reserved by the publisher. No part of this series may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means – graphics, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information and retrieval systems – without written permission from the publisher, except for non commercial, educational use, including classroom teaching purposes. The views expressed in this series are those of the authors, but not necessarily of IGI Global.

Titles in this Series

For a list of additional titles in this series, please visit: www.igi-global.com

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) Framework for K-12 Teacher Preparation Emerging Research and Opportunities Margaret L. Niess (Oregon State University, USA) Information Science Reference • copyright 2017 • 122pp • H/C (ISBN: 9781522516217) • US $135.00 (our price) Handbook of Research on Building, Growing, and Sustaining Quality E-Learning Programs Kaye Shelton (Lamar University, USA) and Karen Pedersen (Online Learning Consortium, USA) Information Science Reference • copyright 2017 • 412pp • H/C (ISBN: 9781522508779) • US $225.00 (our price) Flipped Instruction Methods and Digital Technologies in the Language Learning Classroom John Paul Loucky (Seinan Jo Gakuin University, Japan) and Jean L. Ware (Tokai University Fukuoka Junior College, Japan) Information Science Reference • copyright 2017 • 313pp • H/C (ISBN: 9781522508243) • US $165.00 (our price) Handbook of Research on Foreign Language Education in the Digital Age Congcong Wang (University of Northern Iowa, USA) and Lisa Winstead (California State University, Fullerton, USA) Information Science Reference • copyright 2016 • 460pp • H/C (ISBN: 9781522501770) • US $275.00 (our price) Revolutionizing Modern Education through Meaningful E-Learning Implementation Badrul H. Khan (McWeadon Education, USA) Information Science Reference • copyright 2016 • 341pp • H/C (ISBN: 9781522504665) • US $185.00 (our price) Knowledge Visualization and Visual Literacy in Science Education Anna Ursyn (University of Northern Colorado, USA) Information Science Reference • copyright 2016 • 431pp • H/C (ISBN: 9781522504801) • US $205.00 (our price) Increasing Productivity and Efficiency in Online Teaching Patricia Dickenson (National University, USA) and James J. Jaurez (National University, USA) Information Science Reference • copyright 2016 • 327pp • H/C (ISBN: 9781522503477) • US $185.00 (our price) Wearable Technology and Mobile Innovations for Next-Generation Education Janet Holland (Emporia State University, USA) Information Science Reference • copyright 2016 • 364pp • H/C (ISBN: 9781522500698) • US $195.00 (our price)

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List of Contributors

Almjeld, Jen / James Madison University, USA.................................................................................. 87 Babb, Jacob / Indiana University Southeast, USA............................................................................. 202 Baker, Nicki Litherland / Ball State University, USA....................................................................... 385 Borgman, Jessie C. / Texas Tech University, USA.............................................................................. 188 Bourelle, Tiffany / University of New Mexico, USA.......................................................................... 348 Branson, Tyler / University of California – Santa Barbara, USA..................................................... 169 Brunk-Chavez, Beth / University of Texas at El Paso, USA............................................................. 123 Buck, Elisabeth H. / University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth, USA............................................... 385 Colby, Rebekah Shultz / University of Denver, USA......................................................................... 317 Colby, Richard / University of Denver, USA......................................................................................... 1 Henry, Thomas Patrick / Utah Valley University, USA..................................................................... 216 Hewett, Beth L. / Defend and Publish, LLC, USA......................................................................... 17,348 Hill, Valerie / University of Washington, USA..................................................................................... 56 Howard, Laura / Kennesaw State University, USA........................................................................... 232 Jenkins, Patricia / University of Alaska – Anchorage, USA.............................................................. 106 Lindsey, Leslie / University of Texas at Tyler, USA........................................................................... 331 Martini, Rebecca Hallman / Salem State University, USA................................................................ 278 McEachern, Robert W. / Southern Connecticut State University, USA............................................ 370 Odom, Stephanie / University of Texas at Tyler, USA....................................................................... 331 Oswal, Sushil K. / University of Washington, USA.............................................................................. 39 Overstreet, Matthew / University of Pittsburgh, USA........................................................................ 75 Petrosino, Krista L. / Georgia Southern University, USA................................................................. 153 Posey, Evelyn / University of Texas at El Paso, USA......................................................................... 123 Quezada, Teresa / University of Texas at El Paso, USA.................................................................... 123 Steffen, Virginia Tucker / Old Dominion University, USA................................................................ 137 Stewart, Jennifer / University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, USA................................................... 294 Tham, Jason Chew Kit / University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, USA............................................. 254 Warnock, Scott / Drexel University, USA............................................................................................ 17 Webster, Travis / University of Houston – Clear Lake, USA............................................................ 278



Table of Contents

Foreword............................................................................................................................................xviii Preface.................................................................................................................................................. xxi Acknowledgment............................................................................................................................... xxix Chapter 1 A Typology of MOOCS........................................................................................................................... 1 Richard Colby, University of Denver, USA Chapter 2 Writing MOOEEs? Reconsidering MOOCs in Light of the OWI Principles........................................ 17 Beth L. Hewett, Defend and Publish, LLC, USA Scott Warnock, Drexel University, USA Chapter 3 MOOCs in the Global Context.............................................................................................................. 39 Sushil K. Oswal, University of Washington, USA Chapter 4 Digital Citizens as Writers: New Literacies and New Responsibilities................................................. 56 Valerie Hill, University of Washington, USA Chapter 5 Principled/Digital: Composition’s “Ethics of Attunement” and the Writing MOOC............................ 75 Matthew Overstreet, University of Pittsburgh, USA Chapter 6 Getting “Girly” Online: The Case for Gendering Online Spaces.......................................................... 87 Jen Almjeld, James Madison University, USA Chapter 7 Arguing for Proactivity: Talking Points for Owning Accessibility in Online Writing Instruction...... 106 Patricia Jenkins, University of Alaska – Anchorage, USA  



Chapter 8 Connecting Writing Studies with Online Programs: UTEP’s Graduate Technical and Professional Writing Certificate Program................................................................................................................. 123 Teresa Quezada, University of Texas at El Paso, USA Beth Brunk-Chavez, University of Texas at El Paso, USA Evelyn Posey, University of Texas at El Paso, USA Chapter 9 Contact and Interactivity in Televised Learning: 15 Years Later........................................................ 137 Virginia Tucker Steffen, Old Dominion University, USA Chapter 10 Developmental Writing and MOOCs: Reconsidering Access, Remediation, and Development in Large-Scale Online Writing Instruction............................................................................................... 153 Krista L. Petrosino, Georgia Southern University, USA Chapter 11 Problematic Partnerships: An Analysis of Three Composition MOOCs Funded by the Gates Foundation........................................................................................................................................... 169 Tyler Branson, University of California – Santa Barbara, USA Chapter 12 The Online Writing Program Administrator (OWPA): Maintaining a Brand in the Age of MOOCs............................................................................................................................................... 188 Jessie C. Borgman, Texas Tech University, USA Chapter 13 Reshaping Institutional Mission: OWI and Writing Program Administration.................................... 202 Jacob Babb, Indiana University Southeast, USA Chapter 14 What’s a “Technician” to Do? Theorizing and Articulating MOOC Maintenance Concerns............. 216 Thomas Patrick Henry, Utah Valley University, USA Chapter 15 A (Critical) Distance: Contingent Labor, MOOCs, and Teaching Online........................................... 232 Laura Howard, Kennesaw State University, USA Chapter 16 Audience, User, Producer: MOOCs as Activity Systems.................................................................... 254 Jason Chew Kit Tham, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, USA



Chapter 17 What Online Writing Spaces Afford Us in the Age of Campus Carry, “Wall-Building,” and Orlando’s Pulse Tragedy...................................................................................................................... 278 Rebecca Hallman Martini, Salem State University, USA Travis Webster, University of Houston – Clear Lake, USA Chapter 18 Introduction Discussion Board Forums in Online Writing Courses Are Essential: No, Really, They Are.............................................................................................................................................. 294 Jennifer Stewart, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, USA Chapter 19 Using Online Writing Communities to Teach Writing MOOCs......................................................... 317 Rebekah Shultz Colby, University of Denver, USA Chapter 20 Hacking the Lecture: Transgressive Praxis and Presence Using Online Video................................... 331 Stephanie Odom, University of Texas at Tyler, USA Leslie Lindsey, University of Texas at Tyler, USA Chapter 21 Training Instructors to Teach Multimodal Composition in Online Courses........................................ 348 Tiffany Bourelle, University of New Mexico, USA Beth L. Hewett, Defend & Publish, LLC, USA Chapter 22 Challenging Evaluation: The Complexity of Grading Writing in Hybrid MOOCs............................. 370 Robert W. McEachern, Southern Connecticut State University, USA Chapter 23 Conducting Programmatic Assessments of Online Writing Instruction: CCCC’s OWI Principles in Practice............................................................................................................................................ 385 Nicki Litherland Baker, Ball State University, USA Elisabeth H. Buck, University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth, USA Compilation of References................................................................................................................ 406 About the Contributors..................................................................................................................... 448 Index.................................................................................................................................................... 453

Detailed Table of Contents

Foreword............................................................................................................................................xviii Preface.................................................................................................................................................. xxi Acknowledgment............................................................................................................................... xxix Chapter 1 A Typology of MOOCS........................................................................................................................... 1 Richard Colby, University of Denver, USA Writing instruction MOOCs up until this point have tended to follow what has become expected of a MOOC in that they convey content first and foremost, or they have attempted to translate a traditional classroom space into an online space. While there is nothing inherently wrong with such practices, this chapter argues that there are opportunities for us to rethink the possibilities of an online space for writing instruction by considering what the benefits and drawbacks of three current MOOC models while also proposing two more. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future MOOC iterations. Chapter 2 Writing MOOEEs? Reconsidering MOOCs in Light of the OWI Principles........................................ 17 Beth L. Hewett, Defend and Publish, LLC, USA Scott Warnock, Drexel University, USA In this chapter, the authors consider the conundrum of a writing MOOC, which is both a countertraditional type of college “course” and an experimental online venue that recently has gained, lost, and regained traction. Using the CCCC OWI Principles and current scholarship as grounding, the authors argue that MOOCs are too big and technologically unwieldy to be considered a traditional, credit-bearing writing course and that they are problematic even when the credit issue is removed from the equation. Issues include inherent accessibility, responsibilities to stakeholders, infrastructure challenges, needs for educator preparation and training, and compensation. The authors then reimagine the writing MOOC as a MOOEE, or massive open online educational experience, to take advantage of its relative benefits. Nonetheless, even reconceiving a MOOC as a MOOEE does not solve all of its problems when held against educational principles that address both learning and material conditions.





Chapter 3 MOOCs in the Global Context.............................................................................................................. 39 Sushil K. Oswal, University of Washington, USA The purpose of this chapter is to present a critique of MOOC hype in the international context. The author scrutinizes the claims advanced by MOOC proponents by asking two questions: 1) What are the assumptions about literacy and learning that inform MOOC discourse about mass education of U.S. and foreign citizens? and 2) What could be some unstated political, cultural, and economic purposes behind these MOOC ventures? In order to provide a contextualized and substantiated critique of the exaggerated claims about the innovative nature of MOOC pedagogy and their extended reach to the poor citizens of developing countries, the author presents an analysis of two writing courses offered as MOOCs by Georgia Tech and Ohio State University, both sponsored by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Finally, the author also discusses the implications of this MOOC hype in the international context to the United States. Chapter 4 Digital Citizens as Writers: New Literacies and New Responsibilities................................................. 56 Valerie Hill, University of Washington, USA As much of life is spent in digital spaces, information literacy now includes a personal responsibility for digital citizenship. This chapter focuses on how students can best become literate, successful learners in the age of MOOCs by embracing a personal responsibility for information literacy. The need for information literacy embedded into MOOCs is imperative because literacy, particularly writing, has rapidly changed in global digital participatory culture and continues to evolve. The shift from traditional classrooms filled with primarily print materials toward mobile devices and instant access to information in real time has revolutionized literacy within a historically short time period. The idea of good writers being also good readers may still hold true in new media formats; however, the concept of the student as a “prosumer” (both consumer and producer of content) in an age of disposable social media and constant connectivity requires a new vision of writing and literacy. Chapter 5 Principled/Digital: Composition’s “Ethics of Attunement” and the Writing MOOC............................ 75 Matthew Overstreet, University of Pittsburgh, USA This essay argues that the primary goal of writing instruction should be the cultivation of an ethics of attunement. This is a habit of mind that allows a writer to adapt to the demands of context and therefore engage in successful rhetorical action. The ability to cultivate this habit of mind is the standard by which MOOCs, or any other writing instruction technology, should be judged. Working from this premise, the essay critiques MOOC-based instruction methods. It finds a deep tension between MOOC models and the theories of knowledge, learning and being which underlie contemporary writing pedagogy. This indicates that MOOCs, as they now exist, may be unable to satisfy composition’s ethical imperative.



Chapter 6 Getting “Girly” Online: The Case for Gendering Online Spaces.......................................................... 87 Jen Almjeld, James Madison University, USA While MOOCs and other fully online educational spaces and tools continue to proliferate at institutions of higher education, some worry over a persistent gender gap in online learning. While debate continues regarding the existence of a digital gender divide, the perception of the gap may be enough to give female learners the idea that digital learning spaces are not for them. Females particularly may be silenced in MOOCs and other online spaces not by instructors or fellow learners, but by cultural expectations. I offer here reflections on two fully online girlhood studies courses interrogating notions of gender performance, norms, and scripts as successful models for positioning gender disparity as a teaching tool rather than a barrier to learning. The piece ends with six recommendations—most rooted in feminist pedagogy—for making MOOCs more welcoming to all genders and learners. Chapter 7 Arguing for Proactivity: Talking Points for Owning Accessibility in Online Writing Instruction...... 106 Patricia Jenkins, University of Alaska – Anchorage, USA The field of composition studies has come to value online writing instruction’s potential because it has matured theoretically. Despite its status as a viable means of instruction, research shows that those who teach it fail to comply with the obligation of accessibility and inclusivity in their online courses. When meeting ideals for accessible and inclusive online writing instruction remains unimportant and difficult to put into practice, instructors fail students with disabilities. The author argues that instructors need to advocate for a proactive approach at their institutions to address the issue of not providing accessible and inclusive online writing courses. A proactive approach supports instructors in attending to the online learning environment before launching a course so that it meets the needs of students with disabilities. This essay offers ideas for framing a conversation to address the issue described above and to encourage establishing a culture of proactivity, and it provides a vision for the features of a proactive culture. Chapter 8 Connecting Writing Studies with Online Programs: UTEP’s Graduate Technical and Professional Writing Certificate Program................................................................................................................. 123 Teresa Quezada, University of Texas at El Paso, USA Beth Brunk-Chavez, University of Texas at El Paso, USA Evelyn Posey, University of Texas at El Paso, USA This chapter addresses how The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) Technical and Professional Writing Certificate Program (TWP) was developed, navigated the transition from an independent writing certificate program to one within a suite of online offerings, evaluated and assessed the program. The authors discuss how the program’s focus on the Principles and Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction strengthens the TPW program by providing a unified approach to stakeholders; preparing faculty to deliver consistent, engaging courses that meet program goals; enhancing recruitment efforts and broadening the pool of prospective students, streamlining administrative functions, and ultimately improving the students’ online writing experience.



Chapter 9 Contact and Interactivity in Televised Learning: 15 Years Later........................................................ 137 Virginia Tucker Steffen, Old Dominion University, USA This chapter revisits earlier studies on interactive television performed at the same institution in order observe any changes that may have occurred in the types of interaction and contact that students in these types of distance courses experience. This study also compares the findings to an asynchronous, webbased distance course to better understand how interaction and contact change across delivery methods. Findings suggest that little has changed in the ITV classroom, with results being very similar to the original study. When comparing ITV results to the asynchronous class, findings show that, while contact may be lessened due to the lack of synchronous presence, there are still instances of lively interaction that can occur. Asynchronous students do, however, wish for increased use of video-based delivery of course content. Chapter 10 Developmental Writing and MOOCs: Reconsidering Access, Remediation, and Development in Large-Scale Online Writing Instruction............................................................................................... 153 Krista L. Petrosino, Georgia Southern University, USA Online education has created a path for universities to expand their geographical and financial bases, per se, by creating virtual classrooms in which students can be present from anywhere, at virtually any time, and do not require the cost of housing facilities, dining, and other expenses that universities (and students) incur beyond the cost of their education itself. The effects of this geographical and financial expansion are far reaching—more so than we sometimes imagine. If we apply this expanse to the multifaceted concept of access, and narrow that focus to one of the most at-risk student populations—developmental writers—we can clearly map connections and complications between location, politics, and pedagogy, all of which have a direct effect on the students and faculty who occupy these online classroom spaces. Here, access becomes most complicated, because it represents in part a geographical and political open door into an education that was previously inaccessible; however, in examining the ways in which some online educational spaces have ultimately developed, the political and financial benefits of MOOCs and other online learning spaces for universities often directly contest disciplinary pedagogies and accepted methods of student support (i.e. small class sizes, individual attention), especially in the case of developmental writers and other at-risk student populations. Ultimately, the relationship of developmental writing and MOOCs in the field’s discussions of 21st century literacies, pedagogy, and student success, and in practice, serves to complicate or fully redefine our field’s concept of remediation and development, and in doing so, assists us re-thinking the development of large-scale online writing instruction at institutions that do not have the need or resources for creating a writing MOOC specifically. Chapter 11 Problematic Partnerships: An Analysis of Three Composition MOOCs Funded by the Gates Foundation........................................................................................................................................... 169 Tyler Branson, University of California – Santa Barbara, USA This essay analyzes the rhetorical function of partnership in the creation and administration of three firstyear composition MOOCs taught at institutions that were recipients of grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2012-2013. Specifically, the author analyzes partnerships with MOOC developers Coursera and teams of academics at Duke, Georgia Tech, and Ohio State. These composition MOOCs



are examples of problematic partnerships, or collaborations between academics and powerful groups, individuals, or companies that may have interests related to, but not necessarily in step with, academics’ own disciplinary agendas. Ultimately, the author argues that despite significant risks, problematic partnerships can be potentially productive sites of research, teaching, and collaboration. Moreover, problematic partnerships can also potentially function as vital pockets where practitioners can leverage institutional collaborations to create new knowledge about writing and writing pedagogy and ultimately keep the field engaged in important public issues related to writing. Chapter 12 The Online Writing Program Administrator (OWPA): Maintaining a Brand in the Age of  MOOCs................................................................................................................................................ 188 Jessie C. Borgman, Texas Tech University, USA This chapter explores issues specific writing program administration considering the huge influx of online writing courses across the country. The author argues that a pedagogical shift has occurred that requires a change in administering writing programs: teaching online is different that teaching faceto-face. Considering this influx and pedagogical shift, the author argues that in the age of MOOCs, focusing on faculty support and the development and maintenance of online writing courses (OWCs) becomes imperative. The central idea of the chapter is that in order for online writing instructors to focus on what they do best (teaching), they need to be led by someone with online writing instruction (OWI) experience, who is trained and qualified to lead a writing program that includes OWCs. The author argues for the development of a new WPA role, an Online Writing Program Administrator (OWPA), in order to distinguish a brand of OWI, which is distinctly different than the instruction and content offered by MOOCs. Chapter 13 Reshaping Institutional Mission: OWI and Writing Program Administration.................................... 202 Jacob Babb, Indiana University Southeast, USA This chapter examines the relationship between online writing instruction (OWI) and the material and pedagogical impacts of OWI on institutions and their missions, using the author’s regional campus to illustrate those impacts. First, the chapter explores the institutional mission and context of the author’s institution, exploring how OWI works with and against the university’s mission and how the growth of online instruction reshapes that mission. Second, the chapter asserts the need for professional development by exploring campus-wide resources for instructor training and then by detailing the writing program’s efforts to provide discipline-specific training that emphasizes pedagogy and collaboration. Finally, the chapter asserts that writing program administrators are uniquely situated stakeholders on their campuses who can make a significant impact on the implementation and ongoing development of OWI on their campuses. Chapter 14 What’s a “Technician” to Do? Theorizing and Articulating MOOC Maintenance Concerns............. 216 Thomas Patrick Henry, Utah Valley University, USA Karl Marx wrote about the importance of the worker in the role of machinery. Further, Marx discusses how machines replace the role of the factory workers. With the workers replaced, the care of the machines is left to technicians, who continually repair and maintain the machines. MOOCs exist under similar



circumstances. Just as a machine may replace workers on a production line, a single MOOC replaces classroom instructors. Thus, the teacher/designer, the one who maintains the MOOC, exists in similar conditions as Marx’s worker and Ellul’s technician. Using a Marxist lens, one can examine closer how these sorts of theoretical concerns espoused by Marx, Ellul, and other thinkers in technology consider the design and use of MOOCs. The MOOC must either be constantly updated (with new and fresh information) or perish (to be replaced by a better MOOC). In this chapter, the author will flush out other challenges within the scope of MOOC maintenance, delivery, and other concerns as they connect to MOOC infrastructure and issue of maintenance. Chapter 15 A (Critical) Distance: Contingent Labor, MOOCs, and Teaching Online........................................... 232 Laura Howard, Kennesaw State University, USA The increase in demand for higher education has resulted in a surge of online courses and degree programs across the US and worldwide. Calls for open access learning options and more cost-effective higher educational opportunities have contributed to this rapid increase, especially in the form of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. For educators and scholars, the evolution of MOOCs and the enthusiastic rhetoric surrounding them necessitates a critical examination. One such area for examination is the relationship between MOOCs and the contingent faculty crisis, especially how the evolution of MOOCs could hurt or help online contingent faculty. Arguably, the concept of the MOOC as a mode of delivery may present opportunities to subvert instructional delivery methods and other elements of the online distance learning status quo that create challenges for contingent faculty online. Ultimately, this chapter offers insight into the issues faced by part-time instructors teaching online, especially in terms of the material realities of the work they do and how their experience is distinct from that of the face-to-face (f2f) contingent instructor. Important to this discussion is how a shift in our conception of MOOCs as an instructional approach may offer new perspectives for online contingent labor in higher education. Overall, the goal of this work is to raise awareness and to advance scholarly discussion of this topic, understanding MOOCs as one potential site of resistance and change. Chapter 16 Audience, User, Producer: MOOCs as Activity Systems.................................................................... 254 Jason Chew Kit Tham, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, USA While some studies have looked at the suitability of MOOCs as an emerging mode of delivery, many seem to miss the mark on the question of usability in the MOOC context. Without a clear understanding of user roles in MOOCs, it will be challenging for course providers to evaluate the effectiveness of their designed systems and thus may negatively impact MOOC participants’ experience with the course platform. With an eye toward a user-centered technological design philosophy, this chapter situates MOOCs as socio-rhetorical systems within a large complex ecology of learning. Through the lens of Activity Theory, I investigate the intricate roles of audience, user, and producer that MOOC participants play interchangeably while scrutinizing the relationships between these roles in an online social learning environment.



Chapter 17 What Online Writing Spaces Afford Us in the Age of Campus Carry, “Wall-Building,” and Orlando’s Pulse Tragedy...................................................................................................................... 278 Rebecca Hallman Martini, Salem State University, USA Travis Webster, University of Houston – Clear Lake, USA Theorizing about twenty-first century writing spaces, the authors argue that online writing environments offer particular affordances to writing teachers when navigating challenging subject matter at complex, political moments. Alongside narrative theorization, the authors provide stories about their writing experiences alongside their students, while offering strategies for complicating and extending our field’s discussions of the possibilities for online writing in the age of massive online open courses. The authors conclude that, while online spaces cannot offer “safe spaces” for writing instruction, they may offer “braver” spaces as students and instructors alike grapple with challenging, political landscapes. Chapter 18 Introduction Discussion Board Forums in Online Writing Courses Are Essential: No, Really, They Are.............................................................................................................................................. 294 Jennifer Stewart, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, USA This chapter develops a framework for thinking about online writing instruction and how it impacts training and the evaluation of new and senior faculty. This chapter interrogates online writing instruction by using activity theory and ethnography to examine the role of introduction discussion forums in an online writing course. Results from this study show how student interaction in introduction discussion boards is influenced by peer reciprocity and instructor modeling. The analysis of this study contains important ramifications for WPAs regarding how an online writing course functions, and the motivation of its users, and how these factors will impact course delivery and programmatic writing policies. Furthermore, the analysis of this study suggests ways in which administrators can increase efficiency and quality of faculty training as institutions accept the pedagogical shift to online writing instruction. Chapter 19 Using Online Writing Communities to Teach Writing MOOCs......................................................... 317 Rebekah Shultz Colby, University of Denver, USA The immense enrollment capacity of massive open online courses (MOOCs) radically decenters student and teacher authority in the writing classroom. However, online writing communities teach each other how to write effectively within that community, a type of writing instruction which could be leveraged in a MOOC. The author qualitatively coded the types of writing questions and feedback posted on a technical writing forum, Technical Writing World and discovered that writing questions focused on technical writing genres, style guides, documentation practices, lower order concerns, and revision or outsourcing of work. Responses often directed the original poster to research the rhetorical situation within a specific company. The author then outlined three pedagogical approaches for writing MOOCs: students could ask writing questions from professionals on similar writing websites, conduct qualitative studies of similar online writing communities to learn their underlying writing values, and participate in MOOCs that were organized to be communities of practice.



Chapter 20 Hacking the Lecture: Transgressive Praxis and Presence Using Online Video................................... 331 Stephanie Odom, University of Texas at Tyler, USA Leslie Lindsey, University of Texas at Tyler, USA This case study will detail the experience of one composition instructor and her efforts to adapt a collaborative, student-centered freshman composition course to the online environment using a lecture video-focused course delivery. Lectures can be understood as “content lectures” or “presence lectures,” which are recorded lectures meant to model writing skills or communicate concern and support, rather than delivering information to be recalled on an exam. Effective composition pedagogy, because it is often more emotionally labor intensive than lecture-based pedagogy, can be compromised if online writing classes are only conducted textually. Auditory and visual communication creates richer social presence than text-only interactions, but it also introduces logistical challenges of creating an authentic digital space and ensuring the materials are accessible to all learners. To overcome these obstacles while still giving students a feel of the instructor’s social presence, pre-recording short presence lectures can be a useful compromise as writing instructors explore the potential of online learning. Chapter 21 Training Instructors to Teach Multimodal Composition in Online Courses........................................ 348 Tiffany Bourelle, University of New Mexico, USA Beth L. Hewett, Defend & Publish, LLC, USA This chapter addresses practical strategies for training teachers to teach multimodal composition in online courses. Specifically, trainers should focus on at least four skill sets: developing and scaffolding multimodal assignments; creating multimodal instructional tools; incorporating technology labs within the curriculum; and adopting and adapting the multimodal ePortfolio as a reflective document for showcasing student learning. Teachers particularly benefit from these skill sets, which enable them to guide students in acquiring such multimodal literacies as learning to design rhetorically effective multimodal projects for various audiences and purposes. The chapter offers theoretical and practical advice for trainers where the instruction will occur in online settings as well as the training itself. This advice also is useful for teachers of face-to-face (onsite) multimodal courses when using a robust learning management system (LMS) for student support. Chapter 22 Challenging Evaluation: The Complexity of Grading Writing in Hybrid MOOCs............................. 370 Robert W. McEachern, Southern Connecticut State University, USA When MOOCs exploded into the public consciousness in 2012, many supporters touted their potential to disrupt higher education. In a short time, MOOCs have evolved, and that role as radical change agents seems to have faded. However, the use of Hybrid MOOCs, in which onground courses use MOOCs for some or all of their content, does have the potential to be disruptive, albeit on a smaller scale. This article will describe one Hybrid MOOC and the ways it could be used to disrupt individual pedagogy, and perhaps affect larger change as a result.



Chapter 23 Conducting Programmatic Assessments of Online Writing Instruction: CCCC’s OWI Principles in Practice............................................................................................................................................ 385 Nicki Litherland Baker, Ball State University, USA Elisabeth H. Buck, University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth, USA Individuals seeking to evaluate the efficacy of online writing instruction (OWI) within a larger writing program must consider the unique challenges and opportunities of this method of teaching. This chapter describes the use of the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s “A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction” (2013) as a framework for assessment. The discussion focuses on the methodological process that led to the implementation of these principles in a local programmatic study, as well as the results of this analysis. This chapter ultimately argues that the application of the CCCC’s principles can be particularly beneficial for administrators seeking an accessible heuristic for assessing fully online and hybrid writing courses. Compilation of References................................................................................................................ 406 About the Contributors..................................................................................................................... 448 Index.................................................................................................................................................... 453

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Foreword

THE HONEYMOON’S OVER, NOW WHAT? CONTEMPLATING THE NEXT-GENERATION MOOC History demonstrates that the advancement of technology is not a steady upward curve. There are flat periods, upwards spurts, and even reversals. —Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, Dune: House Atreides It’s 2:37 a.m. I’m sitting up in my bed, eyes wide open, the agitation winning out over the exhaustion. I told myself I wouldn’t let Dan get to me, and yet here we are. Instead of sleeping, I find myself busy mentally drafting a reply to a comment he had left in a MOOC discussion thread several hours ago, the latest in a barrage of stem-winders: why should he let participants who didn’t even grow up learning English review his writing? Why can’t the course instructors grade the assignments themselves? Why aren’t the instructors more responsive? Are they harvesting email addresses to sell to spammers? I had a feeling that Dan thrived on the attention he got from the instructors whenever he lobbed these little bomblets—as the old internet adage goes, don’t feed the proverbial trolls—but there was something about getting called out in a semi-public discussion forum that made it hard to resist. In academia and the popular press alike, we often talk about MOOCs in terms of how incredibly big they are (the “M” stands for “massive,” after all), but they can sometimes get very small, nit-picky, even petty. My engagement with Dan illustrates this phenomenon perfectly. And it’s during moments of frustration such as this that I find myself asking: What are we doing? Is it working? Is it even worth it? With reflection, I now realize that much of the anxiety I felt during that initial run of our MOOC had a good deal to do with the uncertainties of what the experience was supposed to be like. With the Rhetorical Composing MOOC, a ten week, rhetoric-themed course originally developed by a team of five OSU faculty members and two graduate students and first launched on Coursera in the Spring of 2013 1 we certainly had more than our share of essential support from our university—an instructional designer who regularly consulted with our team, ready access to studio space, the assistance of several tech specialists who helped with video production, file storage, and data management—but in some ways we were flying blind. Not only were MOOCs themselves fairly new, there were also not very many writing-based MOOC predecessors to look to when developing our course2. Consequently, and much like those old cartoons where the character lays out new lengths of track while on a forward-moving train, we learned important lessons along the way that we ended up implementing as the course played out in real time. For one, we realized fairly early on that something as simple as a change in the term of address we used—from “student” to “participant”—resulted in a less  

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regimented and reductive way of interacting with the group. The meaning of that switch signaled for the crowd, and for us, a different, more fluid dynamic between instructors and learners, and influenced their interactions and ours moving forward. Building off of that realization, we worked to reshape the course curriculum so it wasn’t too traditional and class-like, promoting robust backchannel chatter, offering optional gamified activities, and the like. Then there was the global reach of the MOOC platform; suddenly, issues such as which time zone to adopt for our assignment deadlines began to crop up (we opted for UTC, incidentally). At one point, we decided to relax and extend our once hard deadlines when some participants mentioned experiencing access issues (rolling brownouts in Egypt, for instance) that kept them from submitting their work on time. One of our biggest realizations was that we needed to pay greater attention to multi-language learners in our course design, since they comprised a significant percentage of total enrollees. We did this by offering MLL-specific discussion topics, producing video content about “World Englishes,” inviting guest Paul Kei Matsuda to do a live Q/A with the MOOC, and generally encouraging practices of generous reading during the peer review process. Of course, as I describe these decisions in hindsight, they all seem to make perfectly obvious sense, but when you’re propelled, as we were initially, by a series of tight rolling deadlines, the opportunity to sit and reflect on them is at best a luxury that we were unable to afford. Now that we have seen more than a decade of MOOCs, the initial period of improvisation and experimentation—the exhilaration and anxiety of flying blind—has passed. The MOOC fever that gripped higher education in the early teens has subsided, the enthusiasm for a liberatory, democratizing online education waning (a familiar narrative to those in the field of computers and writing), tempered by the realities of the costs associated with specialized labor, technical resources, and hosting, among other factors: according to a recent U.S. News and World Report article, institutions such as Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Illinois, and Arizona State University are already well underway to figuring out how best to monetize the MOOC, offering credit-bearing versions at prices that undercut their traditional course offerings—Georgia Tech even offers a low-cost masters in computer science comprised entirely of MOOCs (Haynie, 2015). That is why this particular collection poses such a necessary intervention in the next-phase development and implementation of writing-based MOOCs. Given the far-flung, multilingual, and large-scale diversity of MOOC learners, the central concern—how best to teach writing at scale in online spaces—is one that we as educators interested in and committed to openaccess distance education ought to be prepared to address. To that end, Writing and Composing in the Age of MOOCs raises critical questions concerning what MOOCs are (or aren’t), what they’re good for (or not), who they help (or hurt). The chapters throughout this collection address a wide swath of topics, every one of them a pressing issue for thinking through vital questions concerning what place MOOCs should occupy in the ecology of writing instruction. As Marilyn Cooper (1986) argued years ago, writing is shaped by the real-world social contexts in which it takes place—in this specific instance, the scale, scope, and reach afforded by the MOOC platform necessitates closer examination as well as experimentation (pg. 373). Among the issues taken up in this collection: classification, critique, ethics, accessibility, economics, identity politics, labor politics, assessment, the ever-changing dynamic between learner and instructor. All of these are, to be sure, complex and daunting topics, but each contributor to this volume tackles them in a uniformly thoughtful and cleareyed fashion that is at once critical without being defeatist, hopeful without being overly enthusiastic. I’ve long been a fan of the edited collection as an important scholarly vehicle, one capable of offering readers the immense value of multiple perspectives. Under the guidance and direction of a thoughtful editor or editors, they are curated sites of sustained and multi-faceted critical inquiry on a given topic; xix

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this collection is no different in that regard. Taken as a whole, Writing and Composing in the Age of MOOCs allows us to glimpse the next generation of MOOCs, leading us to create more effective, useful, inclusive online educational experiences for a global community of learners. Faced with a future plagued by rising tuition costs, shrinking government subsidies, and other budgetary crises in higher education, it is essential that we continue to develop alternative ways of reaching out to those who wish to learn—whoever they might be, wherever they might live, and for whatever reasons they might have for doing so. And if we as compositionists are not among the ones acting as agents of this change, we risk having it foisted upon us—and potential learners the world over—in ways that fail to achieve consequential outcomes for authentic learning. Ben McCorkle The Ohio State University, USA

REFERENCES Cooper, M. (1986). The ecology of writing. College English, 48(4), 364–375. doi:10.2307/377264 Haynie, D. (2015, May 27). Opportunity for credit a new hook for MOOCs. U.S. News and World Report. Retrieved from http://usnews.com

ENDNOTES 1



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The core team for the Rhetorical Composing MOOC consisted of Kay Halasek, Kaitlin Clinnin, Susan Delagrange, Scott DeWitt, Jennifer Michaels, Cynthia Selfe, and myself. Initially funded by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop writing-based MOOCs utilizing open educational resources, it was one of five such courses launched in 2013. Since that initial launch, a second iteration ran on Coursera in Autumn 2014, and a revised version recently ran in the Summer 2016 on Canvas. Prior to the launch of the Gates-funded MOOCs, Coursera offered one discipline-specific writingbased course: “Writing in the Sciences,” facilitated by Stanford’s Kristin Sainani.

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OUR ORIGIN STORY Our editorial collaboration on Handbook of Research on Writing and Composing in the Age of MOOCS represents our longstanding professional working relationship, from our initial meeting at Bowling Green State University, where Elizabeth was a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric and Writing and Kristine was a faculty member in the program. Both of us had a strong interest in technology and teacher training, which led to our first collaboration on a educational technology class in BGSU’s College of Education and Human Development and to the eventual completion of Liz’s 2004 dissertation “Transitioning into the Fully Online Writing Course: A Pilot Study.” In between, there were numerous other partnerships, including Liz’s role as an online mentor to faculty in English teaching online for the first time, a role resulting from a course Kris taught in the doctoral program, “Online Learning for English Educators,” and that ultimately enabled a co-authored article with Kris, Liz, another online mentor, and a new online instructor that foregrounded the benefits of discipline specific faculty development teams for online course migration (Alvarez, Blair, Monske, & Wolf, 2005). As our expertise grew, however, we began to realize that the challenges for both teachers and their students went far beyond the ability to successfully migrate face-to-face writing courses for online delivery. Indeed, it was important that we not reinscribe the early rhetorics of technology that took the utopic view that technology in the classroom was automatically an empowering process. As we questioned that empowerment, we turned to the work of Cynthia L. Selfe (1999), who has long encouraged technology users to become technology critics (Selfe & Selfe, 1994) and thus “pay attention” to the material and cultural conditions that empower some and disenfranchise others. For Selfe, this meant asking “Cui Bono?” or who benefits from what can be an uncritical rush to technologize. We decided to take up Selfe’s question in our own 2003 article, “Cui Bono?: Revisiting the Promises and Perils of Online Learning,” in which we established an historical and scholarly framework for the rise of online writing instruction. This framework, which included both utopic and critical uses of technology in writing studies, helped us articulate and interrogate the newest rhetorics of technology that grounded online learning within the language of both access and convenience for students and the rise of the course management system within the language of ease for instructors. Although the language of benefit was and is a pervasive one, we ultimately argued that while many students benefitted from online education, it was potentially at the expense of their instructors. Inevitably, in this early phase of online writing instruction, the academic labor of faculty was a secondary concern to institutions looking to online learning as the answer to enrollment and tuition issues in what was becoming a competitive and, in the case of institutions like the University of Phoenix, a profit-bearing educational business model. 

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FAST FORWARD In the thirteen years that have passed since we published our “Cui Bono?” article, our roles and responsibilities have evolved. In her career as a tenured professor, Liz has been responsible for the training of teaching assistants to develop and deliver online courses, developing a course similar to the one she took with Kris, and she has served as an Assistant Chair and Composition Director, leadership roles that have been tied to faculty development and faculty labor. Kris has served as both a Department Chair and now a Dean, roles that have involved online curriculum development and the challenge of simultaneously advocating for online learning and for the support for faculty who engage in this labor-intensive process. Despite this shift in our professional roles and responsibilities, and despite the changes in tools in the shift from a Web 1.0 culture of static, primarily text-based online learning spaces to Web 2.0 culture of dynamic, interactive, and multimodal online learning spaces, writing instruction is here to stay in one form or another. Then and now, it’s an equally complicated process to provide support and reward structures for faculty and to honor the goals of access and equity for students. As more and more institutions, writing programs, and composition faculty are charged to virtually serve the diverse learning needs of equally diverse online student populations, conversations about program and course-level best practices continue to dominant our professional scholarly networks across the discipline of writing studies. Rhetoric and composition specialists have responded to these conversations with groups such as the CCCC Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing Instruction, which developed a Position Statement (2013) on Principles and Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction and a series of best practices for a range of stakeholders involved in the development, delivery, and assessment of online courses. Clearly, the profession is taking a stronger stance to ensure that online writing instruction receives equal attention to face-to-face instruction in terms of institutional support, quality control, faculty training, and student needs. To that end, a 2015 collection from Parlor Press, Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction (DePew & Hewett, 2015), aligns best practices in online writing instruction with the CCCCs principles. Many online learning experts, including contributors to our collection such as Tiffany Bourelle, Beth L. Hewett, Sushil K. Oswal, Theresa Quezada, Scott Warnock, and Jessie C. Borgman, have more recently founded the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE). During this time, there have been range of both single-authored and edited collections attending to the topic, along with special issues of journals such as Computers and Composition, that have attended to both hybrid and fully online learning within writing studies. These include such titles as Jonathan Alexander’s and Marcia Dickson’s Role Play: Distance Learning and the Teaching of Writing (2006), Joyce Magnotto Neff’s and Carl Whithaus’ Writing Across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning (2008), and Scott Warnock’s Teaching Writing Online: How and Why (2009), and Daniel Ruefman and Abigail G. Scheg’s Applied Pedagogies: Strategies for Online Writing Instruction (2016). Equally significant are discussions contextualized around specific contexts for and applications of online learning, such as Lee Ann Kastman Breuch’s Virtual Peer Review: Teaching and Learning about Writing in Online Environments (2004), Kelli Cargile Cook’s and Keith Grant-Davie’s Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers (2005), and Beth Hewett’s The Online Writing Conference: A Guide for Teachers and Tutors (2010). The strengths of these and other treatments rest in their appeal to the targeted needs of specialized audiences, whether it be novice online writing instructors (Warnock), sub-disciplinary contexts that include professional and technical communication or writing centers (Cook/Grant-Davie & Hewett), or again, specific types of online writing practices such as peer review (Kastman Breuch). xxii

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Although rhetoric and composition has a longstanding investment in digitally-mediated writing pedagogies, particularly in the sub-discipline of computers and writing, discussions of fully online learning, even with the conversations we reference above, have until very recently been more disparate, often occurring in a broader range of interdisciplinary scholarship on andragogy, faculty development, and educational assessment. As a result, Writing and Composing in the Age of MOOCs seeks to join the online education discourse within Writing Studies based on our joint experiences as online instructors, as teacher training specialists, and as graduate educators concerned that future faculty in rhetoric and composition are sufficiently prepared for the rhetorics and realities of online learning in diverse institutional contexts. From our perspective, we simply need more discussion of these issues in our published scholarship and more case studies about the possibilities and constraints of fully online writing instruction in the larger context of higher education. Given this institutional context, it is impossible to ignore the technological and economical shifts that have led to the rise of the MOOC, or the Massive Open Online Course. 2012 was deemed the “Year of the MOOC” by the New York Times (Pappano, 2012) in light of so many institutions, primarily research intensive flagship schools embracing the MOOC model of a video talking head professor delivering content to 60,000 plus students with little or no interaction between teacher and students. These early online remediations of lecture-based face-to-face university courses are referred to as xmoocs, while cmoocs (both terms introduced by Canadian computer scientist and educational innovator Stephen Downes) are considered more “connectivist,” using a broader range of tools to foster instructor-student and student-student than the typical MOOC learning management platforms such as Coursera, EdX, or Udacity facilitate. Since then, with a number of notable models of success and failure, the debate over who benefits, “Cui Bono?” from this curricular model has been ongoing, with concerns about preserving curricular integrity, meaningful assessment, and ultimately student success as universities rush to technologize, or in this case “MOOC-i-cize” courses from computer science to philosophy, and of course, writing. Not unlike discussions of online learning, until very recently, disussions of MOOCs were equally disparate in writing studies, but often occurred in the form of commentaries from faculty who enrolled in courses to experiment with genre and modality. One notable exception to this trend is Steven Krause’s and Charles Lowe’s (2014) collection Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promise and Perils of Massive Online Courses. The collection’s title is an ironic one in that it echos our original “Cui Bono?” article from 13 years ago, yet it also powerfully suggests that as technology and delivery systems change, the types of questions we should be asking should remain constant, which is powerful rationale for Writing and Composing in the Age of MOOCs. In the Krause-Lowe collection, a number of contributors from institutions such as Duke University, Michigan State University, and the Ohio State University report the results of pilot composing and writing courses funded by the Gates Foundation in 2013. The Ohio State team’s (Halasek, et al., 2014) “A MOOC with a View: How MOOCs Encourage Us to Reexamine Pedagogical Doxa” recounts not only the new experience of collaboratively teaching OSU’s Rhetorical Composing MOOC but also how that experience challenged traditional narratives, and the assumptions behind them, of who, what, and how they were teaching not only in online environments but in face-to-face ones and the need to move away from narratives that position the role of teacher as a single individual and presume that everyone enrolled in a college course occupies the subject position of “student” with the same level of motivation for enrolling in a college writing course. Thus, they and other contributors to Invasion of the MOOCs advise against a one-size fits all model, and we are honored to have one of the OSU MOOC developers, Ben McCorkle, write the foreword to our collection. As with Krause and Lowe’s collection, Writing and Composing in the Age of MOOCs xxiii

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represents a series of diverse curricular models, insitutional contexts, and material conditions shaping the audiences, purposes, and methods for teaching writing online on both larger and smaller scales, from MOOC settings to the more standard class sizes found in the writing classrooms across the United States.

ORGANIZATION OF THE COLLECTION Even as we consider what a MOOC environment can teach us about other learning spaces, both virtual and face-to-face, several of our contributors rely on a range of criteria and variables to assess the relative value of writing MOOC spaces. For instance, Richard Colby’s Chapter 1, “Typology of MOOCs,” grounds the collection by reviewing a range of MOOC delivery models, questioning what those models offer rhetorically, technologically, and pedagogically. In this way, Colby and other contributors encourage us not to jump on the MOOC bandwagon but to question the motives and goals for migrating and potentially transforming writing courses in such spaces. Similarly, in Chapter 2, “Writing MOOEEs? Reconsidering MOOCs in Light of the OWI Principles,” Beth L. Hewett and Scott Warnock contend that MOOCs are less viable as a credit bearing “course” in the traditional sense; thus they call for better understanding of their educational benefits in terms of accessibility, stakeholder input, infrastructural challenges, preparation and training, and incentive and reward. Equally important is the need to situate MOOCs in diverse contexts; for Sushil K. Oswal this includes delivery of US-based MOOCs to international students. In Chapter 3, “MOOCS in the Global Context,” Oswal calls for further attention to the quality of content we deliver to global audiences, rather than focus solely on the benefits of delivery. Because we live in a global digital participatory culture, as Valerie Hill notes in Chapter 4, “Digital Citizens as Writers: New Literacies and New Responsibilities,” educators must attend to the information literacy of students to foster critical thinking, reading and writing across the varied genres, modalities, and tools of both social and academic online spaces in which students have become not just consumers but prosumers. Such literate processes must have an ethical component as well; indeed, in Chapter 5, “Principled/Digital: Composition’s ‘Ethics of Attunement’ and the Writing MOOC,” Matthew Overstreet argues for criteria that assesses writing MOOCs by their ability to foster a rhetorical sense of composing that is “attuned” to context, concluding that MOOC delivery models are less able to fulfill this imperative than smaller-scale counterparts. In addition to chapters that emphasize the larger question concerning the viability of writing MOOCs in general, many pieces in Writing and Composing in the Age of MOOCs also provide a detailed look at specific case studies or student populations. In Chapter 6, “Getting ‘Girly’ Online: The Case for Gendering Online Spaces,” Jen Almjeld questions the gender-neutrality of MOOCs, given that so many of them are housed in fields dominated by men, and she provides a useful example of two fully online courses in girlhood studies to stress the need for more diverse strategies to foster women’s participation in fully online learning environments. The cultural assumptions about who our online students are also drives Patricia Jenkins’ Chapter 7, “Arguing for Proactivity: Talking Points for Owning Accessibility in Online Writing Instruction.” Jenkins calls for establishing guidelines for online course development that meet the needs of students with disabilities so that we “walk the talk” about our goals of inclusivity and accessibility for all learners. Part of that inclusivity certainly involves understanding logistical needs of adult learners, as Teresa Quezada, Beth Brunk-Chavez, and Evelyn Posey contend in Chapter 8, “Connecting Writing Studies with Online Programs: UTEP’s Graduate Technical and Professional Writing Certificate Program.” The authors profile the transition of the program at the University of xxiv

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Texas, El Paso, to serve the region and beyond through migrating courses in ways that expanded the student recruitment pool and ultimately enhanced more consistent delivery through both scheduling and faculty development. Moreover, how we deliver courses in ways that meet students’ learning styles is a critical question in Chapter 9, Virginia Tucker Steffen’s “Contact and Interactivity in Televised Learning: 15 Years Later.” Tucker reports the results of a study comparing an interactive television course and an asynchronous online course, concluding that while online students expect and demand interactive learning opportunities, there remains a role for video-based delivery. Despite the emphasis on meeting students’ educational needs and expectations, a number of contributors question the motivations for online delivery and partnerships and the extent to which, as Krista Petrosino suggests in Chapter 10, “Developmental Writing and MOOCs: Reconsidering Access, Remediation, and Development in Large-Scale Online Writing Instruction,” MOOC-based learning may be a step in the right direction but for the wrong reasons, including the presumed financial gain at the expense of our discipline’s curricular values and practices. Tyler Branson echoes this concern in Chapter 11, “Problematic Partnerships: An Analysis of Three Composition MOOCs funded by the Gates Foundation,” in which he reviews the pilot projects at Duke University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Ohio State University. Branson asserts that despite the collaboration with external partners with competing ideologies about teaching and learning, such opportunities expand our expertise and influence cultural discussions about written literacy. Inevitably, these tensions between the how’s and why’s of online learning have led to questions about the role of writing program administrators and writing faculty in the planning process, something Jessie C. Borgman foregrounds in Chapter 12, “The Online Writing Program Administrator (OWPA): Maintaining a Brand in the Age of MOOCs.” Here, Borgman argues for WPAs to become experienced online educators prior to developing online curricula and supervising writing faculty teaching online courses. Borgman’s compelling argument is aligned with Jacob Babb’s contention in Chapter 13, “Reshaping Institution Mission: OWI and Writing Program Administration,” that “WPAs and writing instructors must participate with other stakeholders in that reshaping.” In overviewing his campus’ experiences matching online learning to regional access needs, Babb also emphasizes sustainable labor practices for faculty and other material conditions that enable and constrain OWI. These labor practices are often invisible and devalued, as Thomas Patrick Henry suggests in Chapter 14, “What’s a ‘Technician’ to Do?: Theorizing and Articulating MOOC Maintenance Concerns.” Henry relies upon a Marxist framework to argue for the role of faculty as workers and the MOOC as the machine that may ultimately replace them at worst or obscure their vital role in design and delivery of content. With discussions such as Laura Howard’s Chapter 15, “A (Critical) Distance: Contingent Labor, MOOCs, and Teaching Online,” the inevitable question becomes how to structure MOOCs and other forms of online writing instruction in ways that improve the material conditions of those who teach it, notably part-time faculty often victimized by the corporatization of higher education. In many ways, these questions connect back to our original concerns about who benefits and the need for balance between student and faculty needs. Thus several essays attend to the roles both groups play in these online settings. Jason Chew Kit Tham’s Chapter 16, “Audience, User, Producer: MOOCs as Activity Systems,” calls for an understanding of how students are both audience for and user of online spaces, necessitating user-centered instructional design strategies that address the concrete activities of the students than an idealized identity. Travis Webster and Rebecca Hallman Martini’s Chapter 17, “What Online Writing Spaces Afford Us in the Age of Campus Carry, ‘Wall-Building,’ and Orlando’s Pulse Tragedy,” advocate for a number of signature pedagogies in writing studies, such as letter writing xxv

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and journaling, to theorize through narrative the experience of sociopolitical moments, to foster writerly activist identities for students, and to maintain critical communication between students and teachers. Both Webster and Hallman Martini, along with Jennifer Stewart, combine empirical research with activity theory. Stewart’s Chapter 18, “Introduction Discussion Board Forums in Online Writing Courses are Essential: No, Really They Are,” similarly argues that student motivation and ultimately student success is influenced by both peer reciprocity and instructor modeling, strategies that should be a part of faculty training for both new and experienced faculty. Clearly, these strategies are part of any strong writing community, something Rebekah Shultz Colby researches in Chapter 19, “Using Online Writing Communities to Teach Writing MOOCs.” As Shultz Colby stresses, online writing communities teach each other the values of that community and how to writing effectively within that community; based on her research, she identifies three viable pedagogical strategies for fostering communities of practice in MOOC-based settings. The ongoing challenge for writing instructors is determining what practices can not only migrate but potentially transform the online writing classroom, and in the case of Chapter 20, Stephanie Odom and Leslie Lindsey’s “Hacking the Lecture: Transgressive Praxis and Presence Using Online Video,” video lectures counteract the traditional presentation of content for mastery and regurgitation. Rather, such video delivery can humanize the instructor by creating a sense of identity and presence. Our final set of essays focus on strategies for enhancing assessment in a range of online contexts; Tiffany Bourelle’s and Beth L. Hewett’s Chapter 21, “Training Instructors to Teach Multimodal Composition in Online Courses,” documents the role of eportfolios as a formative and summative tool for developing and scaffolding multimodal assignments, along with other strategies that ensure that composition’s current emphasis on multiliteracies in the face-to-face writing curriculum scales to online writing curricula as well. Chapter 22, Robert McEachern’s “Challenging Evaluation: The Complexity of Grading Writing in Hybrid MOOCS” explores the use of MOOCs as a way to create a blended classroom of face-to-face and online in both content and communication, assessing student’s efforts to balance both environments in ways that disrupt the concept of the classroom as an individualized, isolated academic space. And in Chapter 23, “Conducting Programmatic Assessments of Online Writing Instruction: CCCCs OWI Principles in Practice.” Nicki Litherland Baker and Elisabeth H. Buck use the CCCC Position Statement on Online Writing Instruction we reference earlier to guide best practice and overall online quality. They strongly encourage writing program administrators to see the OWI guidelines as a heuristic that informs faculty development and serves as an assessment framework.

CONCLUSION Regardless of individual focus, these diverse chapters in Handbook of Research on Writing and Composing in the Age of MOOCS indicate that the greatest impact on online learning in general and online writing instruction in particular can be described in one word: Change. From an institutional perspective, significant changes have occurred at a number of levels, including shifts in legislative funding models for higher education mandating that institutions develop a customer service model and market to a broader range of student populations whose career goals may not be met by traditional degree delivery modes. This also results in a change in enrollment management strategies, for just as the level of state support decreases, institutions often look to increase the numbers of tuition-paying students. Given the shifts in this population from traditional college-age students to more diverse markets that include international xxvi

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students and adult learners, we can no longer presume our physical brick and mortar writing environments are accessible to all students. But perhaps the greatest change is the shift to more open-access, multimodal learning environments across the disciplines that better accommodate 21st-century students, who in our current economic climate, demand an educational model that allows them to better balance academic, professional, and family responsibilities in ways that are both affordable, and bridge the gap between what students do with technology and what we do, or don’t do, with technology as academics. Many chapters support a broader range of curricular and technological formats that meet the diverse learning styles of these diverse learners, moving from more limited emphases on text-based learning systems to multimodal environments that integrate the verbal, the visual, the aural, and the kinesthetic through use of video, audio, and other media rich learning objects. These shifts not only mesh with scholarship in the field of writing studies that foregrounds an emphasis on multiliteracies (Selber, 2004; Selfe, 2007; Alexander & Rhodes, 2014) but also call the question about the cultural capital of a face-to-face education in a digital era that mandates more consistent accessibility of quality academic content online. As individual writing programs may debate the migration to online delivery in general and MOOCs in particular, another institution has already made that shift or soon will, to the detriment of enrollment, revenue, and ultimately relevance in a changing era of anytime-anywhere access to quality instruction, including writing instruction. Regardless of these changes, the chapters in Writing and Composing in the Age of MOOCS so clearly document that we should engage in the type of critical interrogation that Selfe has long advocated. We should also, as Selfe and other colleagues have done, experiment first-hand with multiple digital delivery formats, from course management systems, open access social media, to MOOCs. That our contributors take on these dual roles as users and critics will ensure that writing studies will continue to question of “Who Benefits?” or “Cui Bono?” from the development and delivery of online writing courses and programs. Elizabeth A. Monske Northern Michigan University, USA Kristine L. Blair Youngstown State University, USA

REFERENCES Alexander, J., & Dickson, M. (2006). Role play: Distance learning and the teaching of writing. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc. Alexander, J., & Rhodes, J. (2014). On multimodality. Urbana, IL: NCTE. Alvarez, D. M., Blair, K., Monske, E., & Wolf, A. (2005). Team models in online course development: A unit-specific approach. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 8(3), 176–186. Blair, K., & Monske, E. (2003). Cui bono? Revisiting the promises and perils of online learning. Computers and Composition, 20(4), 441–453. doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2003.08.016 Cargile-Cook, K., & Grant-Davie, K. (2005). Online education: Global questions, local answers. Amityville, NY: Baywood. xxvii

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Conference on College Composition and Communication. (2013). Position statement on principles and effective practices for online writing instruction. Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/cccc/resources/ positions/owiprinciples Halasek, K., McCorkle, B., Selfe, C. L., DeWitt, S. L., Delagrange, S., Michaels, J., & Clinnin, K. (2014). A MOOC with a view: How MOOCs encourage us to reexamine pedagogical doxa. In S. Krause & C. Lowe (Eds.), Invasion of the MOOCs: The promises and perils of massive online courses (pp. 156–167). Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Hewett, B. (2010). The online writing conference: A guide for teachers and tutors. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Hewett, B. L., & DePew, K. E. (2015). Foundational practices of online writing instruction. Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. Kastman Breuch, L. (2004). Virtual peer review: Teaching and learning about writing in online environments. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Krause, S., & Lowe, C. (2014). Invasion of the MOOCs: The promises and perils of massive online courses. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Monske, E. (2004). Transitioning into the fully online writing course: A pilot study. Bowling Green State University. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. (3146758) Neff, J. M., & Whithaus, C. (2008). Writing across distances & disciplines: Research and pedagogy in distributed learning. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pappano, L. (2012, November 12). The year of the MOOC. The New York Times, p. ED26. Ruefman, D., & Scheg, A. G. (2016). Applied pedagogies: Strategies for online writing instruction. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. doi:10.7330/9781607324850 Selber, S. A. (2004). Multiliteracies for a digital age. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Selfe, C. L. (1999). Technology and literacy in the twenty-first century: The importance of paying attention. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Selfe, C. L. (2007). Multimodal composition: Resources for teachers. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Selfe, C. L., & Selfe, R. J. (1994). The politics of the interface: Power and its exercise in electronic contact zones. College Composition and Communication, 45(4), 480–504. doi:10.2307/358761 Warnock, S. (2009). Teaching writing online: How and why. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

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Acknowledgment

The editors would like to acknowledge their long-standing collaboration over the years and are excited about the opportunity to share the chapters in this collection with others. Second, the editors would like to thank the authors who contributed their scholarship to this collection. Without their collaboration and expertise, we would not have been successful in compiling the variety of voices and perspectives on this topic. Many of these authors also participated as reviewers in providing extensive feedback for revision. Liz would like to thank her family and friends who supported her through this process. Kris would like to thank her husband, Kevin Williams, and her mother Angela Blair for their love and support. Elizabeth A. Monske Northern Michigan University, USA Kristine L. Blair Youngstown State University, USA



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Chapter 1

A Typology of MOOCS Richard Colby University of Denver, USA

ABSTRACT Writing instruction MOOCs up until this point have tended to follow what has become expected of a MOOC in that they convey content first and foremost, or they have attempted to translate a traditional classroom space into an online space. While there is nothing inherently wrong with such practices, this chapter argues that there are opportunities for us to rethink the possibilities of an online space for writing instruction by considering what the benefits and drawbacks of three current MOOC models while also proposing two more. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future MOOC iterations.

INTRODUCTION Massive Open Online Courses have generated a fair amount of both hype and critique. The narrative is familiar. As Steven Krause described in the 2014 epilogue to the edited collection Invasion of the MOOCs, in November 2012, Laura Pappano declared in The New York Times that it was the year of the MOOC, and by November 2013, MOOC guru and Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun in an interview with Fast Company stated, “I was realizing, we don’t educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product” (Chafkin, 2013). And just as quickly as a failed startup or disappointing Kickstarter campaign, MOOCs disruptive reign was over. Or was it. During that moment of promise and since, three notable composition MOOCs appeared: • • •

Georgia Tech (Coursera) First Year Composition 2.0. The Ohio State University (Coursera) Writing II: Rhetorical Composing. Duke University (Coursera) English Composition 1: Achieving Expertise.

At the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication, Karen Head, Rebecca Burnett, Kay Halasek, and Denise Comer spoke about their experiences designing and teaching these MOOCs, reflecting on how well (or not) each followed the CCCC position statement on online writing instruction DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-1718-4.ch001

Copyright © 2017, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

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Figure 1. A common model of writing instruction

(CCCC, 2013), as well as tweaks to work through the constraints of the Coursera software. These courses used a model of direct instruction usually through videos, followed by discussion, writing practice, then peer review and peer grading (see Figure 1). Many MOOCs convey content first and foremost, or, they have attempted to translate a traditional classroom space into an online space. While there is nothing inherently wrong with such practices, I argue that there are opportunities for us to rethink the possibilities of an online space for writing instruction by considering what the benefits and drawbacks of five MOOC models.

BACKGROUND Georgia Tech’s, Ohio State’s, and Duke’s MOOCs are reasonable examples of how to structure delivery of online writing instruction. However, were they “good” writing courses? I’m not going to claim these MOOCs are or aren’t “good” because for the last ten years, I have taught over sixty sections of writing over 10 week terms to a relatively small number of students in face-to-face writing classes, with fairly challenging and play-tested assignments, pedagogically responsive scaffolding, and a combination of peer and instructor review and evaluation, culminating in a reflective portfolio assessment, and I could not say with any certainty whether the outcomes of student learning and retention come next year would be better or worse than those from these MOOCs. We like to think it is better, but the evidence is rarely conclusive. As Edward White (1989) states, “there is no replicated design in existence for demonstrating that any writing instructional program in fact improves student writing, if we define writing in a sophisticated way” (p. 198). It is not for lack of trying, however. Many research methodologies have been enacted to get at what students learn about writing and how they learn it. Studies from the 1970s and 1980s looked at improvements in specific language features such t-units (Stewart, 1978) or errors (Maimon & Nodine, 1979), but these do not capture the “sophisticated ways” of writing that White (1989) refers to. In the 1990s, some longitudinal case studies of writers were conducted trying to capture the complexities of learning to write, such as Chiseri-Strater (1991)’s two case studies or Wolcott’s (1991) study of basic writers; however, these lack insight into instructional design beyond the individual cases and, frankly, case studies are

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always limited by various demand effects of the study—most notably, a monthly or quarterly interview asking a student to reflect on his or her writing through a series of prompts is not a “typical” experience for a student writer. Much more sophisticated longitudinal studies of writing have followed: Richard Haswell’s (2000) quantitative study of writing features towards workplace performance of 64 students showed improvements over four years, and Kathleen Blake Yancey, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak’s (20014) study of seven students with a very specific curriculum showed a more sophisticated transfer of rhetorical knowledge; however, Lee Ann Carroll’s (2002) study of 20 students through portfolios and interviews, and Nancy Sommers and Laura Saltz’s (2004) study of submitted writing and interviews from 65 students at Harvard show more complicated writing changes over four undergraduate years. As Sommers (2008) writes, “the big picture of undergraduate writing is hard to grasp because there are so many puzzling pieces that do not easily fit together into a seamless whole” (154). The idea of a MOOC, of teaching one to many or even the more progressive models I discuss later in this article, challenges not the outcome of the quality of student writing, but the assumption that the quality of our instruction is better than any a MOOC could offer, but our research is inconclusive in this. My interest in the three composition MOOCs was born out of curiosity. As such, I did not enroll in any of them simply because, at the onset, I wanted to see how they worked not with padded numbers of curious onlookers but through participation of those who were going to participate. I have followed, however, the conference presentations and articles that those who facilitated the MOOCs shared. I was interested in seeing what they came up with and how effective they would be given the mounting but sometimes conflicting evidence as to their effectiveness. However, in their completed states, as a potentially disruptive innovation, I was surprised that these courses seemed very similar to one another. Sure, there were some minor differences. I do not want to diminish the significant contributions that the Ohio State University team put into their peer reviewing platform, WEx: The Writers Exchange, to facilitate draft sharing and peer-to-peer feedback. The system allowed the MOOC participants to submit work “for anonymous review and rating by four readers, each of whom was given careful instruction about responding productively to authors and each of whom used a common rubric to structure their ratings” (Halasek et al., 2014, p. 159). Nor complain about the Analytics Engine that they deployed that allowed students to compare quantitative measures of their writing (reading ease, length, and ratings) with others (Halasek et al., 2014). What I mean in calling out their similarities is that each of the composition MOOCs are based on a model of direct instruction, writing, and peer review or peer grading. This is a fairly familiar activity system for a college writing course, writ large into a MOOC (and their designers recognize this). However, is a “familiar” means appropriate for these new online learning spaces? Furthermore, as a model of instruction, is it the only means of improving students’ performance and knowledge about writing? One notable misalignment embedded in my questions might be the classification itself. The “Massive” in MOOC actually constrains some means of instruction. Even though Bill Hart-Davidson in “Learning Many-to-Many” (2014) confirms that writing teachers have long understood how following a few-to-few model or one-to-one model results in better instruction, he goes on to say that, of the MOOCs he has seen, they “are still one-to-many affairs by and large with an occasional and poorly supported attempt at many-to-many in crowded, noisy, discussion forums that are not the main learning activity of the course” (p. 217). Picture the 32,000 students enrolled in Ohio State University’s Rhetorical Composing or even the 1,657 students who completed the first assignment in that course. Even if we separated them into “small” groups of 15 students, they would need 2,133 proctors, leaders, teachers, or facilitators to offer expert feedback. That is, assuming expert feedback is something to strive for. 3

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Counterintuitively, “openness” is an additional constraint to instruction. Halasek et al. (2014) describe of their Rhetorical Composing MOOC at Ohio State University that they had to revise course content when they saw that a majority of their students who signed up were not traditional college-aged students. Instead, they had an audience of diverse professions and backgrounds, most already with a bachelor’s degree or higher (72%). As rhetoricians, we routinely invoke the importance of audience in our writing and research, and admonish the student who says his or her essay is for “everyone” or a “general audience.” Yet, instructions and course content not just in Rhetorical Composing but in many MOOCs such as those at edX where the median age is 26 (edX, 2013), essentially need to be almost arhetorical, or at least, presented in the most general way. Even the “anonymous” peer reviews of these MOOCs suggests a model that, somehow, we are evaluating as objective readers and not a real audience who could and should be swayed by the writing that we are reading. “Openness” is also a constraint if we imagine the audience not only of the instructors designing these courses but of the students writing in these courses. The continued expansion of the internet has brought with it a proliferation of online communities. Although Joseph Harris (1989) long ago critiqued the use of community in composition when it is used as a destination or ideal of communal classroom interaction, I will maintain that communities as they exist on the internet are not idyllic or uniform as Harris might have worried about. But these communities of the wild are not the types we imagine or even desire in a writing classroom of 20 students much less 20,000 students. After all, an “open” community, as is commonly practiced on the open internet, would probably violate the civility clauses in most universities’ honor codes. Instead, “openness” in MOOCs is used only in its most limited sense, as the one-way, free material conduit from course to student. In other words, free of cost, not of thought. There are pedagogical constraints of “Online” and “Course” as well. For example, it is easy to imagine, if not expect, that the online identities of MOOC participants define how they are perceived. Much as we are surprised when the foul-mouthed raid leader in the game World of Warcraft turns out to be, in reality, a female primary school teacher from Iowa, or a senator (Narcisse, 2012), seeing MOOC participants as only the words on a screen can introduce all manner of cognitive biases that can limit what we expect or ask of them. And then there is the problem of “Course.” Online communities are educating to and from their participants every day, outside of the constraints of a 10 or 15 week term. And that says nothing of the millions of Youtube videos that show learning on demand and practical instructions on just about everything—with the notable exception of writing; as of the date of this publication, composition and rhetoric videos mostly suck. Given the constraints, and those constraints will remain even if we change the name from MOOC to something else as some have argued; and given the way that the familiar models of MOOC instruction do not seem to always mesh with best practices for writing instruction, my primary question is, what types of MOOCs are possible given the available means, whether rhetorical, technological, or pedagogical?

A TYPOLOGY My title is Typology of MOOCs. It is meant to be partly playful—an archeological dig through the digital detritus of a “dead” technology, or a literal studying of type to make sense of how MOOCs could or should work. But I also want to claim that each MOOC foregrounds distinct features that separate it from other MOOCs.

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With that in mind, I want to describe open online courses as fitting into one of five types. The first three types already have established labels, but I will discuss them nonetheless, and more importantly, step through what a writing course might look like if it considered further the available features of the technology. The next two types have not been labeled previously, but I want to do so now to highlight the distinctive features already practiced and yet different from the more common MOOCs. In describing and classifying these MOOCs, I will point out the primary instructional features of MOOCs as follows: • • • • • • •

Presentation: Delivery of information or data. Instruction: Specific directions for how to perform an action or function. Evaluation: A quantitative assessment of performance, retention, or application. Interaction: Dialogue, discussion, connection. Feedback: A qualitative assessment of performance. Practice: Application or performance of content. Participation: Active engagement with people or places.

xMOOC xMOOC is a term coined by Stephen Downes, MOOC advocate and researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, in opposition to other MOOCs. The x is for eXtended, as in the MOOC was an “extension of something else” (Downes, 2013). The term is most often applied to the earliest of open courses first offered by MIT and, since, hosted by portals such as Coursera, Udacity, and Harvard and MIT’s edX. What xMOOCs extend is really the reach of presentation of capital C “Content.” They reach massive audiences through the online presentation of course content. Current iterations of xMOOCs often include assessments in the form of tests and sometimes online conversations so as to provide a means of certification for the students enrolled in the course. When we hear about MOOCs, this is by far the most common type. The primary features of the course are presentation and evaluation (see Figure 2). Figure 2. xMOOC model of instruction

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Content is presented in video or text, and occasionally in interactive form (e.g., discussion forums), and this is usually followed by an evaluation of retention, or, in some rare cases, application. Current xMOOCs will often use automated scoring of multiple choice tests. However, the best xMOOCs should use user experience analytics and include adaptive pathing through content with assessments integrated into the videos or presentations. This would allow participants to skip ahead or, if they spent extra time on an assessment or video, they would be presented with more information or additional paths to further study. So what would a writing xMOOC look like? The real question would be, what would a writing course look like that did not emphasize performance? What I mean is that writing courses take as a given the performance of writing within the course. We might sometimes call on the lab or studio metaphor as an approach to the teaching of writing that emphasizes the classroom as a working space of experimentation, but we rarely imagine the course of pure presentation without practice and participation. The thing is, as a field, we know a lot about rhetoric and writing. We have capital C “content.” I do not mean what gets often conveyed in composition graduate courses which is actually about the teaching of writing; I mean, honest to goodness, how to persuade people to do things, how to read an unfamiliar genre, how to sequence an argument for greatest impact, and even how to use humor. And yet, as a discipline, we have yet to fully embrace our content in favor of a tradition of practice that perpetuates an imagined ideal of each writer finding his or her voice to create an organic argument all the while, as professionals, hypocritically writing standard letters of recommendation, proposals, research studies, grants, and other functional writing. To be clear, there is a MOOC type that can better capture best practices in instruction in writing performance, but an xMOOC is not it. However, for the 30 year-old financial analyst who wants to learn more about how writing works, this is the course for her. It just does not exist yet.

cMOOC After the MIT Opencourseware initiative, but before the year of the MOOC, Stephen Downes and George Siemens (2012) put together a MOOC based not on the presentation of information, but on the exchange of ideas and, more importantly, on understanding how connections are made with people and information in a dynamic information and technolgoical landscape. The “c” in cMOOC stands for connectivism. As Johnathon Haber (2013) describes it, “in a cMOOC environment the participants in the course act as both teachers and students, sharing information and engaging in a joint teaching and learning experience through intense interaction facilitated by technology.” The cMOOC is not a central repository of knowledge, but a primary conduit that connects a diverse network of learners where they are at. The cMOOC operates as a metaphor for how we learn. Stephen Downes (2013) describes it in a blog post: “What we wanted people to experience was that connectivism functions not as a cognitive theory – not as a theory about how ideas are created and transmitted – but as a theory describing how we live and grow together. We learn, in connectivism, not by acquiring knowledge as though it were so many bricks or puzzle pieces, but by becoming the sort of person we want to be.” The primary features of a cMOOC are interaction and practice (see Figure 3). The content of the course is generated or connected by the participants who then connect with additional content and participants, creating a network that manifests in an interconnected matrix of knowledge about the course focus. A writing cMOOC would capture one ideal of the composition class—that it can exist as a protopublic space. Rosa Eberly (1999) has argued that the writing teachers often strive to create a community and teach writers how to address audience, but what is absent in both the ideas of community and 6

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Figure 3. cMOOC model of instruction

audience is the fact that neither are presented in uncontested ways. Of course, this is for good reason. Students are often writing for an imagined audience because they are learning how to transition into new discourses; they do not have the experiences of existing in those communities yet. Furthermore, as I have previously mentioned, classroom communities are groupings of convenience more than true communities with activity systems that extend beyond the immediacy of the classroom space (Harris, 1989). What Eberly argues should be the ideal is a classroom that expects students to be one of many rather than many of one community. Considering students as in or counter to many publics encourages civic engagement and developing identities more fully—that “Publics as a term to replace readers or audiences or communities allows students to experience writing as wholly processual and as practiced within and for real groups of people who need their discourses” (Eberly, 1999, p. 175). The cMOOC encourages students to write from where they are at, whether Youtube, public forums, blogs, or social media, and connecting and sharing their writing within their familiar public spaces emphasizes what they already know about writing, but also, invites them into alternative publics of practice. Another version of the cMOOC is the Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC) that most recently hosted the Dialogues on Feminism and Technology course. As described on FemTechNet, a “DOCC

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recognizes and is built on the understanding that expertise is distributed throughout a network, among participants situated in diverse institutional contexts, within diverse material, geographic, and national settings, and who embody and perform diverse identities (as teachers, as students, as media-makers, as activists, as trainers, as members of various publics, for example)” (“what is a DOCC?”, 2016). In this course, nodal courses offered locally at 16 different universities participated on shared assignments and commented on 13 video interviews that looked at technology from a feminist perspective. Two notable assignments were a maker project, in which the students had to build something, and “Wikistorming” in which participants created and revised Wikipedia articles on and about women as well as interrogating the processes and gender bias of Wikipedia editing (“feminist wiki-storming,” 2016). Such assignments emphasize node to node to node relationships in a distributed learning and participation network that move beyond the immediate locus of course to student.

POOC The Participatory Open Online Course moves the subject and object of the activity system from internally focused to outwardly focused—they are designed around community engagement. The only two examples of POOCs are JustPublics@365’s Reimagining Scholarly Communication for the Public Good (2013) and Alex Miltsov’s Media@McGill’s The Participatory Condition (2013). These courses were only offered once, which is by far the most significant problem with many service learning and community engagement based projects: There’s always a limit to the goodwill of the community with regards to outsiders doing research, and a limit to the resources and availability of participants contributing new and vital work for the community partners. Furthermore, rhetorical exigence is often limited to specific topics at specific times that cannot be replicated beyond those moments. POOCs distinctive features are presentation, participation, practice, and feedback (see Figure 4). Activism and community engagement courses need to present ethical and responsible practices as the content of the course first and foremost in order to maintain some sustainability, as Ellen Cushman (2002) has argued. Students then participate in projects relevant to the communities, whether East Harlem in the case of JustPublics@365, or the Internet writ large in Media@McGill. Feedback in such courses should be public, which is to say that research, projects, writing produced should be evaluated Figure 4. pMOOC model of instruction

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by the community it is for and not by a teacher detached from that immediate activity system. One of the dilemmas faced by JustPublics@365 was in providing scholarly resources such as articles and videos freely to the community because many did not have access otherwise, and this required working with the CUNY librarians and community partners to secure permissions to release works (Smith-Cruz, Thistlethwaite, & Daniels, 2014). Because so many community-based projects involve writing and research tasks, composition as a discipline has had a strong history of community-based engagement and service learning. Many articles sharing research and best practices have been published in the past decade (see Johnson (2010) for a substantial review). While such work has continued to flourish, there is always a concern about saturation levels; for example, what happens when a course of 100, 1,000 or 20,000 are asked to participate in a community project, whether an online network such as a gaming forum or professional organization, or in a local community? Nevertheless, a writing POOC could be successful by collecting primary source data from multiple sites that would benefit from continued analysis and sharing of that data. One potential data source is the Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives (DALN). The archive consists of text, audio, and video interviews of “people of all ages, races, communities, backgrounds, and interests…about how — and in what circumstances — they read, write, and compose meaning, and how they learned to do so” (“DALN Home,” n.d.). Examples of scholarship of what is possible using the DALN are published in Stories that Speak to Us: Exhibits from the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (2013), and include everything from websites, to Prezis, to traditional PDF scholarship. A writing POOC could work with community partners to enrich the DALN while also providing opportunities to build community projects and initiatives from the collection. In fact, as a discipline, a writing studies POOC that operated more as a national or cross-campus initiative to collect data about writing practices that students might later draw upon, whether they were partners and participants in a POOC or in a traditional face-to-face class, could help contribute to a richer understanding of writing and rhetoric. To this point, I have offered three types of MOOCs as they are traditionally defined, but it is probably apparent that none looks like the three composition MOOCs I discussed previously. For these MOOCs, I want to offer new labels.

iMOOC No, this is not the newest MOOC model from Apple. What I am calling an iMOOC is not a delivery model for content, but a course that blends instruction with practice—a MOOC that privileges interactive feedback (see Figure 5). This is common practice, and actually best practice in a writing course that emphasizes writing performance. Writing iMOOCs would begin with some sort of instruction. Whatever the critique is of instruction, it is what separates a writing course from a course with writing. Instruction can come in the form of videos, but also discussions and examples about writing processes and practices. Of course, the best writing instruction looks at writing in practice and not as only fixed skills, as in current-traditionalism. Such dynamic and rhetorically responsive instruction should be followed by deliberate practice (Kellogg & Whiteford, 2009; Macnamara, Hambrick, and Oswald, 2014) and subsequently a feedback loop. As Kellogg & Whiteford describe it, “the term deliberate indicates that one must undertake the practice with an explicit goal of learning the skill and improving one’s 9

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Figure 5. iMOOC model of instruction

performance. Practice in the sense of putting in the time, but just going through the motions, is not enough” (p. 254). While other MOOC models maintain an assessment procedure, a defining feature of iMOOCs is that feedback leads to continued, deliberate practice and more feedback. While I have covered features of this model earlier when I talked about Ohio State, Georgia Tech and Duke’s composition MOOCs, I want to suggest ways that we can enrich iMOOCs by emphasizing its defining feature—the feedback loop. One such way is to emphasize the participants’ writing. OSU’s Rhetorical Composing’s second assignment asked students to synthesize their peers’ first literacy autobiography assignments, which is one useful way to do this—i.e., using the text as content. However, students analyzing and evaluating each others’ works is also a beneficial possibility. In fact, one study found a “strong correlation between the average of the peer-graded marks and the mark of the professor (r(50) = 0.39, p < .01)” (Kaplan & Bornet, 2014). The immediate question becomes, how could this be accomplished with 20,000 or even 1,000 works? This leads me to suggest that we reconsider the traditional ways of group composition that works in face-to-face classrooms. Instead, rather than making teams from the top, or encouraging self-selected teams, both options that cannot account for MOOC attrition rates, we can learn from the way online communities work and award higher status to engaged participants. For example, in many online forums, high volume posters earn higher status with more privileges (e.g., gold or platinum statuses). In a MOOC, high volume participation could reward participants with elevated status and more responsibility, that in turn, could give them access to course facilitators and course building options. This would also allow engaged feedback as participants could feel a greater sense of autonomy. Furthermore, this could address the critique that Steven Krause described after his participation in the Duke MOOC—that there was “no way with Coursera’s system to have any exchange with…peer reviewers (because it’s all anonymous) and there is no way to evaluate the evaluation” (Krause, 2013). A system of evaluated and open feedback would encourage active and accountable participation.

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MOOD Another MOOC type without a label is what I call the MOOD. The MOOD would be an open online Domain of writing and writing instruction (see Figure 6). One model, of course, has been in existence since 1994: the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL). Joe Moxley’s Writing Commons at the University of South Florida has added another domain of writing instruction, focusing more on applied research and genre approaches, and importantly, adding the possibility of crowdsourcing new and revised content. Although each of these is considered an Online Educational Resource (OER), they are more responsive than one might assume from a “resource” website. Writing Commons actively solicits submissions to the site, and in 2013, they had 1,277,591 visitors to their site (About, n.d.). They have updated the site with new videos and text to better respond to the need of providing a resource for writers in many academic disciplines. The Purdue OWL has also changed to reflect new content, including adding video content in recent years. However, what makes Purdue OWL different is that they have writing tutors who answer short writing related queries at the OWL Mail Tutors page. The Purdue OWL had 248 million hits and its tutors answer 2,400 writing related emails in 2013 (OWL Fact Sheet, 2015) While Writing Commons invites submissions for inclusion, the Purdue OWL does not; even so, Writing Commons suffers from a lack of focus in some areas, and a lack of rhetorical awareness in others (Colby, 2013). Both are imperfect examples to describe the MOOD model, but they are trend-setting models even if one is over twenty years old. What each shows is that domains of writing instruction are sustainable when they are actively revised and responsive. The concept of a MOOD is to truly disrupt the notion that somehow five, ten, or fifteen weeks of an academic term is the space of learning to write. Our students know this intuitively as they search Youtube for videos on how to overcome a boss battle in World of Warcraft or learn a new dance move not when September rolls around, but now and on demand. Yet, school still compartmentalizes learning in very structured ways, both chronologically and disciplinarily. As writing teachers, we need to remember that our expertise and service can extend beyond those constraints, and thriving and active domains of writing instruction can appeal to those who want to improve their academic writing. Figure 6. MOOD model of instruction

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More fully realized MOODs would invite more one-to-one or one-to-few interactions with additions of persistent forums for sharing writing and discussion. Active, public forums that would open up opportunities to ask questions and discuss writing would add to the impact of these domains. In such an ideal, I do not want to discount the time intensive tasks of forum management, but it would be worth an experiment at least.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS The models that I have described here are often inherited and evolutionary adaptations of online spaces to deliver familiar experiences. If those experiences are designed by teachers, what is familiar is often something that might not work in the new age of networked communications. When those choices are made by information architects to facilitate the most efficient “delivery” of “content” then these models turn into something entirely different. The MOOC of the future will not, and probably should not, look as they do today, but if teachers become frustrated with the technology, and content delivery mechanisms become more prevalent, we might see some of the more rhetorically and pedagogically responsive possibilities disappear as we are already seeing in the limited adaptation of POOCs and xMOOCs. We know that online communities and ecologies (Eyman, 2015) often invite new, network rhetorics, and that transmedia navigation (Jenkins, 2009) and multimodal literacies are required for contemporary communication. For one, we have seen significant changes in digital literacy practices, or the “effective use of symbolic systems, visual representations of language, and digital object manipulation” (Eyman, 2015, p. 47). If we want the teaching of writing to continue to be responsive and relevant, we need to continue to integrate these literacies within our courses, whether in a classroom or online. As we consider the next step for online learning environments, I want to end by arguing that the next evolution of MOOCs should focus on being social, visual, and participatory. The social. Information and communication channels that might previously have been delineated, if more limited, have become more complex, asking of their participants to become more rhetorically and technologically savvy. Social media has saturated information channels to the point that participation can be time intensive. In a survey from 2014, U.S. users spent, on average, 42.1 minutes on Facebook, 34.2 minutes on Tumblr, 21.2 minutes on Instagram, 20.8 minutes on Pinterest, and 17.1 minutes on Twitter per day (eMarketer, 2014). The next iteration of the MOOC should inhabit social channels. In addition to these popular social media channels, online learning domains should have more public forum spaces. While the writing tutors at the Purdue OWL have been answering individual questions, a public forum where more can read and ask such questions will provide opportunities for richer discussions. The visual. It is well known that we are seeing significant shifts in how alphabetic text is used. Where alphabetic instructions or documentation used to be the norm, video and visual representations have become where people turn now for assistance. With the ease of shooting quality video conveniently on most smartphones coupled with the intuitive and “free” hosting of those videos on Youtube and Vimeo, learning-on-demand videos have become popular. One entire ecosystem that did not even exist a decade ago is the Let’s Play community (2007) and Twitch.tv (2011) in which gamers entertain viewers by voicing commentary while they play through a game. Online writing instruction should use video and visual techniques to improve instruction and show writing activities. Let us imagine a writing process equivalent of a Let’s Play video in which we see student or professional writers offering commentary while they write. We also might imagine interactive videos, easily accomplished with the annotation 12

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feature in Youtube, to include input from the user so that videos provide options for rhetorical choice rather than a single outcome. The Participatory. The social domain, whether Twitter, Facebook, or online forums can only go so far in providing rhetorical exigencies for discussion and communication. If writing instruction is to remain relevant in our academic, professional, and civic lives, we need to work more with communities outside our physical spaces. Collecting and sharing data about writing practices, working with community partners on writing and research projects, and moving our energies into civic action can enliven instruction and our relevance.

CONCLUSION The rhetorical versatility required to navigate, participate, and produce amid technological changes challenges teachers to recognize not only the need of these literacies but to reimagine possibilities for teaching within and through these literacies. What we should avoid doing is discounting any mode or burying our head in the sand because a technological evolution looks unfamiliar to us. The teaching of writing has a history born out of necessity of integrating technological changes into the classroom. We should strive to make online instruction reflect what we value rather than have the values of others imposed upon us.

REFERENCES About. (n.d.). Writing Commons. Retrieved from http://writingcommons.org/about Burnett, R., Head, K., Comer, D., Halasek, K., & Moxley, J. (2014, March 20). Composition MOOCs and Pedagogy by the Thousands: Reflections on Four Open Education Innovations. Paper presented at the Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Indianapolis, IN. Carroll, L. A. (2002). Rehearsing new roles. How College Students Develop as Writers. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP. CCCC. (2013, March). A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction (OWI). Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/owiprinciples Chafkin, M. (2013, November 14). Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather of Free Online Education, Changes Course. Fast Company. Retrieved from http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastianthrun-uphill-climb Chiseri-Strater. (1991). Academic literacies: The public and private discourse of university students. Heinemann. Colby, R. (2013). Review essay: In the internet age, who needs textbooks? WPA: Writing Program Administration, 37(1), 223–230. Comer, D. (2014). English Composition I: Achieving Expertise (Duke University). Coursera. Retrieved from https://www.coursera.org/course/composition

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Cushman, E. (2002). Sustainable service learning programs. College Composition and Communication, 64(1), 40–65. doi:10.2307/1512101 DALN Home. (n.d.) Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. Retrieved from http://daln.osu.edu/ Delagrange, S., DeWitt, S. L., Halasek, K., McCorkle, B., & Selfe, C. (n.d.). Writing II: Rhetorical Composing (The Ohio State University). Coursera. Retrieved from https://www.coursera.org/course/writing2 Downes, S. (2012, Jan. 6). Creating the Connectivist Course. Stephen’s Web. Retrieved from http://www. downes.ca/post/57750 Downes, S. (2013, April 9). What the ‘x’ in ‘xMOOC’ stands for. Google Plus [post]. Retrieved from https://plus.google.com/+StephenDownes/posts/LEwaKxL2MaM Eberly, R. A. (1999). From writers, audiences, and communities to publics: Writing classrooms as protopublic spaces. Rhetoric Review, 18(1), 165–178. doi:10.1080/07350199909359262 edX. (2013). A better future edX. Media kit. Retrieved from https://www.edx.org/sites/default/files/ mediakit/image/thumb/media_kit10.23.pdf eMarketer. (2014, 18 Nov). Younger Users Spend More Daily Time on Social Networks. EMarketer. Retrieved from http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Younger-Users-Spend-More-Daily-Time-on-SocialNetworks/1011592 Eyman, D. (2015). Digital rhetoric: Theory method, practice. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. doi:10.3998/dh.13030181.0001.001 FAQs. (n.d.). Writing Commons. Retrieved from http://writingcommons.org/about/faq-s Feminist Wiki-Storming. (2016). FEMTECHNET. Retrieved from http://femtechnet.org/docc/feministwiki-storming/ Haber, J. (2013, Apr. 29). XMOOC vs. CMOOC - MOOC Pedagogy - Degree of Freedom. Degree of Freedom. Retrieved from http://degreeoffreedom.org/xmooc-vs-cmooc/ Halasek, K., McCorkle, B., Selfe, C. L., DeWitt, S. L., Delagrange, S., Michaels, J., & Clinnin, K. (2014). A MOOC with a View: How MOOCs Encourage Us to Reexamine Pedagogical Doxa. In S. D. Krause & C. Lowe (Eds.), Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promise and Perils of Massive Open Online Courses (pp. 156–166). Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Harris, J. (1989). The idea of community in the study of writing. College Composition and Communication, 40(1), 11–22. doi:10.2307/358177 Hart-Davidson, B. (2014). Learning many-to-many: The best case for writing in digital environments. In S. D. Krause & C. Lowe (Eds.), Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promise and Perils of Massive Open Online Courses (pp. 212–222). Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Haswell, R. H. (2000). Documenting Improvement in College Writing A Longitudinal Approach. Written Communication, 17(3), 307–352. doi:10.1177/0741088300017003001

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Head, K. (2014). First-Year Composition 2.0 (Georgia Institute of Technology). Coursera. Retrieved from https://www.coursera.org/course/gtcomp Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Johnson, K. G. (2010, Oct). Service Learning in First-Year Composition: Programmatic Approaches and Measurable Effects. WPA-CompPile Research Bibliographies, No. 10. Council of Writing Program Administrators. Retrieved from http://comppile.org/wpa/bibliographies/Bib10/Johnson.pdf Kaplan, F., and Bornet, C. (2014). A Preparatory Analysis of Peer-Grading for a Digital Humanities MOOC. Digital Humanities 2014: Book of Abstracts. No. EPFL-CONF-200911. Kellogg, R. T., & Whiteford, A. P. (2009). Training advanced writing skills: The case for deliberate practice. Educational Psychologist, 44(4), 250–266. doi:10.1080/00461520903213600 Krause, S. D. (2013, June 21). The end of the Duke composition MOOC: again, what did we learn here? Retrieved from http://stevendkrause.com/2013/06/21/the-end-of-the-duke-composition-mooc-againwhat-did-we-learn-here/ Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions A Meta-Analysis. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1608–1618. doi:10.1177/0956797614535810 PMID:24986855 Maimon, E. P., & Nodine, B. F. (1979). Measuring syntactic growth: Errors and expectations in sentencecombining practice with college freshmen. Research in the Teaching of English, 12(3), 233–244. Narcisse, E. (2012, November 7). For the Horde: She Plays World Of Warcraft AND She Won Her State Senate Race. Kotaku. Retrieved from http://kotaku.com/5958535/for-the-horde-she-plays-worldof-warcraft-and-she-won-her-state-senate-race Owl Fact Sheet. (2015, March 3). Online Writing Lab. Retrieved from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/ owl/resource/612/1/ Pappano, L. (2012, Nov. 3). The Year of the MOOC. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www. nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace. html Siemens, G. (2004, December 12). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. elearnspace. Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm Smith-Cruz, S., Thistlethwaite, P., & Daniels, J. (2014). Open scholarship for open education: Building the JustPublics@ 365 POOC. Journal of Library Innovation, 5(2). Sommers, N. (2008). The call of research: A longitudinal view of writing development. College Composition and Communication, 60(1), 152–164. Sommers, N., & Saltz, L. (2004). The novice as expert: Writing the freshman year. College Composition and Communication, 56(1), 124–149. doi:10.2307/4140684

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Stewart, M. F. (1978). Syntactic maturity from high school to university: A first look. Research in the Teaching of English, 12(1), 37–46. Ulman, H. L., DeWitt, S. L., & Selfe, C. L. (Eds.). (2013). Stories that Speak to Us: Exhibits from the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press. Retrieved from http://ccdigitalpress.org/stories/ What Is a DOCC? (2016). FEMTECHNET. Retrieved from http://femtechnet.org/docc/ White, E. M. (1989). Developing successful college writing programs. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS cMOOC: The “c” in cMOOC stands for connectivism. As Haber (2013) describes it, “in a cMOOC environment the participants in the course act as both teachers and students, sharing information and engaging in a joint teaching and learning experience through intense interaction facilitated by technology.” The cMOOC is not a central repository of knowledge, but a primary conduit that connects a diverse network of learners. DOCC: Distributed Open Collaborative Course that connects other courses, locally and online, to a central node for conversation and action. iMOOC: An “interactive” MOOC that blends instruction with practice and persistent feedback loops. MOOD: Open online Domain of writing and writing instruction that serves as a general resource but that is also responsive to input from its users. POOC: The Participatory Open Online Course moves the subject and object of the activity system from MOOC site to student to community engagement. xMOOC: The x is for eXtended course, or classroom extended online. The term is often applied to the earliest of open courses. They reach massive audiences through the online presentation of course content.

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Chapter 2

Writing MOOEEs?

Reconsidering MOOCs in Light of the OWI Principles Beth L. Hewett Defend and Publish, LLC, USA Scott Warnock Drexel University, USA

ABSTRACT In this chapter, the authors consider the conundrum of a writing MOOC, which is both a counter-traditional type of college “course” and an experimental online venue that recently has gained, lost, and regained traction. Using the CCCC OWI Principles and current scholarship as grounding, the authors argue that MOOCs are too big and technologically unwieldy to be considered a traditional, credit-bearing writing course and that they are problematic even when the credit issue is removed from the equation. Issues include inherent accessibility, responsibilities to stakeholders, infrastructure challenges, needs for educator preparation and training, and compensation. The authors then reimagine the writing MOOC as a MOOEE, or massive open online educational experience, to take advantage of its relative benefits. Nonetheless, even reconceiving a MOOC as a MOOEE does not solve all of its problems when held against educational principles that address both learning and material conditions.

INTRODUCTION Through all the crackling conversations in education publications and forums about massive open online courses (MOOCs), the particulars of online instruction or distance learning are still not differentiated enough from online writing instruction (OWI). Generally speaking, online instruction encompasses teaching online in any discipline, but OWI is unlike most online disciplinary instruction in two straightforward ways:

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-1718-4.ch002

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1. Online writing courses are not content-driven, and 2. They always require writing. Although writing courses can have what we might think of as disciplinary content—such as the writing studies approaches Downs and Wardle (2007) described—they are skill-focused in that they are based on learning about, composing, and sharing writing. Writing must be practiced to be learned or, as Yancey (2015) articulated, “Learning to write effectively requires different kinds of practice, time, and effort” (p. 64). In high-stakes settings like credit-bearing college courses, a student’s practice writing needs an instructor’s responsive feedback and guidance. Writing courses, including online writing courses (OWCs), are—or should be—about composing, the primary activity that occurs in them. Because such composing occurs in the context of potential readers, a writing course necessarily is about writers interacting with each other and the instructor. While teaching about writing occurs in any writing course, the writing itself—alphabetic text and multimodal compositions alike—is the main focus. In online settings particularly, that instruction happens through and with writing. Anecdotally speaking, OWI materials most often are delivered in textual form. The student’s writing—also usually text-based—needs to be read; teachers and peers typically offer feedback using text with occasional digital voice instruction. This basic nature of writing-as-communication for a genuine reader-as-audience is the particular, peculiar flavor differentiating writing courses from most other college courses. The added nature of writing-as-teaching is OWI’s general modus operandi and its most challenging element. In both cases, the writing course builds as it proceeds, and the course texts emerge as students write and rewrite because students create those texts—hence, the course itself—over time. This crucial distinction between general online instruction and OWI represents a challenge for compositionists. In that context, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing Instruction (2013) published A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction, which identifies and describes core educational principles and example effective practices for teaching postsecondary writing online. The statement’s practical purpose is to support writing program administrators (WPAs), teachers, and tutors as they administer, design, and teach OWCs or tutor online writing students, and as they communicate with others about them. In this chapter, we consider the conundrum of a writing MOOC, which is both a counter-traditional type of college “course” and an experimental online venue that has gained, lost, and regained traction in a few short years. Using the OWI Principles and current scholarship as grounding, we argue that MOOCs are too big and technologically unwieldy to be considered traditional, credit-bearing writing courses. Credit issues aside, problems with these courses include inherent accessibility, responsibilities to stakeholders, infrastructure challenges, educator training, and compensation. We then reimagine the writing MOOC as a MOOEE, or massive open online educational experience, to take advantage of its relative benefits. Nonetheless, even reconceiving a MOOC as a MOOEE does not solve all of its problems when held against educational principles that address both online composition learning and material conditions. Minimally, we believe online writing students still need instructors to help them improve as writers, an opinion grounded in the principle-centered OWI Position Statement. The online education landscape continues to groan with tectonic shifts and changes. Some see these rumbles as harbingers of destructive eruptions. But this geological metaphor shifts from impending disaster to regeneration if educators reframe these changes as being driven by mutable processes. This chapter envisions changing writing MOOCs into MOOEEs to improve their educational potential. 18

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THE OWI PRINCIPLES We were co-chairs of the OWI Committee when the OWI Position Statement was written and the OWI Principles articulated. Our committee consisted of composition and rhetoric specialists, technorhetoricians, and technical writing experts from two- and four-year private, state, and for-profit postsecondary institutions. The committee’s more than six years of research included an annotated bibliography, college campus site visits, two national surveys of hybrid and fully online OWI teachers and WPAs, interviews with an expert/stakeholder panel, and discussions with OWI professionals who attended our CCCC presentations, special interest group meetings, and workshops (Hewett & DePew, 2015; Hewett, 2015a). These research efforts culminated in the OWI Position Statement, which identified these 15 core OWI Principles—intended to be more descriptive than prescriptive—and accompanying example effective practices:

Overarching Principle OWI Principle 1: Online writing instruction should be universally inclusive and accessible.

Instructional Principles OWI Principle 2: An online writing course should focus on writing and not on technology orientation or teaching students how to use learning and other technologies. OWI Principle 3: Appropriate composition teaching/learning strategies should be developed for the unique features of the online instructional environment. OWI Principle 4: Appropriate onsite composition theories, pedagogies, and strategies should be migrated and adapted to the online instructional environment. OWI Principle 5: Online writing teachers should retain reasonable control over their own content and/ or techniques for conveying, teaching, and assessing their students’ writing in their OWCs. OWI Principle 6: Alternative, self-paced, or experimental OWI models should be subject to the same principles of pedagogical soundness, teacher/designer preparation, and oversight detailed in this document.

Faculty Principles OWI Principle 7: Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) for OWI programs and their online writing teachers should receive appropriate OWI-focused training, professional development, and assessment for evaluation and promotion purposes. OWI Principle 8: Online writing teachers should receive fair and equitable compensation for their work. OWI Principle 9: OWCs should be capped responsibly at 20 students per course with 15 being a preferable number.

Institutional Principles OWI Principle 10: Students should be prepared by the institution and their teachers for the unique technological and pedagogical components of OWI. 19

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OWI Principle 11: Online writing teachers and their institutions should develop personalized and interpersonal online communities to foster student success. OWI Principle 12: Institutions should foster teacher satisfaction in online writing courses as rigorously as they do for student and programmatic success. OWI Principle 13: OWI students should be provided support components through online/digital media as a primary resource; they should have access to onsite support components as a secondary set of resources. OWI Principle 14: Online writing lab administrators and tutors should undergo selection, training, and ongoing professional development activities that match the environment in which they will work.

Research and Exploration OWI Principle 15: OWI/OWL administrators and teachers/tutors should be committed to ongoing research into their programs and courses as well as the very principles in this document. The first OWI Principle concerns inclusion and access, a focus badly needed in rhetoric and composition. Per the Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), access is a moral and legal imperative, one to which many pay too little attention unless compelled by students’ disclosure statements to offices of disabilities or student services (Hewett, 2015a). Our attention to access was timely. The same year, the “Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age” (2013) also was published. In July 2015, a groundbreaking institute on access and digital publishing was held at West Virginia University. OWI Principle 1 insists that whether or not educators know that individuals have special needs, online learning must welcome everyone, including students and teachers with physical and learning challenges, multilingual speakers, and those with socioeconomic disadvantages. Access needs are even broader because most students and teachers are new to technologies for learning, rather than social, purposes. They are even less familiar with learning writing in primarily text-based, online settings (Hewett, 2015b). Beginning with accessibility is proactive, not retroactive. Placing inclusivity and accessibility up front requires considering every OWI Principle in a new context, fundamentally changing how educator’s conceive of and implement OWI. The other 14 OWI Principles address instructional, faculty, and institutional matters, as well as a commitment to OWI research. Although we believe these OWI Principles are solidly grounded, educators should use nuanced reasoning to adapt them to particular situations. Additionally, other principles may need to be developed. Because this position statement is designed to be organic, the OWI Committee will review and revise it periodically to account for new OWI scholarship, the changing realities of postsecondary education, and technological development. Practically, teachers, administrators, and other stakeholders can apply the OWI Principles to their specific circumstances to develop actions, policies, and approaches that influence the material conditions of OWI. Similarly, teachers and administrators can use the OWI Principles to develop supported arguments about how they can respond to and/or engage OWI initiatives with students’ and teachers’ needs in mind. Writing MOOCs are an example of how having such guidelines helps parse the challenges and benefits of teaching with uncertain technology and practices.

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ANALYZING MOOCS AS EXPERIMENTAL OWI As the OWI Position Statement was being written, MOOCs exploded onto the higher education scene. Many positive and negative things have been said about MOOCs, even among their adherents. For example, Downes (2010), a MOOC originator, said on his Website: “This to me [sic] is a society where knowledge and learning are public goods, freely created and shared, not hoarded or withheld in order to extract wealth or influence”; he said these words to Thun, founder of the MOOC provider Udacity, who eventually said of MOOCs, “We have a lousy product.” New technologies and ways of thinking about online education naturally lead to untried educational forms. In response to the excitement and skepticism that such forms can engender, OWI Principle 6 calls for experimental OWI models to adhere to the OWI Position Statement’s educational principles. OWI Principle 6 specifically addresses technology and digital educational practices that build momentum without sufficient review and scrutiny before adoption. If an institution were asked to create a writing MOOC, for example, one might use OWI Principle 6 to filter questions about whether and how to do so. In deploying alternative approaches to OWI, it is important to ground the writing pedagogy in scholarly research, carefully conceived pilot programs, and both new and already existing effective OWI practices, many of which were first developed in onsite composition settings. Such a reasoned approach helps protect against irresponsible pedagogies and the poor teacher preparation that may accompany them. Given the experimental nature of MOOCs for OWI, we decided to explore them with the OWI Principles as a critical framework, which the following discussion demonstrates. That analysis revealed several areas where MOOCs fail to satisfy certain basic concerns. In this section, we argue that as college writing courses, MOOCs have specific, potentially unresolvable problems that necessitate a rethinking of their premise and structure.

Access First Following the OWI Position Statement and its overarching principle regarding inclusion and access, access is a core problem of writing MOOCs. Specifically, students and teachers need adequate access to each other and technology: such access is crucial to teaching and learning writing. The “M” in MOOC implies inclusion and access; theoretically, its massiveness means all desiring students can enter it. Yet, massiveness simultaneously denies the intimacy of access to one’s teacher. Although we address the conundrum of teacher interaction in a massive writing instructional experience below, we acknowledge here that when writing is taught, the huge numbers implied by a MOOC significantly narrows the potential for necessary individual, one-to-one interactions with experts—teachers—in writing. In principle, anyone may have initial access to a MOOC, yet in practice, access to the writing teacher is eliminated—the notion of a writing course is changed fundamentally. That first “O” in MOOC represents openness. Because MOOCs are open to anyone without fees (although certification fees may be involved), they appear to meet a core access qualification: no prohibitive cost. Yet, MOOC openness is accomplished through two means, each with its own issues. First, people who cannot afford traditional college courses can enroll in a MOOC, but that does not mean they can access the course technologically. Second, people must have not just online technology but the proper technology to participate. Internet access can be unreliable for students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged; live in rural, urban, Native American reservation, and incarcerated settings; and are in the military, as Gos (2015) discussed. Furthermore, MOOCs may have either asynchronous 21

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and synchronous interactions or both, but students still need appropriate technology to participate fully. For example, because some students use mobile devices to access OWCs, a MOOC would need to be tested for mobile technology access, as OWI Effective Practice 1.6 indicates. Rodrigo (2015) suggested that such access minimally means “critically strategiz[ing] mobile learning” (p. 497). More traditional OWI courses may not yet address this guideline either, but a particular need exists with writing MOOCs because their openness beckons students without college acculturation and thus unsupported in their interactions with typical postsecondary course participation requirements. MOOC access also means that course technology has been vetted for accessibility per the ADA1; as Effective Practice 1.5 suggests, such accessibility and inclusivity should be validated “through an external evaluation . . . in keeping with the guidelines set by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)” (OWI Committee, 2013, p. 10). For example, oral lectures and voice-based materials should be transcribed into text, per Effective Practice 1.10 (p. 10) to help hearing- and vision-impaired students, those with audio-processing disabilities, and those who simply need multiple learning media. Materials like slides and PDFs must be fully accessible, meaning that they must be created and saved so screen readers can read them in a text-to-voice process, and all images require text-based captions. Information technology (IT) support people must create materials as well as train MOOC teachers (and any other support educators) in how to use technologies with access in mind, per Effective Practice 1.9 (OWI Committee, 2013, p. 9). Additionally, MOOC access means students must be able to engage with the technology through which writing feedback is provided, whether teacher or peer response. Feedback technology must be accessible to all MOOC students, whether disability-related or not, as Effective Practices 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 (OWI Committee, 2013, p. 9) indicate. For instance, many first-generation college students may have a mobile device or laptop, but instead of a word processing program like Microsoft Word, it may use Microsoft Works or another rich-text product; Works does not read common response functions like marginal comments or Track Changes. Responses must be provided in an accessible form for the composing program, which may require changing processes and internally embedding comments. Before enrolling in a writing MOOC, students need clear technology and bandwidth requirements for review work (per Effective Practice 1.2 [OWI Committee, 2013, p. 9]), but teachers still should realize that since not all students will have ideal access, they will have to vary their response styles and strategies, and they need supportive professional development in knowing when and how to do so. Ultimately, some students will not have minimum technological qualifications, effectively barring them from the MOOC, while others will need modifications that—ideally, according to the ADA and OWI Principle 1—will be built into the course before it launches. Some students will not be able to comprehend the technological course instructions, which must be written for a wide range of reading and technology abilities if the course is truly open. Indeed, some may struggle to comprehend the material provided about and for writing. As a direct result of a MOOC’s openness, some enroll with weak literacy skills. When the instructional venue is primarily text-based, reading and writing skills become more crucial, and “students will need to strengthen their reading muscles” (Hewett, 2015b, p. 2). Students’ literacy muscles can be weak and, if the MOOC is inclusive and accessible, they will receive opportunities to develop them. These less prepared students should, by right, be provided necessary literacy support to have a chance at succeeding in the course. Indeed, MOOC access also implies access to support systems so students not only can dabble in education but complete and learn something from a course. MOOCs typically have low completion and success rates. According to a University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education study, Coursera 22

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course completion rates from 2012 to 2013 were around 4% (Perna et al., 2013). Of course, as Koller et al. (2013) expressed, retention may not be the whole game with large courses like MOOCs, “Since there is no financial cost or barrier to entry, there is little reason to believe that even a majority of the students who enroll in a MOOC intend to complete the class.” Rice (2013) made a similar argument, saying critiques of 10% completion rates “make little sense” considering many MOOC students are not paying, are not enrolling for credit, and may enroll for reasons “beyond education”; Rice also indicated that even with a tiny completion percentage, most MOOCs are still “larger than any face-to-face lecture course offered in a given university” (p. 90). Despite these defenses, truly open access education should be accomplishable by virtue of its structure and affordances, something writing MOOCs appear not to be at this time. A student other than the uncommon autodidact should be able to demonstrate writing growth and complete a writing MOOC successfully. We worry that is not the case. Indeed, many have discovered that MOOCs do not offer the wide-open access their name implies (see Kolowich, 2013, March 4), and, in fact, they merely may perpetuate long-standing education technology inequalities. Thrift (2013) bluntly said, “The MOOC model appeals to economic elites.” Some universities experimenting with large-scale courses and programs changed how the courses are offered and, more importantly, who can participate. Georgia Tech, for instance, expressed determination not to have its fully online master’s program in computer science fail, but “Georgia Tech’s cautious approach starts with enrolling students who are likely to succeed” (Kolowich, 2013, December 13); the very process of selecting students seems, of course, outside the openness MOOCs implicitly promise.

Responding to Students and Having Them Respond to Each Other Returning here to the massive native of a writing MOOC, OWI Principle 7 indicates that students should receive individualized, personalized feedback on their writing from well-prepared online writing instructors who should engage the best OWI practices with the best of traditional composition theory and practice (also see OWI Principles 3 and 4). First, of course, students need access to the instructor. However, as has been shown through initial writing MOOC offerings from Duke University (see English Composition I: Achieving Expertise), Ohio State University, Mt. San Jacinto College, and Georgia Tech, few students have access to the instructor, and that simply is not how a writing course—onsite or online—is taught. Porter (2014) engaged Freire’s corpus in noting: “The value of many college courses is not primarily the delivered content. Rather, the real value added is the interactive performance” (p. 17) and such interaction “consists of the instructor commenting on and interacting with that writing, on an individual level” (Porter, 2014, p. 19). From substantial research, composition scholars know that teaching and learning writing occurs between teacher and student and is affected by writing for genuine audiences, often peers and the teacher. Teachers are crucial to this collaboration. A writing MOOC appears too big for any teacher—or team of teachers—to provide individualized or even small-group feedback based on as few as one or two compositions. Even in a traditionally sized course, teachers rely on the learning support that group and individual peer review offer. Head (2013), who taught the writing MOOC First-Year Composition 2.0, said of teacher response and evaluation of student writing: “And, what of evaluation? All our team could do was to prepare students to be the best peer-assessors they could be. I couldn’t personally evaluate their work in the way I do with a traditional class” (p. 52). Yet, we believe it remains crucial to provide review and/or evaluation by someone trained professionally to do so. As Porter (2014) stated: “a good chunk of the composition course consists of

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the instructor commenting on and interacting with that writing, on an individual level. Can a MOOC, even a dynamically designed, social media-based MOOC replicate that?” (p. 19). Certainly, peer review is backbone pedagogy for many disciplines, particularly composition, and the hope in writing MOOCs is that students indeed will be “the best peer-assessors they could be” (Head, 2014, p. 52). Unfortunately, in writing MOOCs, peer review is about all students get—if their peers are invested enough to respond at all. But this approach is likely insufficient for the students working under those who run—rather than teach—writing MOOCs. Scattered, hypothetical peer and teacher review is not how writing courses are taught. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, J. Harris (2103) remarked that something vital is missing in “large online courses: That something involves what occurs when a good teacher responds carefully and closely to the work of a student.” He then said, and we agree, “I suspect we still need to figure out how to offer online learners that sort of care and responsiveness.” “Care and responsiveness” in any OWI setting require personalization, semantic integrity shown through linguistically direct speech and problem-centered instruction, and engaging opportunities to revise (see Hewett, 2015b, 2015c; Warnock, 2010). Discussing technology-facilitated electronic peer review pre-MOOCs, Bean (2011) said, “But something of deep importance may be lost when teachers no longer read student work” (p. 300). As if echoing Bean, Krause (2013) described his participation in a “Listening to World Music” MOOC and wrote that the writing assignments: left me with a feeling I fear some of my own students might share: it didn’t really matter what I wrote because no one (including myself) cared, and I was destined to get the same grade no matter what I did. It was garbage in/garbage out. . . . [the course] reminded me of something we’ve all known about teaching for a long time: content scales, but teaching and learning don’t. (p. 694) Ultimately, Krause (2013) said MOOCs are an extension of “nineteenth-century pedagogy of lectures, tests, and writing prompts that go nowhere” (p. 694). Essentially, most students receive no response to their writing, while even postal-based, old-fashioned correspondence courses provided individualized writing response from a teacher. These are harsh indictments of the peer-only MOOC pedagogy, a pedagogy in conflict with OWI Principle 1’s call for access in OWI as well as OWI Principles 3, 4, and 7’s appeals for marrying the best of OWI and traditional theory and practice in training OWI teachers. Arguments about adopting a writing MOOC may intertwine conversations about feedback with those that glint of new technology. Halasek et al. (2014) raised a provocative idea about the paradigms governing writing instruction, what they called the “Teacher Knows Best” and “Attentive Student” narrative. In responding to a question posed by Porter—“Does the Rhetorical Composing MOOC serve the purpose of, accomplish the goals of, and substitute for a second-level writing course at a traditional brick-and-mortar institution such as Ohio State University?”—Halasek et al. (2014) stated: “To this question, we would say, ‘No, nor should it’” (p. 164). They said that “the MOOC has motivated us to reframe the question” of whether writing instruction scales upward effectively (Halasek, 2014, p.164). Some administrators would hope for scaling writing instruction to create larger courses as it might mean paying fewer teachers while increasing revenues if fees are attached to writing MOOCs. Halasek et al.’s reasoning is thought-provoking, but it may advance theory at the expense of practice: They framed an idea we can debate at conferences, yet practical applications mean most students simply never interact with their writing MOOC instructors.

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The bottom line is this: Most students are going to be in trouble. Despite excitement about the potential for students to teach each other in MOOCs, as Hart-Davidson (2014) stated: “Most MOOC environments simply do not prioritize learner-to-learner interaction in their pedagogical design or their delivery infrastructure” (p. 218). Given writing’s basic instructional need for interactive, audience-based process, this lack of prioritization is unacceptable.

OWI Training As with peer readers, MOOC teachers need supportive training. If offering a writing MOOC is spurred by a top-down proposal, writing faculty and administrators must facilitate informed conversations about teacher training. Again, OWI Principles 3, 4, and 7 are useful. OWI Principle 7 focuses on OWI training and preparedness for teachers and WPAs who offer professional development and teacher assessment, saying both should receive “appropriate OWI-focused training, professional development, and assessment for evaluation and promotion purposes” (OWI Committee, 2013, p. 17). An OWI-experienced WPA would recognize the differences OWI presents to writing instruction and the similarities OWI has to traditional writing instruction. Hewett (2015a) called these the yin of Principle 3 and the yang of Principle 4 because new theory and practice must be researched and engaged to balance with established theory and practice that can be migrated/adapted to OWI (p. 50). Appropriate training means the WPA has had preparation and experience as writing teacher, is competent in online learning and instruction, and can teach writing in online settings. An adequately prepared WPA can train, offer professional development opportunities, and assess OWI instructors’ teaching. There is seriousness in OWI that does not merely take onsite WPAs and teachers, plop them underprepared into an OWI setting, and say, “Now teach!” A writing MOOC must be similarly serious, especially because it is pedagogically experimental in nature and because so many students may be affected by it. One cannot migrate writing instruction into massive online settings through lectures because, as discussed above, response to student writing is where most of the teaching occurs (Hewett, 2015c; Kennedy & Howard, 2014). OWI students have to read their writing lessons (the course content) and teacher and peer response and apply all that to their own writing, which Hewett (2015b) indicated requires a cognitive leap between what students read and what they need to write; a teacher’s focused and individualized response to the writing and the students greatly aids this work. Skilled OWI teachers are qualified to say whether the student has succeeded in mastering a writing course’s/MOOC’s outcomes, yet untrained peer readers—who might be sole readers in a MOOC—may not provide sufficiently meaningful feedback. As Krause (2014) suggested, “Student-centered courses still require a teacher to be a facilitator, a guide, a mediator, and that is even more the case in an online class” (p. 126). Training teachers specifically for these roles is central to the OWI Position Statement, and it remains crucial for MOOCs.

Pay and Equity Scaling questions in education unsurprisingly have raised alarms about faculty pay. A campus proposal for a writing MOOC must elicit thoughtful conversation about paying a teacher whose course might enroll tens of thousands of students (as did the one in which Warnock enrolled in 2013). OWI Principle 8 urges “fair and equitable compensation” for OWI teachers (OWI Committee, 2013, p. 19). What is fair for a MOOC team teacher or team leader or, as Comer (2014) called them, “online course associates and managers” (p. 142)? In a time when teachers often are denigrated, English education—and rhetoric and 25

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composition—fights hard and often loses big. Extreme pay inequities and losses of full-time positions for an increasingly contingent faculty world demonstrate this disrespect (see, for example, Mechenbier, 2015). Comer (2014), who taught the Duke University writing MOOC, hinted at another scaling issue: In “seated classes” she had 12 students and was “accountable to every one of them . . . . In the MOOC, by contrast, I needed to rely on others to answer questions, or students to find their own way through the fog. And, for the most part, this worked fine” (p. 146). In her MOOC, the colossal number of enrolled students—82,820—resulted in leaving students to wander through the “fog” alone, certainly an untenable attitude in a seated writing course of 12 (or 20 or 30). Is one actually a teacher in a MOOC? If so, when the class begins with 50,000 students and ends with 2,000, how is one’s teaching measured? How many withdrawals are acceptable? Is “for the most part, this worked fine” considered a success? In a management team of 20, as in Comer’s case, who gets paid what? What is fair for managing all those learners and/or other “online course associates”? Indeed, what is managing a course rather than teaching it? How many hours does it take to prep such a course, read thousands of discussion posts, read student project writing, respond to online discussions, and help students asking about accessing course materials (while knowing many may not even know what they should be asking)? Recall that pay is more than money—although it is that, too. Griffin and Minter (2013) used the term “literacy load” to refer to their study findings that “the reading load of the online classes was more than 2.75 times greater than the face-to-face classes” (p. 153); their analysis of literacy load accounted for both student and teacher efforts. Warnock (2009) suggested OWI teachers may write as many as 30,000 words to each OWI student (p. 71). In consideration of this issue, Hewett (2015a) stated that OWI compensation includes not only “adjustments for newly developed courses, course load modifications, and technology purchases” but also training stipends, travel assistance, permission to work off-site, official recognition of effort, and access to “teaching to share the higher literacy load” (p. 65). OWI Principle 8 indicates that equity in traditional online settings is only now being defined concretely. So, how to determine equity in an experimental educational venue where teachers become associates and managers and non-paying students drop out in droves? These personnel and equity issues must be addressed.

Scaling a Writing Course It is easy to understand the draw of MOOCs: this bighearted, heroic experiment in bounteous knowledge and sharing a university’s expertise and knowledge widely. Monetizing the effort may be good for the institution, faculty, and students. Yet, any conversation about a writing MOOC must address the course size issue, which ultimately is a question of scalability. OWI Principle 9 considers this problem, building on course-size precedents set by the 1989 CCCC Principles for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing and the 2009 CCCC Statement on Second Language Writing and Writers. OWI Principle 9 states that, like other writing courses, OWCs should have no more than 20 students and preferably no more than 15. The OWI Committee chose these numbers for the OWI Position Statement because they express what expert practice reveals to be a reasonable number of online writing students. The CCCC Principles for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing, updated in 2015, stated: “No more than 20 students should be permitted in any writing class. Ideally, classes should be limited to 15. Remedial or developmental sections should be limited to a maximum of 15 students. No English faculty members should teach more than 60 writing students a term.” Further, this document pointed readers to an NCTE document entitled “Why Class Size Matters.” To be exceptionally clear, a 50,000-to-1 (or -20) ratio is not reasonable and 26

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fails all tests of “sound writing instruction” as well as “reasonable and equitable working conditions” listed under item 11 of the postsecondary writing instruction position statement (2015). Educators understand the implications of class size, and writing instructors long have understood that their teaching effectiveness is related directly to how many students they teach. Furthermore, already-piloted writing MOOCs have required huge teams of teachers, instructional designers, and technology specialists—and seed money. This funding often comes from grants (e.g., Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). It is not scalable to replicate and repeat these pilot efforts when the funding is gone. As Porter (2014) explained: “No MOOC can meet the writing needs or promote the writing development of the majority of college students. Like composition textbooks, MOOCs do not scale down very well . . .” (p. 24). Scaling a writing instructional team would require implementing a strong training program (per OWI Principle 7) with newly developed MOOC-based, OWI theories (per OWI Principle 3) that engage migration-worthy, adaptable onsite theories (per OWI Principle 4; see also Warnock 2009, 2015). Further, engaging OWI Principle 5 would require that teachers, once wellprepared and fairly assessed on their MOOC instruction, should retain “reasonable” levels of content control and choices about how they teach. Students, too, need regular scalable, institutional MOOC preparation, which might include video orientation tutorials (per OWI Principle 10) and opportunities for peer community-building (per OWI Principle 11). Of course, scaling means providing IT, library, and college counseling support online (per OWI Principle 13) for tens of thousands of students. More crucial to OWI Principle 13 is its guidance that students should have access to online writing support through online writing lab (OWL) tutoring offered in the modality and medium of the course, per Effective Practices 13.1 and 13.2 (OWI Committee, 2013, pp. 26-27).

A MOOC by Any Other Name Still Is Not a “Course” Finally, regardless of student fees and access issues, some institutions will want to offer a writing MOOC (or any MOOC) as a credit-bearing course, the “C” in the acronym. Institutions have explored this credit-bearing possibility. Rivard (2013) reported early efforts by Georgia State University and University of Maryland University College to grant credits for certain MOOCs. Freedman (2013), following enthusiastic comments that Bill Gates made about taking online courses about oceanography and other topics, indicated those comments: speak to the deeply ingrained American concept of learning as practical, manageable, bite-size (hence byte-size). Knowledge becomes a commodity you can buy rather than a product of a process that takes time, effort, and patience to master. Gates’s words speak to a view of cultural attainments that we call middlebrow. Freedman continued: “The United States has long been a fertile home to popular, middle-class enthusiasm for knowledge offered in an easy-to-digest format” and “MOOCs are just the latest incarnation of bringing watered-down versions of culture, knowledge, and learning to a mass audience.” While a MOOC may reach a broad audience, “Problems arise only when we think of MOOCs as university courses rather than as learning for the masses.” Of course, this MOOC issue ties into broader, long-standing issues of what really counts in college courses. As Laitinen (2013) pointed out, the “fundamental criterion [of the Carnegie Unit] was the amount of time spent on a subject, not the results attained” (p. 64). Quality, competency, learning—these long have been a challenge to measure and then communicate to others. 27

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Nonetheless, to be accredited, a writing MOOC minimally should enable students to complete the course having been given feedback, individualized instruction, and interpersonal conferencing opportunities, as outlined in OWI Principles 3, 4, and 7.

THE POSSIBILITY OF A MOOEE No matter how we viewed writing MOOCs—through whichever lens particular OWI Principles offered—we found them lacking as college composition courses. Knowing the ways that online learning is embracing MOOC-like projects, however, we sought to find and offer a positive vision that would better enact the OWI Principles for the benefits they provide in grounding the experimental nature of any OWI objective. Therefore, we reevaluated MOOCs outside the structure of a course and offer here some thoughts for the field’s consideration.

Providing a Compositional Frame to Re-Think “Knowledge” What is our relationship with knowledge? The MOOC dialogue has reinvigorated that core education question. Freedman (2013) saw MOOCs in general as often unthinkingly transmitting knowledge in the absence of conscious and social consideration. Rhetoric and composition specialists know writing courses are different yet. MOOC instructor Youngman (2013) surveyed former students and said MOOCs are forcing us to consider “whether a particular credential—a diploma—is necessary to demonstrate learning, as well as who gets to decide the relative value of the possible alternatives.” He reported that one student said: “As an employer, I would not recruit anyone based on MOOC certificates, but I would accept that someone who has them has a genuine interest in further education.” Interestingly, in Youngman’s survey, 90% of students already had at least a four-year degree, suggesting both a wide population of autodidacts and that the MOOC’s broad access promise is not being met. A dissertation study of how K12 education sector employers viewed MOOC learning had similar findings: Employers often viewed MOOC participation positively, especially for IT-type positions, but MOOCs rarely sufficed in place of standard academic credentials (Webb, 2015). Some have complicated MOOCs’ knowledge-sharing goals even further. Altbach (2013) described the MOOC movement as an insidious, even if unintentional, form of educational neocolonialism: MOOCs “threaten to exacerbate the worldwide influence of Western academe, bolstering its higher-education hegemony. . . . Neither knowledge nor pedagogy is neutral. They reflect the academic traditions, methodological orientations, and teaching philosophies of particular academic systems.” The philosophy faculty at San Jose State University, who wrote an open letter of protest against the imposed use of a MOOC by Harvard Professor Michael Sandel in their curriculum, likely would agree (Kolowich, 2013, May 2). MOOCs indeed are prompting additional, nuanced dialogue about from where “knowledge” emanates and what qualifies as “owning” it. For OWI, the ultimate problem MOOCs encounter is that writing simply does not fit the general course models of most other disciplines. It’s a question of content knowledge versus skill-based knowledge. An OWC helps students learn about writing and develop skills through both content about writing and writing as content itself. A MOOC might be an apt content container, but content presentation alone does not equal a learning opportunity in a field that acknowledges social construction and writing as a social act (see the CCCC Principles for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing, 2015). Differentiating 28

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the content MOOC from writing instructional endeavors, Krause (2014) stated, “First, let’s make that C stand for ‘content’” (p. 127). Porter (2014) similarly thought a MOOC could make a great textbook, but “it should not ever be mistaken for or misrepresented as a course” (p. 20). Friedman (2013), in a New York Times editorial, critiqued current postsecondary learning structures: “Institutions of higher learning must move, as historian Walter Russell Mead says, from a model of ‘time served’ to a model of ‘stuff learned.’” Friedman’s equation of education to “stuff learned” certainly fits the current theory of a MOOC as an approach to content and mastery of material that can be parceled—and perhaps measured—but it fails to consider a deeper level of critical thinking connected to what rhetoricians and compositionists consider strong writing. Content courses, the paradigm MOOCs emulate best, lend themselves to a different kind of educational model from writing courses, and even they may struggle with sophisticated and accessible technology to teach and assess massified learning adequately. Whether the question is how knowledge is created, how the course runs, or how the student and course are assessed, the writing course has a different instructional paradigm.

What Writing MOOEEs Might Offer The OWI Principles suggest that a writing MOOC by any other name is simply an impossibly big class in which access to interpersonal connection among teacher/s and writing students is minimal and for which course credit is of questionable value. Using specific language from the OWI Position Statement, we have demonstrated some challenges of writing MOOCs. Although our analysis may make us appear to be strongly anti-MOOC, we think that the rhetoric and composition community could benefit from synthesizing some MOOC concepts into OWI. MOOC-like thinking might help educators create learning opportunities for eager, interested learners, more “experiences” than “courses,” using the unique affordances of online learning. In fact, we recommend a new name for these entities: Massive Open Online Educational Experiences (MOOEEs) (see Warnock, 2015, for an introduction to this term). An educational experience might enhance writing instruction in higher education by enlarging the possibilities (many access concerns notwithstanding) of reimagining what a massive open online offering could provide to people who want to write more effectively. A MOOEE need not be credit bearing, although an institution could assess a student’s portfolio for credit (White, 2014). There need be no pretense that a MOOEE can substitute for the more intimate, instruction orientation of an OWC, which offers intensive, appropriate teacher-to-student attention. “Course” is a word loaded with meaning in higher education circles. “Educational experience” says something different that the rhetoric and composition community can collaborate on identifying and describing. How can MOOEEs help in rethinking OWI as an educational endeavor? As we did with MOOCs, below we consider MOOEEs through the OWI Position Statement. We are not arguing that all experimental forms should come out of the gate adhering fully with the OWI Principles—they could not!—but even experimental forms can and should be considered through such a lens in order to make them the best possible for meeting student learning needs.

MOOEEs and the Burkean Parlor Reid (2014) offered an idealistic view of MOOCs as an extension of the Burkean Parlor of connection, community, and socially constructed knowledge and understanding (p. 210). He was supposing that given this unique online chance, MOOC students would connect with one another and talk about their writing 29

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in deep, thoughtful ways where their exchanged ideas and writing would lead to new creations among them. Whether that actually happens in such huge courses is largely unknown. Yet, let us continue that idealistic social constructive vision for MOOEEs, where course grades and credit present no obstacle for curious or even uncertain students or for teachers’ creative responses to multitudes of students. Thus, a MOOEE could offer writing instruction in ways similar to a MOOC, but it would do so grounded in the OWI Principles. In line with OWI Principle 6 regarding experimental OWI, MOOEE developers would acknowledge the investigational essence of massiveness, openness, and online approaches in the context of the educational guidelines that make the most sense. They would first ground the MOOEE in access, selecting technologies students would most likely have, determining and conveying how students should be prepared to use those technologies, integrating media in response to different types of learners, and finding ways to enable conferencing and conversation. MOOEE developers would consider how to prepare individualized feedback (even researching the probative value of automated response technologies, as Hewett and Warnock [2015] discussed) and how to scale and introduce sufficient expert writers (who no longer need to be professional teachers given the absence of college credit) to assist learners (per OWI Principle 9). Indeed, MOOEEs might enable de-scaling the massive group by categorizing students into smaller clusters by their interests in such genres as technical communications, business texts, or creative non-fiction. Such clusters might further be shrunk by the results of short surveys that serve as interest inventories or self-assessments of writing skills. Although such cluster-based changes would remain teacher/expert reader intensive, they would enable a more manageable approach to reaching students individually and in terms of their self-identified desires and needs. With such focus, student might engage more in the Burkean Parlor of intensive and collaborative learning. As suggested above, MOOEEs would enable higher education to re-envision the nature of a teacher for the experience. In a perfect writing MOOEE, all students would have access to professional writing teachers, but given the absence of credit-related responsibilities, fewer of these could be involved, enabling a broader range of expert writers from education and other professions as well as paraprofessional tutors and writing fellows. Nonetheless, the importance of training all of these people per OWI Principle 7 cannot be overstated. Training the teacher, tutors, and/or writing fellows should not be experimental, and it should be responsibly accomplished by those with sufficient and successful experience in OWI and in a writing MOOEE particularly. Such a guideline places OWI teachers in a tricky position: How can one be trained for experimental instructional venue? WPAs involved in developing MOOEEs should choose OWI teachers who have experience in established OWI settings. Specifically, as OWI Principle 4 suggests, these educators need to understand the collaborative theories grounding contemporary writing instruction and should learn how to apply them in large-group, online settings. Then, with additional study about OWI and MOOEEs as well as discussion with others attempting experimental OWI forms, these individuals will be more prepared to teach. Removing the pretense that a writing MOOEE is a course that can fairly assess writing and offer credit would free an instructional team to do its work more creatively and flexibly. Although examining a writing MOOEE through the OWI Principles clearly exposes that it would not meet certain key qualifications for effective OWI, the OWI Principles nonetheless suggest remedies. For example, OWI Principle 11 recommends that OWI leaders build an association or transactional community among students; this type of connection is all the more important in a massive and impersonal instructional setting. By analogy, this advice should be used to connect like-minded and similarly skilled educators for the MOOEE, a practice that also addresses OWI Principle 12, which states that teacher satisfaction is as critical as student satisfaction. 30

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Removing the idea of offering a course transforms the massive, open, online event and its attendant expectations to an opportunity that we find exciting and invitingly challenging. We believe in online writing groups and situations in which those who want to improve or who love writing are able to work and collaborate with each other, but we worry that it cannot happen sustainably, regularly, or even predictably in a MOOC.

MOOEEs and Peer Review If educators are going to run a writing experience with thousands of people, they must figure out how to conduct substantive, challenging, meaningful peer reviews. Some of Krause and Lowe’s (2014) contributors to Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promises and Perils of Massive Open Online Courses investigated the role of peer review in MOOCs. Peer review is a key writing MOOEE issue. Our field believes in peer review (e.g., Bruffee, 1995; Spear, 1988; Woods, 2002), but we must resolve whether peer review alone is adequate or even responsible. How do we balance a strong belief in peer-to-peer and social constructivist approaches to learning with a critique of (apologies to Elbow, 1998) teacherless classrooms? Hart-Davidson (2014) considered the inherent relationship between rhetoric and composition and peer review, citing M. Harris (1986) in suggesting “that this may be our signature contribution to the academy: the disruption of the lecture model in favor of more engaged, peer-learning models in the undergraduate curriculum (Harris, xii)” (p. 216). Hart-Davidson (2014) embedded this issue in a broader argument about peer networks, saying a “dynamic” arises when learners can draw from each other’s “rich set of resources”: It’s that dynamic, that learning potential, the possibility of ubiquitous, near-constant connection with a peer network that is (has always been?) the best reason to think about digital technology in relation to writing, learning, and teaching . . . . writing programs have not adequately used digital technology to anything like their full potential in this regard. (p. 215) Perhaps MOOEEs can help to fulfill Hart-Davidson’s implicit call for using digital technology more robustly for peer review. For example, given the removal of credit, students might engage differently with a required peer-review training using interactive, writer-adaptive software and video.

Research MOOEEs could lead to a broad-reaching education paradigm shift, and a quick flip through many periodicals reveals just how frequently these big-picture questions about education’s viability are posed. But, to be clear, these forays should not be in mad-scientist mode, where instructors gleefully put students in structures that do not serve most of them—and then claim the spirit of innovation. Research is crucial to developing effective and supportable OWI. The final OWI Principle encourages testing, measuring, assessing, and applying action research at every stage. Studies should be qualitative (per Effective Practice 15.1), quantitative (15.2), and longitudinal (15.3 [OWI Committee, 2013, p. 31]). As Ehmann and Hewett (2015) asserted, and as originally argued by Haswell (2005), these studies should be replicable, aggregable, and data supported. OWI lends itself to these approaches, but they are as yet underutilized. King (qtd. in Heller, 2013) stated that assessing and comparing different teaching approaches could change online learning through “large-scale measurement and analysis,” or big data: 31

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“. . . we could instrument every student, every classroom, every administrative office . . . everything. We could basically get the information about everything that goes on here, and we could use it for the students.” As some already are doing with the first generations of writing MOOCs, there is great value in mining the colossal amount of data from a massive writing experience to see what is happening. Given that much research is needed in any and all OWI-focused areas, with student experiences a top concern, data mining MOOEEs or MOOCs offers a sensible way to use automated writing evaluation technology to the benefit of writing studies (Hewett & Warnock, 2015). Such research could teach much about student behaviors, and—echoing the promise mentioned above by Halasek et al. (2014)—educators might learn something new about writing online. WPAs and writing faculty can point to Effective Practice 15.2 in arguing for a research-based structure as MOOEEs get underway, setting up quantitative studies or even return-on-investment studies to understand financial impact (OWI Committee, 2013, p. 31). This practice speaks not just to pedagogy but also to ever-present financial considerations.

Access We return to where we began. Access should be the beginning, middle, and end of all online educational endeavors. Some institutions have used MOOEE-like concepts of openness to rethink how they provide opportunities. Drexel’s College of Nursing and Health Professions, for instance, piloted a scholarship program for 30 students, who were able to take for free their first RN-to-BSN course for possible invitation to the full program (Kim, 2013). In this type of situation, the MOOC, as Porter (2014) said, can expand “composition teachers’ reach and impact, providing access to a much broader audience than simply campus-resident students who come to us in relatively small classes (