Starting, Evaluating or Revamping Online Tutoring in Your Writing Center
Wednesday, February 12th, 1-2pm ET
Megan Boeshart Burelle & Kim Fahle Peck
Scenario 1: In a meeting with a college administrator you, a writing center administrator, learn that your institution will now offer online classes and are told that you must implement online writing tutoring as soon as possible for your institution to be compliant with accreditation standards.
Scenario 2: You are a new writing center director who has inherited an online tutoring program but you’ve been tasked with evaluating and making any necessary changes to better support student needs.
Scenario 3: You are frustrated with the current technology your writing center has been using for online tutoring because you feel that is limiting access to your services.
The above scenarios represent examples of writing center administrators having to grapple with how to start, improve, or revamp the ways they implement online tutoring in their centers. Should centers offer asynchronous or synchronous tutoring? Should they use their LMS? WConline? Google Docs? Zoom?
This webinar will assist writing center administrators in making decisions regarding modalities and platforms for online tutoring that consider access and inclusivity, institutional culture, and budget and resource constraints. The webinar will begin with a grounding in Tenet 6 of OLI Principle 1, Online literacy instruction should be universally accessible and inclusive: “Institutional support systems and programs (i.e., tutoring centers, student academic success centers, disabilities services) should be available minimally to all students in the same modality as their course and available maximally in additional, flexible ways.” We will engage in a discussion with participants about how we as administrators have worked to provide at least this minimal level of shared modality of tutoring and courses, but have also striven for increased flexibility by drawing on institutional resources and integrating tools to meet our needs.
Participants will:
Kim Fahle Peck is the Writing Center Director at York College of Pennsylvania. She is the Membership/Communication Chair of the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE) and the Web Coordinator for the Mid-Atlantic Writing Center Association (MAWCA). Her research interests include writing centers, online writing instruction, and undergraduate research.
Wednesday, February 12th, 1-2pm ET
Megan Boeshart Burelle & Kim Fahle Peck
Scenario 1: In a meeting with a college administrator you, a writing center administrator, learn that your institution will now offer online classes and are told that you must implement online writing tutoring as soon as possible for your institution to be compliant with accreditation standards.
Scenario 2: You are a new writing center director who has inherited an online tutoring program but you’ve been tasked with evaluating and making any necessary changes to better support student needs.
Scenario 3: You are frustrated with the current technology your writing center has been using for online tutoring because you feel that is limiting access to your services.
The above scenarios represent examples of writing center administrators having to grapple with how to start, improve, or revamp the ways they implement online tutoring in their centers. Should centers offer asynchronous or synchronous tutoring? Should they use their LMS? WConline? Google Docs? Zoom?
This webinar will assist writing center administrators in making decisions regarding modalities and platforms for online tutoring that consider access and inclusivity, institutional culture, and budget and resource constraints. The webinar will begin with a grounding in Tenet 6 of OLI Principle 1, Online literacy instruction should be universally accessible and inclusive: “Institutional support systems and programs (i.e., tutoring centers, student academic success centers, disabilities services) should be available minimally to all students in the same modality as their course and available maximally in additional, flexible ways.” We will engage in a discussion with participants about how we as administrators have worked to provide at least this minimal level of shared modality of tutoring and courses, but have also striven for increased flexibility by drawing on institutional resources and integrating tools to meet our needs.
Participants will:
- Consider what modalities and platforms make the most sense for your center, considering factors of budget, software already available at the institution, what types of support students, desire, and necessary training.
- Complete an Institution Inventory worksheet, which includes collecting information from your institution’s website about student demographics, the prevalence of online learning, course modalities, software licenses currently held by your institution, and tutor numbers, hours, training infrastructures, etc.
- Discuss how you can use the Inventory Worksheet data to build or revise an online tutoring program and how you can use the information as leverage when negotiating for resources/budgets, etc.
- Formulate a plan of how you want to use the data or for what additional research you need to conduct to build, evaluate, or improve you online tutoring programs.
Kim Fahle Peck is the Writing Center Director at York College of Pennsylvania. She is the Membership/Communication Chair of the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE) and the Web Coordinator for the Mid-Atlantic Writing Center Association (MAWCA). Her research interests include writing centers, online writing instruction, and undergraduate research.
Hybrid Course Design: Exploring the Many Ways “Face-To-Face” and “Online” Can Be Blended and What That Means for Our Students
Thursday, April 16 from 3-4pm ET
Jude Miller
Research on course design for hybrid writing courses indicates that the structure of hybrid writing courses can look radically different across institutions. Indeed, aside from possessing the two vaguely unifying features of being courses that blend face-to-face and online learning, hybrid writing classes can entail virtually any imaginable permutation of those two elements.
In theory, hybrid classes provide students the freedoms of self-directed, self-paced learning that’s associated with online classes, while also holding on to the elements that many instructors find valuable about face-to-face classes. However, my experience suggests that how, exactly, the face-to-face and online components of a class are combined can have a very significant impact on the curriculum itself, and thereby the students in the course. What’s more, while certain elements of hybrid classes can easily serve institutional or administrative needs (like maximizing class space by moving courses partially online), other aspects of hybrid course design more directly pertain to students’ needs (like allowing for a schedule of face-to-face meetings that makes sense for the curriculum). And while these various stakeholders’ needs can sometimes overlap, it’s not a given that they always do. Simply put, there are both perils and promises of hybrid writing courses.
This webinar will discuss the circumstances that led to the creation of my program’s first hybrid writing class, in addition to the structure of this hybrid writing course and the pedagogical and institutional rationale for that structure, ending with a discussion of how the course continues to transform to meet shifting needs by overcoming certain challenges while facing new ones.
Participants will:
Thursday, April 16 from 3-4pm ET
Jude Miller
Research on course design for hybrid writing courses indicates that the structure of hybrid writing courses can look radically different across institutions. Indeed, aside from possessing the two vaguely unifying features of being courses that blend face-to-face and online learning, hybrid writing classes can entail virtually any imaginable permutation of those two elements.
In theory, hybrid classes provide students the freedoms of self-directed, self-paced learning that’s associated with online classes, while also holding on to the elements that many instructors find valuable about face-to-face classes. However, my experience suggests that how, exactly, the face-to-face and online components of a class are combined can have a very significant impact on the curriculum itself, and thereby the students in the course. What’s more, while certain elements of hybrid classes can easily serve institutional or administrative needs (like maximizing class space by moving courses partially online), other aspects of hybrid course design more directly pertain to students’ needs (like allowing for a schedule of face-to-face meetings that makes sense for the curriculum). And while these various stakeholders’ needs can sometimes overlap, it’s not a given that they always do. Simply put, there are both perils and promises of hybrid writing courses.
This webinar will discuss the circumstances that led to the creation of my program’s first hybrid writing class, in addition to the structure of this hybrid writing course and the pedagogical and institutional rationale for that structure, ending with a discussion of how the course continues to transform to meet shifting needs by overcoming certain challenges while facing new ones.
Participants will:
- Discuss what hybrid courses look like at your institutions.
- Outline ways that the unique features of hybrid courses at each of our institutions effectively (and maybe sometimes not so effectively) serve students in our respective programs.
- Generate and exchange ideas about what works and what doesn’t regarding hybrid course design.