Dissertation Prospectus

You Want Me to Do What?! - Subjectivities of the Online Writing Instructor on Prezi

DE as Discourse Community

Cynthia Pengilly
Pedagogical Tool Review

Distance education has been exploding over the past several years and many traditional colleges and universities are struggling to keep up with proprietary schools, which have outpaced traditional campus-based institutions in their distance education offerings.  Much like my adjunct counterparts housed at brick and mortar institutions, I must teach at several online schools – including proprietary and traditional institutions – in order to make a decent salary.  As such, I (or “we” – to include other online adjuncts) tend to pay attention to sources of information that offer tips, job leads, and other information regarding changes in online teaching requirements and expectations.  In order to stay abreast of such changes, I am a member of numerous online instructor listservs, websites, and even a professional organization geared towards online adjunct instructors.

Tool Description
One such source of information that I rely upon on a daily basis is OnlineTeachingJobs, a moderated, closed-group discussion board which serves as an extension of the book entitled Make Money Teaching Online: How to Land Your First Academic Job, Build Credibility, and Earn a Six-Figure Salary (Babb & Mirabella, 2007). The book was written by online adjunct instructors for online adjunct instructors. I think this is important considering the current academic climate where adjuncts are responsible for teaching a bulk of the course load.  In English Studies, adjunct instructors teach between 52 and 97 percent of courses at the four year institution and more than 50 percent of courses at two year colleges (DeVoss et.al, 2000).  What this book provides is a landscape of the field from the proprietary angle.  The book has been praised, by those wanting to know the “secrets” to getting into the industry, as much as it has been scorned, by those insisting that adjunct conditions will not change if it is touted that online instructors can potentially work very few hours resulting in large amounts of income.

The Book
The book has eleven chapters and I will identify each of the chapter titles. But, in the interest of time, I will only provide overviews of a few key chapters.

• Chapter 1 – Introduction to Online Teaching
• Chapter 2 – Online Schools: Are They For Real?
• Chapter 3 – Preparing Yourself for Teaching Opportunities
• Chapter 4 – Types of Online Teaching Jobs
• Chapter 5 – How Much Can I Earn?
• Chapter 6 – The Hunt: Finding Your First Job
• Chapter 7 – The Interview: What Universities Look For
• Chapter 8 – Sealing the Deal, Training, and Your First Class
• Chapter 9 – Working as an Online Faculty Member
• Chapter 10 – Must-Have Technologies
• Chapter 11 – Maintaining Relationships and Growing Your Business

The book can easily be divided into halves with the first half providing an overview of the field – how to get acclimated with terms (Chapters 1-5).  I will provide an overview of Chapters 2, 4, and 5 because they address issues of legitimacy, the role of online adjuncts and the pay expectations.  Chapter 2 answers the question are online schools for real?  In this chapter, the fears of teaching online are introduced such as the level of rigor in the course objectives, student retention, legitimacy of online degrees, and accreditation concerns including diploma mills and how to spot them.  Chapter 4 covers types of online teaching jobs ranging from high school to college level.  A great amount of detail is spent discussing the role of online adjuncts, why they are needed, and how to balance the teaching load when working for different schools.  This ties in rather nicely to my discussion about discourse communities (see below).  Chapter 5 discusses the pay such as how much to expect for pay, what factors might influence pay (i.e. degree, years of teaching experience), and ways to make extra money by taking on tasks such as course design and working as a mentor to other faculty.

The bulk of the book (Chapters 6-11) covers what to do after breaking into the field. Chapter 8 discusses the training process and teaching the first course; salary and contract negotiation is covered, the different types of training, and preparing for the first course. Chapter 9 discusses the insides of working as an online adjunct including the various types of systems one may encounter, the importance of balancing time based on the workload and pay, and the most efficient way to communicate with students (email).  Chapter 11 discusses networking opportunities and keys to successful relationships at various institutions.  This chapter also covers institutional differences, varying demands, learning from one’s mistakes, and managing money when it is not likely to be consistent.  These are very familiar issues to adjuncts who have already taught on-campus but such issues are even more of a concern when teaching online because of the geographical separation so adjunct concerns are likely to be overlooked.

The Listserv
While new online instructors can use the space to post “help” messages for getting started in the field, they are usually directed to the accompanying guidebook.  The primary function of the listserv includes updates on training for different institutions such as length of training, difficulty (i.e. level of nuisance), and whether it is paid or unpaid. Other issues include the length of time between completing training and being offered the first class and how often classes or contracts are offered at various schools after being in the system as a qualified, trained adjunct instructor.  If there are any new schools venturing out into DE, this information is also readily shared since it is easiest to get in early before competition becomes a problem.  Labor and insurance issues frequently arise and members exchange ideas about how to balance time between schools and how many classes are ideal to teach (which varies depending on discipline); insurance information is also shared since some schools offer insurance to adjuncts (for a higher premium), but this is not the standard.  Finally, the most important information shared in this group is pay per institution and salary.  There is a good amount of dispute over if it is appropriate to share such information but a good amount of members feel that such information is the primary purpose for joining a listserv.  More recently, the debate has died down considerably, as a few members uploaded an Excel spreadsheet which lists a bulk of online institutions and ranks them according to pay; several iterations of this document now exists as members have collaborated by making their own updates to the document and re-posting it to the group. You can view the most recent iteration of this document, an abbreviated version, in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Pay and Training Requirements for Online Teaching, Updated 5/24/1010

Tool Adoption
The affordances of the book may be short-lived because of changes in institutional policies, field identity and the like, but the accompanying listserv is not - there are presently 5484 members as of Monday, June 21st, 2010.  As such, the OnlineTeachingJobs Yahoo Group is quite possibly one of the primary places of information exchange between online instructors of all disciplines and of almost every institutional make-up.  While the text and accompanying listserv does not directly deal with teaching writing online, online writing teachers are a part of this larger community and so it does bring in notions of discourse community – something that I believe is missing in many academic conversations about distance education.  English Studies has spent decades trying to answer the age old question of “What is good writing?”  And more recently, English Studies scholars (Warnock, 2009; Neff & Whithous, 2008; Cook, 2004) have grappled with identifying best practices in the field by attempting to answer questions such as “What is a good online writing instructor?” and “How should writing be taught online?” The concept of discourse community is important because it is what helps new online instructors learn the lingo and expectations of the community (Bizzell, 1992).  I believe that the OnlineTeachingJobs community provides that foundation of information on a continuing basis – it is outside the walls of a specific institution and easy to access.

When considering how best to teach writing online, I think it is important to consider how different institutions articulate the role of DE instructors and how it works to confirm or reject the best practices of the field. There is definitely a tension between how this role is articulated when online writing instructors have the authority and autonomy to modify their courses when needed as opposed to teaching pre-packaged or canned course content.  By necessity, this means that we must also consider the role of proprietary schools which is why the concept of discourse communities may be useful for further articulating and understanding the role of online writing instructors.

Argument Support
The one thing that most scholars can agree upon when it comes to DE is that it has fundamentally changed the education landscape.  Peterson (2001) identifies how DE has changed the roles of instructors, modified education goals, and drastically changed student learning.  Writing instructors are encouraged to get more involved in the discussion about DE for two reasons: 1) DE is all about writing so writing teacher’s should be driving the content creation; and 2) writing courses are required courses, even in DE.  Much of the scholarship about DE has come from outside the field of English Studies, which is likely the reason for the trends of DE to have the content designed by someone other than the instructor teaching the course; such practices are actually the opposite of what DE is supposed to accomplish – it works to further separate the student from the instructor instead of bringing them closer together (Peterson, 2001; Neff & Whithous, 2008).  This is where the concept of the facilitator comes into play and Anderson (2008) puts forth the idea that a “guide on the side” is not enough and is really only one part of establishing teaching presence - it is not the main goal that everything stems from.  What Anderson is suggesting here is that the facilitator metaphor and DE generally speaking has not been really critically challenged or questioned. This ties in with the concerns of Higgs & Budd (2007) who provide a political perspective on the growth and development of online higher education; they state that everything has a purpose and there is an ethical problem in higher education’s use of online education because of the tension between the goals of education in capital culture and the pressure to cater to the illusionary ethos of online education.

The illusionary ethos is that online education defines progress as the efficient production of goods - so that education and its means of production become commodities which renders the teacher redundant (i.e. facilitator metaphor rears its ugly head again).  As such, many writing instructors fear that DE will change them into a “deliverer of corporate values and goals, instead of a deliverer of traditional, liberal humanistic goals” (Peterson, 2001, p.360). I feel that such fears are justified when you consider proprietary schools that offer online courses and degree programs that typically have pre-canned courses, restrictions on academic freedom (i.e. limits to how much a course may be supplemented with instructor materials), and even rules about how often and when an instructor must be present in the online classroom.  Writing instructors must get involved in this debate so that we are not exploited by institutions as they attempt to create greater efficiency and greater revenues (Peterson, 2001; Anson, 1999).  Such nuances in institutional policies and practices have serious implications for online writing instructors and to ignore the broader practices of the field is to suggest that the teaching of writing only exists inside a vacuum at traditional institutional structures that are non-proprietary in nature.

If you look closely at the discourse surrounding DE, one of the things that the institutions and course designers are trying to do is construct a standardized ethos for their instructors with very little diversity or varying degrees of subjectivity.  I am suggesting, along with Smelser-Gackler (2001), that ethos, in and of itself, is an argument.  Babb & Mirabella’s (2007) text and Yahoo listserv have etched out some of the missing pieces of the world of distance education by providing an outside or non-academic perspective including its characters, important acts, valued outcomes, and meaningful artifacts (i.e. “figured worlds” see Holland, 1998, p. 52). As instructors attempt to align their natural ethos with their mediated ethos, we must inquire as to how this ethos is constructed in various contexts for the online writing instructor, and we can begin this search by simply looking towards the broader discourse community.

References
Anderson, T. (2008). Teaching in An Online Learning Context. In The Theory and Practice of Online Learning. 2nd Edition.  Edmonton, AB: AU Press. p. 343-366.

Anson, C. (1999). Distance Voices: Teaching and Writing in a Culture of Technology. College English, 61(3), p. 261-280.
Babb, D., & Mirabella, J. (2007). Make Money Teaching Online: How to Land Your First Academic Job, Build Credibility, and Earn a Six-Figure Salary. Wiley Publishing.

Bizzell, P. (1992) Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Cook, K., & Davies, K. (2004). Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers. Baywood Publishing.

Devoss, Danielle, Dawn Hayden, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Richard J. Selfe, Jr.  (2000). Distance Education:  Political and Professional Agency for Adjunct and Part-Time Faculty, and GTAs.  Moving a Mountain: Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education. Ed. Patricia Lambert Stock and Eileen E. Schell. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 261-286.

Higgs, G., & Budd, J. (2007). Toward an Authentic Ethos for Online Higher Education. Policy Futures in Education 5(4): 507-515.

Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D. & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Neff, J., & Whithous, C. (2008). Writing Across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Peterson, P. (2001). The debate about online learning: Key issues for writing teachers. Computers and Composition, 18, p. 359-370.

Smelser-Gackler, Lynn. (2000). Looking for the Teacher: Ethos in the Online Classroom. Journal of Literacy and Technology 1(2): Spring 2001.

Warnock, S. (2009). Teaching Writing Online: How &Why. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English.

Community –> Interaction –> Permanence

Community Blog Analysis

Surely, one would think that taking an online class would automatically create a sense of community with one’s peers?  However, as we discovered in class discussion earlier this week, defining “community” can be a very elusive task.  Community is often defined as having a sense of belonging or belonging to a collective that includes others (Koh & Kim, 2004). As Koh & Kim (2004) explain, there are geographical communities and relational communities; the latter of which are virtual communities where members are not bound together by geographical location.  For example, I will always feel a connection to the universities where I earned my degrees; however, I seem to have a greater sense of belonging with my graduate school alma mater than my undergraduate school, and surprisingly enough, I actually completed my master’s degree at a distance. I suppose that I subconsciously connect graduate school to a more definitive time in my life – I had a greater vision of my future self than I did as a wide-eyed undergrad student. So, it felt like a more permanent connection and still does to this day.  Such an emotional connection also plays a large part in virtual community (Koh & Kim, 2004), which could easily explain my sense of belonging to my online master’s degree program (which I still visit online periodically).

In our ENG 795/895 course, a bulk of our interactions occur in the online realm which does qualify as a virtual community (Koh & Kim, 2004), but our classroom communications resemble that of a synchronous classroom environment because of the real-time audio, video, and chat features.  It is important to keep this in mind when considering if our individual blogs helped to create a sense of community.  Blogging, or e-journals, provide students with the opportunity to share their opinion about a topic while considering a larger, mostly invisible, audience.  Beach & Doerr-Stevens (2009) refer to this opportunity as online role playing because it is a literacy practice that encourages effective argumentation strategies “to convince others of the validity of one’s opinion,” which might ultimately lead to changes in the status quo. For example, Tesha posted an equal number of reading responses on teaching online public relations students (“Preparing Public Relations Students for the Blogosphere” and “Internet and Public Relations Curriculum”) as she did on the foundational principles of teaching writing online (“New Writing Pedagogy,” “Teaching Writing in Asynchronous Environment,” and “Online Training Spiral”).  And when looking for articles about community and educational uses of new media or Web 2.0, I didn’t need to travel very far.  Diane, Tesha, Nathan, and Nancy each have at least one posting on either blogs or wikis. And there was a good amount of discussion on online community as well (see Christy and Susan).  So, we did blog about the topics that interested us most, but the commenting feature, one of the affordance of blogs, was not used to its fullest potential.  From what I could find, there were not more than two dozen comments generated over the course of five weeks.  This number could be low because of the short time frame of the course, but it could also be because we were taking our basic synchronous course structure and attempting to blend it with an asynchronous component known as virtual peer review.

In our course, it was only suggested that we comment on other’s blogs, but it was not required.  This could be another reason for the low participation but it is more likely the fact that blog comments, akin to virtual peer review, moved our classroom discussion to an asynchronous environment.  And, as Breuch (2005) argues, peer reviews have always been discussed and defined as a speech act – a synchronous activity.  In my own experiences teaching writing online, I have found it especially difficult to get my online students to not only participate in virtual peer review but to do so in a constructive and useful manner; this same issue rears its ugly head in my online hybrid classes as well which poses serious implications for the teaching of writing online.  There are advantages to virtual peer review such as a longer time to read and respond to classmates but forcing participation will likely not make the peer review process more effective. I believe this is the idea that Kevin had with our assignments because I don’t believe that requiring blog comments would have created a greater sense of community.  I feel like our “community” already exists inside of our classroom. In other words, the blogs were an extension of classroom community and was not the primary means of interaction, so comments or suggestions could be easily saved until the next class.  This could be why virtual peer review has not work very well in my hybrid writing classes – there is not a great need to depend on other’s comments when we still have “class” to go to.

I suppose that community can be thought of as a sense of belonging as it is typically defined, but I also like to think of it as having varying degrees of permanence.  Our class has community because we meet twice a week at the same time and for the same purpose.  Such a definition can be easily applied to a weekly church meeting or a monthly HOA meeting. Think, for a moment, about the degree of permanence that exists within these two communities – you can maybe run away from church for a short while but if you are truly religious or spiritual, your escape will be short-lived. And for an HOA, well, it is our best and worst friend as a homeowner right? So, for our purposes, I think about permanence in interaction since it is at the heart of virtual or online communities. Our interactions are interconnected, blending our private and public selves, which have a direct correlation to my personal understanding of “power, status, and worth” (Anderson, “Writing Power Into Online Discussion,” 2006).  As a class, our sense of community existed a priori. Let me explain: I am working on a PhD; these are my colleagues; we share the same discipline; and now, as I have discovered, we share the same research interests as well.  In the end, I am bound to “see” them again one day at a conference or in a research publication, so if that’s not permanence or community, I don’t know what is.

References
Anderson, B. (2006). Writing Power Into Online Discussion. Computers and Composition , 23, 108-124.

Beach, R., & Doerr-Stevens, C. (2009). Learning Argument Practices through Online Role-Play:Toward a Rhetoric of Significance and Transformation. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy , 52 (6), 460-468.

Breuch, L. (2005). Enhancing Online Collaboration: Virtual Peer Review in the Writing Classrom. In K. Cook, & K. Grant-Davie, Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers (pp. 141-156). Amityville: Baywood Publishing Co.

Koh, J., & Kim, Y. (2004). Sense of Virtual Community: A Conceptual Framework and Empirical Validation. International Journal of Electronic Commerce , 8 (2), 75-93.

Natural Ethos vs. Mediated Ethos in the DE Classroom

We are all word-finders; we seek to interpret texts and we seek to be found within our texts.  In the online classroom, the text is the only way to be present.  In this piece, Lynn (2000) wonders if she is in attendance in her online class.  She asks, “In our pursuits as word-finders is ethos both ‘lost and not.’?”  Socrates act of covering and uncovering of his head signifies the complexities of ethos and its tangled relationship with language and self. Lynn asserts that there are ethical concerns with such separation of speaker from text; Isocrates addresses ethics by directing attention to the rhetor (based on the manner in which one lives). Aristotle believes it is not about being good as much as it is about appearing good to the audience; ethics grows not from the person’s life but is created in the act of speaking.   This makes rhetoric the act of constructing ethos.

Similar to death of the author debates, Lynn asks if the teacher even exists.  She provides a working definition of her own ethos as “a flexible conception of discourse relationships between writer and text and the character revealed within that relationship.”  In DE scholarship, this is much discussion about maintaining a student-centered classroom and being a “guide on the side.”  So, a new instructor might wonder if the instructor even exists, or more importantly, should the instructor exist.  Lynn asserts that students read and construct the instructor’s ethos in the classroom, but she questions the attempts by students to represent themselves as a different gender or race in classroom interactions; she believes that it is an ethical issue that requires more research into the concept of a natural ethos.

This is a very insightful piece and it brings up a perspective of online education that has yet to be explored.We all have multiple personas and conflicting identities, but if there is a “natural” ethos, how can it be defined?  And when we get into the classroom how might our “mediated” ethos appear and how should it appear?  I see some serious implications for those English instructors, like myself, who are caught teaching pre-packaged course content.  In this sense, it may be difficult to align our natural ethos with our mediated ethos which likely has a great deal of unknown pedagogical and ideological implications as well.

References
Smelser-Gackler, Lynn. (2000). Looking for the Teacher: Ethos in the Online Classroom. Journal of Literacy and Technology 1(2): Spring 2001.

Illusionary Ethos in Distance Education

Higgs & Budd (2007) provide a political perspective on the growth and development of online higher education; everything has a purpose.  The purpose of education is to instill a set of qualities such as intellectual abilities (analytical and verbal skills), character traits (self discipline and perseverance), and moral values (commitment to truth and objectivity).  The authors assert that when we speak of ethos, we are referring to the culture of goal-oriented behavior and that is guided by the pursuit of human virtues. The authors are asking, in a sense, is it possible for DE to have an ethos?

There is an ethical problem in higher education’s use of online education because of the tension between the goals of education in capital culture and the pressure to cater to the illusionary ethos of online education.  The illusionary ethos is that online education defines progress as the efficient production of goods  - so that education and its means of production become commodities (which renders the teacher redundant).  I think this is also an important tie-in as to why instructor are stripped down and devalued in their classification of “merely” facilitators.  In short, the authors assert that online education pretends to have moral value but it only claims a moral purpose – it does not define or demonstrate it on ground of virtues.  For example, most literature comes from within the field, is prescriptive, and never challenged; such literature usually reads: online education is flexible, effective, efficient, interactive, and affordable.  The ethical implications of these claims should be explored and we should be asking how these events are happening and with what effect.

This topic is important to my own research since I am interested in the dialogic interplay between field and practitioner which has not been adequately explored. In this tension between field and practitioner, there are also overlaps between ethos and identity and this article makes that connection clearer in the purview of field ethos & field identity. For English Studies, we already understand and use terms such as identity and ethos, but I don’t think that we have even considered them in the context of distance education - what are some of the assumptions that we continue to operate using?  In what ways should these assumptions be questioned in light of our own field identity?

References
Higgs, G., & Budd, J. (2007). Toward an Authentic Ethos for Online Higher Education. Policy Futures in Education 5(4): 507-515.