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I thought some of you might find this document helpful for thinking through your approach to plagiarism. The Council of Writing Program Administrators is a national organization comprised of college and university faculty who run or have professional interest in researching and running writing programs. This document is a statement of best practices for educating students about plagiarism and for building educational environments in which academic honesty flourishes.

David, This is very useful for those of us teaching writing intensive courses - thank you.

I like that this encourages working with students (even PLAGIARISTS) in order to help them get past bad or misguided habits and develop better, more ethical writing practices. Even in the short time I've been teaching, it seems like students are becoming both (a) less attentive to issues of casual plagiarism and (b) less responsive to punitive approaches. I think these guideline could be helpful, for both online and traditional courses, in helping students to think about the kinds of writers they want to be. (...or the kinds of writers *I* want them to be)

Edutopia's compilation of OERs for writing. Among my favorites is Andrea Walsh's MIT course on expository writing: Analyzing Mass Media.

Piece from _Kairos_, a flagship journal in writing studies, about how principles of universal design can make writing pedagogy "more flexible, more inclusive, and more challenging."

One of the most important professional documents in my field is the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) Outcomes Statement. This statement, the result of years of collaboration and revision, defines general learning outcomes for first-year composition (FYC) courses. Most importantly for others in our EFOT class, the statement contains sections that explain how faculty in all programs and departments can build on the preparation students receive in FYC.

With this and another article that I will also post, I think I have found the answer to the question I posted on Bb discussion/reflection - is it better to be redundant or to be a minimalist? To quote from the other article, "in an online environment, redundancy is often better than elegant succinctness." To quote from this article - in Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener said, "We can hardly expect that any important message is entrusted for transmission to a single neuron, nor that any important operation is entrusted to a single neuronal mechanism." When teaching writing online, simply put, you should provide information to your students through multiple means.

I liked the article in this week's reading on creating an interactive syllabus and found this article about how writing students contributed to an interactive course syllabus. This resonated with me since I teaching writing courses.

One of the best resources in the world for people form across the university who are interested in teaching writing. This site is an open resource for books, journals, and teaching modules.

This resource gives some great, easy to read ideas for matching your learning objectives with your assessment techniques. It also has a list of criteria for writing clear assignments, which could be useful as a checklist when creating a new assignment.

Hi Susan - I particularly liked the Alignment tab, which gave some very clear suggestions of assignments that align with stated learning objectives. Your suggestion of a checklist is brilliant! I also noticed that they linked to their Institutional Assessment page from this page - a nice reminder that everything needs to be in alignment at every level.

Susan, Great find, I too find the tabs really helpful and have bookmarked this reference to my Bookmarks page so that I can refer to it over and over. Thanks so much!

Dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) is a way to develop local standards. Teachers work with colleagues and students to build evaluation criteria. This is a link to a succinct definition developed by the Writing Program at UMass-Amherst, where they practice DCM.

In the time I do not have, I am keeping an eye (and only that) on a Coursera online course on how to create an online course. Nowhere as exhastive as this one, but it does provide me with hunting ground for sites to suggest in this forum. Here is one of two I will post on writing SLO's

Primer for using Google Docs in your class. Provides information about various tools and plugins that enable bibliographic work, speech recognition and voice commenting, assessment using a rubric, and more.

The Web Literacy Map is a map of competencies and skills that Mozilla and our community of stakeholders believe are important to pay attention to when getting better at reading, writing and participating on the web.

This is a brief article aimed at University of Nebraska-Lincoln graduate students offering time management and email writing tips. I chose this article both because I find the general time management tips helpful for everyone and I feel that many of my students would benefit from similar suggestions/guidelines when communicating professionally online. I especially enjoyed the line reminding students, "that many faculty view an e-mail message as a letter that was delivered quickly rather than a quick conversation."

Here are some insights into how Georgia Tech's Writing and Communication Program theorizes and practices assessment. They are certainly using some "trendy" approaches to assessment and evaluation; students have to compose a self-review essay, for example. Summary from the Website: The Writing and Communication Program is interested in formative and summative assessment in individual classes and in the program as a whole. To create consistent assessment across the entire program, we use a common base rubric (which individual instructors modify to fit their assignments) and an end-of-semester portfolio system.

The author discusses the theory behind online discussions, as well as the potential value of - and problems associated with - online discussions. Some excerpts: "The argument I offer here is that saying an online discussion is a worse version of an IRL discussion is like saying an apple is a worse version of an orange. Disappointment with online discussions because they are not like IRL discussion is like being disappointed with an apple because it is a bad orange." ... "In an IRL discussion, students look, speak, and listen with multiple objects. In online discussion, like during a lecture, students sit and stare at a single object as well: but it is a computer rather than a person speaking. The lecturer is the computer. This lecturer is a screen with a keyboard and includes a complex series of frames within which the student types sentences in varying sequences. By this I am not only talking about video lectures which students watch, but rather more perceptually. In a lecture, the lecturer is the sole object of attention. There is only one object of attention: bracketing the complex material engaged with in the screen, it remains true that students exclusively engage with the screen when learning online. Students in online courses stare at a computer when learning online the same way they would stare at a lecturer speaking, focusing their attention on a single object. At a lecture, it's a person. Online, it's the computer."... "In any case, online discussions are still discussions. It would be a mistake to say all we do during online discussion is stare intensely at a computer. Most of the discussions in my online courses occur asynchronously on discussion boards. On these written discussion boards, for example, we read and write responsively. The whole situation of online discussion is therefore more akin, in this respect, to written correspondence."

From the conclusion: "Participating well in online discussions might be more like writing a good letter or having a good phone conversation, as opposed to a good spoken kind comment in an IRL discussion. We should not expect online discussions to be anything at all like IRL discussions. They are categorically different. In other words, being disappointed with online discussions because they are not like IRL discussions is like being disappointed with apples because they are not oranges." "In planning online courses, generating online assignments, and creating materials for online teaching, it is important to remember that online discussions require students to focus intense attention on a machine, and therefore compels them to cathect and introject that machine. Independently of the fluidity of your module and software, students transfer meanings onto their machines during the learning process rather than a person. While the introjection of machines is an interesting opportunity for further educational research, as an instructor, plan for student participation with this in mind: they are interacting with a machine and not people. An online discussion is more like a computer's lecture than an IRL discussion, no matter how interactive."

Universal Design in the ESL classroom

I like this list, Jane, though I feel the author Kregg Strehorn could have elaborated on some of the suggestions to explain more clearly what is meant and what a particular method entails. Maybe there was a strict word limit to which Strehorn had to adhere. In any case, some of the ideas are very interesting but also seem to be very time-consuming and potentially confusing. Don't get me wrong, I think it's wonderful that Stehorn reads and records some of the texts they are using in the class, reads and records and transcribes lectures, gives students different assignment choices, writes detailed class outlines and shares them with students, etc. All of these ideas make sense to me, but how do you have time as a teacher (and in my/our case instructor and full-time staff member) to do all that, unless you teach the same course over and over again? I am a great supporter and believer in universal design; plus, online classes in particular are, almost by nature, using a range of tools, thus serving students with different needs. Yet, Strehorn should discuss the amount of work involved in creating this course and should also address students' responses to this course as well as potential pitfalls in terms of student assessment. Perhaps Strehorn has done so in a different place.

OK. Here is the other article I promised. My interest was to find out about the principle of redundancy, but this article is not just about that. Editor's Note : Effective online learning requires careful preparation, design, implementation, and follow-up. This article combines best practices from a variety of resources - research studies, publications, and discussions among online instructors. The analogy of a garden is used to reinforce practices that will ensure a successful "harvest!"

Hi Yu, I like this article. For some points, I had not thought about them. Thanks for sharing.

Author Information Conklin, Heather C., Tuten, J. Terrell, and VanderMeulen, Matt Institution(s) or Organization(s) Where EP Occurred: Ashford University Effective Practice Abstract/Summary Abstract/Summary of Effective Practice: Ashford University's use of cutting-edge, web-based, dynamic rubrics in eight online writing-intensive courses has improved the efficiency and effectiveness of grading, feedback provision, and assessment.