Designing the Online Graduate Writing Seminar

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Designing the Online Graduate Writing Seminar

• Kristine Rabberman
• Lisa Minetti
• Thursday, March 20, 2008

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Online Learning at Penn

• Undergraduate, lecture-based courses offered in
  the School of Arts and Sciences since 1999
• Limited faculty interest/participation in online
  learning environments
• Goal for FOLK 541 pilot Learn more about how
  interactive online technologies could support
  learning objectives for graduate seminars

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FOLK 541 What

• Core course offered 10 years face to face
• Students introduced to
• processes to develop academic research project
• academic writing conventions across disciplines
• skills to develop and refine their own original
  research proposal

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FOLK 541 How

• Sequenced formal writing assignments
• Interactive modality through breakouts, class
  discussion and peer review
• Weekly written feedback from the instructor

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Goals for Online Pilot

• Achieve learning outcomes
• Retain interactivity
• Support sequenced writing assignments
• Take advantage of course tools to innovate

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Tools for Achieving Objectives

• Synchronous web conferencing tool
• Breakout rooms
• VoIP
• Whiteboard
• Threaded discussions
• Journals
• Formal writing assignments

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Achieving Learning Objectives Instructional Chain

• Goals for class session
• Threaded discussion
• Journal

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Achieving Learning Objectives GoalsUnit 5
Evidence and Research Social History

• Discussion of common reading
• Understand how a social historian meets
  challenges in analyzing her primary sources
• draw connections between a social historians
  research questions and methodology.

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Achieving Learning Objectives GoalsUnit 5
Evidence and Research Social History

• Strategies to develop research projects
• Convince a reader that a proposed project is
  important to conduct and will progress knowledge
  in the field, while still being bounded and small
  enough to be manageable
• address realistically the limitations of
  available sources while still speaking to
  important issues within an academic field.

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Extending the impacts

• Course design requires students to develop the
  discipline to write and think outside of class
• Informal touch base weekly enables continuous
  dialog with instructor
• Written archive of evolution of project
  represents the research and writing process