12: Faculty Professionalization for OWI

Code-and-Fix Faculty Professionalization Design

The practice of software design has long followed a code-and-fix methodology, building programs or websites on successive, layered, quick decisions. If the computer and project application is small, the approach works quite well. Code-and-fix is a way to get or keep moving on a project. But as systems grow, new features or better approaches invariably become challenging to implement. Bugs abound until they are fixed in long testing phases, taxing human resources and frustrating users. If the fix is too time-consuming and the choice regarding user identity and needs is left to programmers, as Jaron Lanier (2011) suggested in You Are Not a Gadget, bugs might simply be considered features of the system: if it is not a bug, it must be a feature.

Using the code-and-fix method as an analogy, consider the creation of an OWI faculty development plan. Whether they know it or not, most English or writing departments have likely used a code-and-fix methodology to get their OWI programs started. They usually begin by asking faculty to teach a few courses; then they gather comment cards or end-of-semester evaluations to see what students think, figure out which outcomes are met readily and which need more attention, implement strategies to improve those courses, create additional courses, and pepper everyone with occasional workshops or one-on-one support with a tech savvy person in IT or an in-house geek, to spice. The approach may work well to get started, but it is very problematic if it is the only way WPAs know to develop the OWI program. Professionalization also often follows a code-and-fix method: there is a short-term demand to fill OWCs with teachers, so we hire and train (or not) teachers to construct courses and teach online, perhaps calling the courses “betas” or “pilots,” fixing problems through implementation. Once courses are going, we copy and paste the original, “fix” courses into additional sections, and hire more instructors and let them teach the content.

This chapter argues that to sustain faculty development in more meaningful ways, certainly more than a code-and-fix method is needed. WPAs and other administrators in charge of OWI programs need to be savvy and thoughtful about faculty development and online instruction.

OWI programs evolve. As they evolve, some WPAs may survey faculty and students to prioritize fixing online technology and pedagogical problems, perhaps even creating knowledge bases of frequently-asked questions (FAQs) and solutions. They may ask such questions as:

• How can online teaching enhance pedagogy?
• How should OWI faculty rethink educational approaches and organization overall to better meet online instructional needs?
• How can OWI teachers improve student participation in activities and exercises and discussion?
• How can OWI teachers help students to improve their performance on papers and exams?
• How can OWI teachers give students greater access to the course in terms of flexibility of time and location?
• How can all participants improve their records of interactions between faculty and students and among students?

These more sophisticated questions and the concurrent desire for improved professionalization call for WPAs and OWI teachers alike to move beyond code-and-fix to something more sustainable. At the root of each of these questions and the programmatic development they encourage is access, and access is possible only by conceptualizing accessibility at the level of interface so that our course goals, curriculum, delivery tools, pedagogy, and professionalization also fall in line with this overarching goal.

Chapter 1 shares the rationale for 15 OWI principles for effective OWI practice. The very first principle of A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for OWI (CCCC OWI Committee, 2013) is an overarching guideline that grounded and supported each of the following 14 principles. OWI Principle 1 strongly suggested that scholars and educators pay close attention to access and inclusivity for students and teachers at every step in the planning and implementing of online classes (pp. 7-11). Code-and-fix approaches to OWI professionalization inadequately follow this principle because universal design for (all) learners and facilitators requires more planning than these approaches allow. Students and teachers should have equal access to content; access to course design; and access to technologies used, assignments prescribed, and assessment measurements planned. It is important to underscore that OWI Principle 1 referred to the access needs of every teacher beginning to prepare and teach and assess courses in online environments. The code-and-fix method most likely does not provide such universal access because, as a methodological approach, many potential problems still can remain hidden or unaddressed as simple features of the ongoing program. When professional development includes quick fixes or none at all, there are systemic problems that end up becoming large, crucial, and potentially damaging to the very education that OWI proposes to provide.

Indeed, a few years down the road, important systematic bugs inevitably will arise. Faculty get squeezed. Who owns the content? OWI Principle 5 suggested that faculty should retain reasonable control over the content they produce, and doing so can become challenging in this design model (pp. 15-16). Who is compensated for new course preparation? If the content already is there, is the instructor of record a teacher or merely a facilitator? Can pay for online teaching even be lower than teaching face-to-face? OWI Principle 8 suggested that faculty should be fairly compensated for creating online course content (pp. 19-20). Should class sizes be increased because some instructor workload already has been provided, even though increased numbers limit the potential for productive interaction? OWI Principle 9 recommended online writing classes be capped at 20, and preferably 15 (pp. 20-21). Without strategic planning, class sizes likely will be increased. It is difficult to plan and justify and fight class-size creep in the code-and-fix design method. Should asynchronous exchange be prioritized over synchronous communication in order to maximize flexible scheduling? Doing so is code-and-fix professionalization development and support, putting processes into play and then fixing infrastructural concerns as a program proceeds and grows. While there are short-term benefits, the approach causes significant long-term problems for the professionalization of the field where, again, bugs are just bugs.

What are some of the benefits that better, more systematized faculty professionalization design models could provide, benefits that code-and-fix approaches tend to support insufficiently? WPAs need to consider the value of innovative teaching strategies that are not recognized by those in authority in institutions as worthy of productive effort in promotion and tenure cases. If teaching online can create greater time and locational flexibility, consider strategies a department can use to support or incentivize faculty or to help maximize opportunities like conference travel, extended research trips, study abroad work, interdisciplinary or inter-institutional teaching, and the like. These are “integrated scholar” opportunities where faculty can develop their own research, teaching, and service together. Plans for recognizing efforts to design and create effective pedagogy in new modalities is difficult in code-and-fix approaches. Something more systematic should be put into place, too, if faculty members are to be encouraged to package written course content into books or to customize materials in more targeted ways for students and to address programmatic goals. Improving pedagogy and experimenting with new ideas is not encouraged when fixes are too cumbersome to put into place quickly. Faculty who are not supported in smart ways will not innovate and take risks because the cost in terms of human and monetary resources is simply too high.

Predictive Faculty Professionalization Design

There is another approach to software design that works to schedule fixes in more timely ways, saving costs and better supporting system-wide approaches. The goal of this approach is to plan testing and recoding cycles with version updates that are engineered by teams of designers, programmers, and usability testers. Implementing an OWC or set of courses, clearly, will require planned development and growth and support. Predicting the directions that the software should take based on evolving user needs also can be limiting, however. Software, modality, content, access, and other requirements change constantly in effective OWI and not in an easily “scheduled” manner. Design requires much creativity, and prediction for when changes need to be made is difficult, as coding or content construction typically follows design. It often is the case that faculty seek to save time by copying and pasting their course content from one semester to the next without recognizing that student demographics have changed, that content must be updated, and that one size does not fit all—particularly with regard to issues of access and inclusivity. By the time updates or recoding is complete, including a round of design revision, users are likely to demand additional or different features. In this design model, teachers often over-focus on design rather than content, missing the goal of OWI Principle 2, which suggested that the course should not be overburdened by teaching tools (p. 11). The semester already may be under way and content updating becomes superficial. And the move from design to coding to usability often is delayed by more bugs. This model is predictive design, which affords some flexibility for constructing long-term, planned development. For example, it seeks to grow a selection of online courses while planning to upgrade their goals and objectives alongside those of onsite courses.

In terms of using this model as a professionalization analogy, though, this method offers limited recognition for OWI teachers as creative designers and expert pedagogues in online environments. What are differences in the demands of fully online, hybrid, and face-to-face course deliveries? OWI Principle 7 called us to focus on adequate training and professional development for OWI specifically (pp. 17-19). Should different sorts of professional development and support mechanisms be installed and grown based on personnel rather than presumed curricular evolution? OWI Principles 11, 12, 13, and 14 encouraged us to develop specific support spaces and tools for teachers’ and students’ online work that may take significant development, such as media labs or OWLs or other virtual or physical thirdspaces (pp. 23-30; see Grego & Thompson, 2007; Lee & Carpenter, 2013). A thirdspace is a commonplace where information senders and receivers can construct and transact ideas: “the study of space offers an answer according to which the social relations of production have a social existence to the extent that they have a spatial existence; they project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing the space itself” (LeFevre, 1991, p. 129). Other questions emerge: Do administrators need to analyze teacher and course evaluation assessments with the same or different learning outcomes in mind? How can predictive coding and content creation aid in student and teacher motivation and retention, getting them literally and figuratively plugged-in (English, 2014)? Again, OWI Principle 7 addressed the needs for fair and educated assessment of OWCs and their teachers (pp. 17-19), while OWI Principle 5 supported trained instructors in autonomous OWC development that might increase both teacher and student motivation as well as retention (pp. 15-16).

Both code-and-fix and predictive design methods are used commonly in developing online courses and teacher-support systems: build and fix as you go, and schedule fixes in between terms or over the summer or next break for the latest academic “version” or customized edition. The first method makes some sense for small programs in order to get started, and the second makes some sense to continue to improve the quality of faculty professionalization as smaller programs grow. And it is possible to bring these two approaches in line with the OWI principles to a certain degree. We should consider, for instance, OWI Principle 4, which suggested that “appropriate onsite composition theories, pedagogies, and strategies should be migrated and adapted to the online instructional environment” (pp. 14-15). Follow the move to OWI with a specific analysis of how the onsite and then the online program measures learning objectives. Indeed, these important principles and guidelines can fit well within online writing faculty professionalization.

While these two software development strategies overlap and can build on one another to great benefit, one thing is clear: Because creative processes are difficult to plan and to build into faculty professionalization and because the demand and supply for online teaching and learning fluctuates, fixing is time-consuming and predictability is extraordinarily challenging, often limiting, and still quite time-consuming. It is not enough to transfer existing face-to-face instruction models to OWC development, delivery, and support. There are many professional development design issues, most notably that of access, which require more significant ongoing review and rethinking.

OWI Principle 1: The Overarching Principle of Access and Inclusivity

With OWI Principle 1 as the overarching guideline, just as OWI should be universally inclusive and accessible (pp. 7-11), faculty working online should retain all of the rights and support and pay structure privileges as onsite faculty, especially if following an integrated scholar approach to connecting teaching, research, and service in online learning environments. Working with students online both asynchronously and synchronously is just as intensive as working with students in a classroom and during office hours (see Chapters 2, 4, & 11). To understand this intensive work, consider valuing people-oriented adaptive work rather than process-oriented models, recognizing that every student learns how to read critically and write in developed ways uniquely. As such, faculty who support students in a people-oriented paradigm should be rewarded for the quality of interaction in unique spaces they provide students. And just as a variety of modalities and tools should be made available to different types of learners, faculty should be encouraged to teach in onsite, hybrid, and/or fully online environments to maximize their own teaching skills and integrated scholar needs. Enacting OWI Principle 1, universal access, requires enabling our sensibilities to imagine the real-world audiences as a diverse universe of users with highly divergent needs through converging practices and systematic goals and objectives—and that effort must be considered deeply, taught to one another, researched systematically, written about, and published in scholarly venues. No doubt, it should be rewarded appropriately.

OWI Principles 2 - 6: Instructional Principles

OWI Principles 2 through 6 covered instructional guidelines (p. 11-17). They detailed why OWCs should focus on writing using unique online instructional tools rather than spending too much time teaching technologies. OWI Principle 2, for instance, suggested that OWCs should focus on the writing and not on technology, which means that faculty should be trained to manipulate technology within their pedagogical philosophies rather than vice-versa. In thinking about how students interact with faculty, with each other, and with content online, faculty pedagogy can develop in productive ways. OWI Principle 3 suggested that appropriate teaching and learning strategies should be developed, which means thinking through such issues as how composition instruction in onsite settings may need to change in online ones, how new approaches in online settings need to be employed, and how outcomes can be augmented when students are increasing their technological literacies. OWI Principle 4, similarly, pointed out that appropriate contemporary composition theories should be integrated into online environments. In terms of faculty professionalization, this principle opens new areas of research and training. Faculty should attend campus-wide, local, and national conferences regarding working with learners online, including developing a better understanding of working with adult and nontraditional and visual learners if the demographics warrant (see Chapters 8, 9, & 10). OWI Principle 5 suggested online teachers should have reasonable control over their own content and teaching techniques, and OWI Principle 6 noted that unique and experimental models themselves should, like all OWCs, be required to follow effective practices principles.

Remember that a primary goal of refactoring is to alter internal structures without changing external behaviors. If a teaching load is 4:4 at an institution, that external requirement should be the same even if internal pedagogical shifts in modality are encouraged. If the number of students per section is capped at 20, which is recommended in OWI Principle 9, then the equivalent online course should be similarly capped (although OWI Principle 9 spoke singularly to OWI course caps without considering onsite courses, this recommendation had its origins in the CCCC’s Statement of Principles and Standards for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing (1989) and the CCCC’s Statement on Second Language Writing and Writers (2009), which were written primarily for onsite courses; pp. 20-21). Ultimately, differences between face-to-face, hybrid, and fully online teaching should be an internal matter of teaching styles that increasingly resemble one another rather than demand or call for different teachers with incredibly different skill sets (see Chapter 18). Doing so reduces the complexity of online courses, improves maintainability by enabling teachers to reinforce effective practices in varied delivery modalities, refines the architecture of writing programs to improve sustainability, and develops a model where changes in curriculum or approach or composition theories can be extended readily to all varied course sections in safe and controlled ways.

A significant danger in online writing faculty professionalization is in spending money and time developing a course and then thinking the course is ready to teach term after term without revision or additional thought. Instead, courses should be developed with iterative design in mind in order to breathe, synchronously, with the developing skills and interests and needs of the teacher as well as the increasingly divergent interests of the students. Creating a shared master course or model syllabus with instructors in a program works well in terms of the new media principles of variability and modularity. However, as the OWI instructional principles indicate, writing courses should focus on well-considered content that can make use of online technologies with teachers who are making specific decisions on conveying, teaching, and assessing student writing practices. Adaptable course shells work well if there is teacher ownership, and that should come from teachers’ iteratively refactoring design and content so that they can (re)present and transcode the course in their own situated contexts. This room for play and innovation in online learning spaces creates that thirdspace unique to every shell that is people-based rather than only process-based, so as help teachers to avoid defining students as stock users of class content term after term, year after year.

In Teaching/Writing in Thirdspaces: The Studio Approach, Rhonda Grego and Nancy S. Thompson (2008) discussed thirdspaces as being “influenced by institutional politics, preferences, and power relations” (p. 5)—emphasizing local needs and how close attention to the everyday lives of students and teachers in specific locations is important. Researchers need tools to measure the knowledge transfer and benefits of spaces like ePortfolios and online learning systems (see also Lee & Carpenter, 2013; Whithaus, 2013). Students and teachers then participate to shape the classroom as a creative text to stimulate ideas and to work together to solve problems. Refactoring course content and delivery of that content must be assessed for reliability and validity across sections by teams of teachers or administrators, which is essential to OWI Principle 6 (p. 16-17). Embedding appropriate composition theories and core composition teaching techniques in OWI is critical. Online writing teachers should retain reasonable control over their own content and teaching techniques, and experimental or new models of OWI still should be pedagogically sound, entail adequate preparation, and require valuable oversight.

OWI Principles 7 - 9: Faculty Principles

OWI Principles 7 through 9 covered faculty guidelines, and these are especially significant when considering faculty professionalization (p. 17-21). OWI Principle 7, for instance, suggested that administrators must receive appropriate OWI-focused training, development, and support for evaluation and promotion. What determines appropriate training varies from place to place and from person to person. At some institutions, a course release is offered to prepare an OWC for the first time. This support may be similar to the time provided to a developer of any course that is taught for the time. At other institutions, such support entails extra compensation for designing and constructing course content in terms of a stipend, additional support for traveling to a conference to present and learn about OWI, opportunities to present development work on campus for additional pay, incentives in terms of useful tools like a scanner or digital camera, or moving to the top of the list of faculty who need a new office computer, and the like. An iterative, agile framework for faculty is needed to support and then recognize the work that is required to create rigorous thought spaces online for students, motivating faculty in development, action, and then action-to-results process. It is vital to encourage faculty to become integrated scholars, connecting teaching to research and service as well as to a sense of investment in the thirdspace culture of the program.

OWI Principle 8 recommended that online writing teachers receive fair and equitable compensation for their work. What is fair is obfuscated sometimes by administrative drive and pressure to increase profit, certainly (see Chapters 6 & 7, for example). We often do not recognize the value in working with students at a distance virtually, for instance, in the same ways that we see faculty work with students physically. There often is less “distance,” however, between an online student and faculty member than there is between a faculty lecturer and a student in a face-to-face setting. That is, technologies afford opportunities for highly interactive spaces that, if done well to support students, can be intensive and time-consuming to faculty. And, as the best courses are those that change as needed through agile design, the notion that teachers should only be facilitators is problematic in OWCs. Some higher education models include paying highly trained rhetoricians and compositionists, for instance, to design and create curricula, and then paying less trained and therefore “less expensive” teachers to facilitate the content without iterative refactoring. Good teaching must consider design and content synchronously, however, changing dynamically in directions students take the course in. If teachers in onsite, face-to-face environments are provided offices and classrooms and tools to use, teachers using other delivery systems, too, should be provided the resources they need. Resources may include computers and professional opportunities like holding online office hours, but may also include partial reimbursement for Internet access, phone “minutes,” and even more flexible synchronous communication class meeting times.

OWI Principle 9 suggested that OWCs should be capped at 20 students per course with an eye toward 15 if possible. Again, in building an agile design system that highlights interaction and works toward improving types of teacher::student and student::student interaction using available technologies, a system both can motivate and recognize faculty who excel in building and feeding such spaces. With OWCs, we want students and teachers to “inhabit” these transactional spaces in order to maximize opportunities for learning. Some programs cap online courses at 10% lower than face-to-face courses, others work to keep the same enrollment per class numbers as onsite sections, while still others increase the online course cap, possibly seeing it as less work than onsite courses or knowing that a number of students likely will drop the course. Another model is to lift all caps on OWCs but create small peer groups and asking faculty to manage specific numbers of groups.1 Ultimately, higher course caps begin to limit adequate motivation to interact to a high degree with one another and with content, thereby creating insufficient opportunities for students to receive teacher and peer feedback. Instructors new to online teaching certainly benefit from lower caps as they work to manage interaction online. Similar to the tendency to cut assignments in onsite courses when student numbers increase or when numbers of sections a teacher is required to teach, online writing teachers with higher course caps may be tempted to cut assignments and to move from synchronous to asynchronous-only models or otherwise to limit interaction or response.

OWI Principles 10 - 14: Institutional Principles

OWI Principles 10 through 14 cover institutional guidelines (p. 21-30). OWI Principle 10 suggested that the institution should ensure that both students and teachers are prepared to work using the local tools and approaches employed, which speaks directly to the need for agile training that is revised and updated as newly mediated approaches and tools are put into place. OWI Principle 11 recommended supporting OWI with personalized and interpersonal online communities. For many institutions, such support begins minimally with setting up an FAQ and step-by-step Web page, but this process follows a code-and-fix or predictive design method that leaves many gaps. To create a more useful support mechanism requires generating a knowledge base with feedback offered transactionally by administrators and teachers and students. Institutions and WPAs should enable students and faculty, especially, to create and connect their personal and/or professional identities to this information. OWI Principle 12 suggested that institutions should foster teacher satisfaction with as robust a focus as is given to student satisfaction. To this end, institutions and WPAs should consider designing an electronic performance support system tied to student and programmatic success. OWI Principle 13 suggested that both online and onsite support tools must be in place for students such that online writing students could receive their primary support online and in the modalities and media engaged by their OWCs (see Chapter 5). Creating more media-rich examples, such as screencasts, in addition to text-based keys to success, is important in order to engage divergent learners convergently. Finally, OWI Principle 14 extended support to include OWLs and tutors who must also receive professional development support matching the environment in which they work, which enables OWL administrators and tutors to receive professionalization opportunities in like method and quality as the WPA and online writing teacher.

OWI Principle 15: Research and Exploration

The final principle, OWI Principle 15, is a research and exploration guideline (p. 31-32). It suggested that administrators and teachers and tutors, as they continue to professionalize their understanding of teaching and learning in online writing environments, must be committed to ongoing action research. That is, again, research requires an agile design refactoring process, where small changes are made and tested in ways that support the larger infrastructure yet make quick, positive improvement. Such an agilely designed refactored research process can significantly restructure approaches over time without breaking the system. Thus, professionalization becomes a process of contact rethinking, rewriting, reworking, and retooling content and approaches through transactional and dialectical exchanges between teachers, tutors, students, content, research in the field, new technological affordances, new motivation through training, and the like.