Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction: Principles and Processes

Educators need new skills for teaching in the ever-evolving online environment, and departments need approaches to such technology that empower instructors and students both. Drawing on current thinking in Hewett and Ehmann offer a fully developed approach to individualized online writing instruction (OWI) that is not platform-dependent.

rhetoric and composition, adult education, and e-learning, and incorporating their own experiences with a variety of online instructional contexts, including the online learning provider Smarthinking, Inc., the authors demonstrate how five important pedagogical principles―investigation, immersion, individualization, association, and reflection―can inform effective online instructor training, independent of the platform being used. Within this framework, the book offers a theoretical justification for online writing instruction (OWI) and a fully developed approach to training educators for such instruction―whether in networked classrooms, distance learning, e-mail- or Internet-based conferences, or online tutoring. The book includes concrete examples of asynchronous (non-real-time) and synchronous (real-time) training methods, complete with illustrations and screen shots, showing clearly how instructors can learn to engage their students in productive conversations about their writing with or without face-to-face contact. Three appendixes offer additional information on selecting instructors for OWI, findings from a two-year study on whether and how students use OWI, and an extensive glossary. This book is ideal for directors of online instructional programs and teachers of graduate and advanced undergraduate methods courses. Because the book employs and addresses the broader instructional issues of adult and e-learning education, it will be appropriate for some corporate learning settings. Educators, professional trainers, and administrators in a variety of fields can extrapolate principles and processes for their own disciplinary contexts despite the book’s disciplinary focus on writing.