Conference on College Composition and Communication Logo

Author: ksuchor

Contact information for Lisa Meloncon

Name: Lisa Meloncon
Title: Associate Professor of Technical and Professional Writing Institution:University of Cincinnati Location: Cincinnati, OH
Phone: 513-556-3034
Email: lisa.meloncon@uc.edu
Skype: lisameloncon
Website: www.tek-ritr.com
Twitter: @lmeloncon

  

Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing Instruction (March 2016)

Committee Members

Diane Martinez, Co-Chair 
Scott Warnock, Co-Chair
Kevin DePew
Shareen Grogan
Heidi Skurat Harris
Beth Hewett
Mahli Xuan Mechenbier
Lisa Meloncon
Leslie Olsen
Sushil Oswal
Joanna Paull
Melody Pickle
Rich Rice
Shelley Rodrigo
Jason Snart
  

Committee Charge

This committee is charged to:

Charge 1: Continue to identify, examine, and research online writing instruction (OWI) principles and effective strategies in online writing centers and in blended, hybrid, and distance-based writing classrooms, specifically composition classrooms but also including other college-writing or writing-intensive courses.
 
Charge 2: Continue to identify, examine, and research effective practices for using OWI specifically for English language learners, individuals with physical and/or learning disabilities, and students with socioeconomic challenges in coordination with related CCCC committees.
 
Charge 3: Maintain and update the Position Statement on the OWI Principles and Effective Practices.
 
Charge 4: In consultation with the Assessment Committee and other relevant groups, review and update the 2004 Position Statement “Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments.”
 
Charge 5: Identify and/or create instructional and professional development materials and strategies to be posted on the Committee’s Web-based OWI Open Resource Webpage.
 
Charge 6: Provide the writing instructional community with access to information about OWI-specific faculty and program development that can assist with legitimizing online teaching for professional development, remuneration, and advancement purposes.
 
Charge 7: Share effective practices in OWI with the CCCC membership in various formats, including instructional workshops at CCCC conferences and events as well as other professional venues.

November 2015 Update

The CCCC Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing Instruction (OWI) is focusing its efforts over the next year on research about student experiences and expectations in hybrid and fully online writing courses, particularly in regard to accessibility. This fall, the committee has launched a pilot version of a survey for OWI students. At the 2016 CCCC in Houston, the Committee will offer several opportunities for members of the writing instruction community to participate in its work, including a half-day pre-conference Wednesday workshop. The committee and its 35-member Expert Panel continue to explore faculty and administrative aspects of OWI as well. It maintains the OWI Open Resource (OR). Through the OR, writing teachers can share specific teaching practices to help each other teach writing online. This work follows from the committee’s publication of A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for OWI in spring 2013 and the 2015 book Foundational Practices for OWI (Parlor Press), which was co-edited by committee members Beth Hewett and Kevin DePew.

The State-of-the-Art of OWI

Initial Report of the CCCC Committee for Best Practice in Online Writing Instruction (PDF), April 12, 2011

Fully Online Distance-Based Courses Survey Results

Hybrid/Blended Courses Survey Results

2009 CCCC Session Review

Read a review of the session we presented at the 2009 CCCC Convention titled “CCCC Committee Research into Best Practices for Online Writing Instruction (OWI).”

Annotated Bibliography

The CCCC Committee on Best Practices in Online Writing Instruction has gathered, reviewed, and annotated webtexts, articles, and books from 1980 through early 2008 that help us better understand those approaches and strategies that are most effective in OWI and compiled them into an annotated bibliography (pdf).

Open Access: Where Next?

Kim D. Gainer
Radford University

A few days ago my daughter was in her bedroom working on a paper about the French painter Edgar Degas. “You should go to the library,” I called from the kitchen. “I am in the library,” she hollered back. Clearly, my daughter and I have a different understanding of what it means to be “in” a library. Her university (which also happens to be my university) subscribes to over two-hundred databases, including many full-text ones, and after two years my daughter has yet to find it necessary to physically check out a journal. In some ways, this is all to the good. Our university’s bricks-and-mortar library, while a respectable size for an institution with 9,500 students, is still a finite structure with only enough shelving to accommodate a fraction of the journals that my daughter can access via online database. She has, moreover, become quite adept at making use of this type of resource. For one thing, she is skillful at picking out the specific databases that would be most useful for the particular project that she is working on. For another, she has developed the knack of combining search terms that will return hits likeliest to be relevant to her topic. As a mother, I find myself, as we say in my family, “grinning like an idiot” in my pride at her skill in navigating through various databases, each with different coverage, each set up slightly differently from the others.

On the other hand, as an instructor at a university that has experienced significant budget cuts, I worry about the cost of those databases. I also worry about the fact that, once our students graduate, some of them will no longer have easy access to these resources. In some cases, public libraries have joined in consortia designed to control costs, for example TexShare; still, the number of databases our graduates are able to access is likely to be significantly fewer than the number they can utilize now. Moreover, after they graduate, some of our graduates may need to redefine their understanding of what it means to be “in” a library as not all public libraries are able to support remote access to the databases to which they do subscribe. That fact will also reduce our graduates’ access to resources. While enrolled at the university, they do not need to subtract travel time from the time available to devote to their project. In addition, they are able to access databases via the university’s library portal twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

In some online communities, it is not uncommon to see a blogger or a commenter broadcasting an appeal for a copy of an article published in a journal to which he or she does not have ready access even via interlibrary loan. The rationale for such requests is that the article is behind a pay wall and that the would-be reader finds the charge for access to one article to be excessive. (Indeed, charges of thirty dollars or more are not uncommon.) When owners of databases have locked up access to a journal, it is probably inevitable that readers unaffiliated with subscribing institutions are going to be faced with what are arguably excessive fees for access to individual articles.

Open access may be at least in part a solution to the problems described above. Open access resources are available free to any reader with access to the web. Of course, this fact does not mean that the resource is “free” in all respects. Someone or some organization must bear the expense of providing access to such resources. However, the cost is shifted from the reader. One way of doing so is through online institutional depositories open to the public. Another way is by charging the author a fee for publication (which may be subsidized by grant money or by the author’s institution). This author-pays model is the one that has been adopted by the non-profit Public Library of Science (PLoS), which in the space of a decade has become a major online publisher in several scientific disciplines.

One problem with relying upon open access at the present moment is the unevenness of coverage. Some disciplines are embracing open access more rapidly than others. The chart below shows the percentage of articles by area available via open access during a recent period. Open access availability ranged from a high of forty-five percent of articles in mathematics to a low of ten percent in the arts. (The humanities, including literature, came in at sixteen percent.)

 

Math 45%
Earth & Space Science 38%
Social Sciences 36%
Professional Fields 31%
Psychology 28%
Physics 27%
Engineering and Technology 24%
Biology 24%
Health 17%
Humanities 16%
Clinical Medicine 14%
Biomedical Research 13%
Chemistry 11%
Arts 10%

 

Another problem is that open access portals do not always succeed in matching the subscription databases when it comes to facilitating searches. Subscription databases often allow for the simultaneous searching of a plethora of journals. This consolidation of resources in one place has a monopoly effect on subscription fees, but it also is what makes the databases appealing to users. Moreover, the extensive indexing provided by subscription databases is something that their owners can point to as constituting “value added.”

For the potential of open access to be fully realized, funding models will have to be clarified, coverage within the disciplines will have to be increased, portals that consolidate resources will have to be created, and systems for indexing articles will have to be put in place. The task may seem rather daunting. At the same time, powerful forces are encouraging movement toward open access, including governmental regulations and institutional and professional pushback against high fees for subscription databases. When the success of the Public Library of Science, as well as that of the crowd-sourced encyclopedia Wikipedia, is considered, it is not impossible to believe that within a decade readers, whether or not affiliated with well-equipped libraries, will be able to access the resources that they need and want.

For additional IP Caucus/Committee coverage of open-access issues, see the following:

Intellectual Property Reports Main Page

Transforming Our Understanding of Copyright and Fair Use

In November 2008, educators were introduced to the “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education,” and our concept of how to deal with copyright issues in the classroom has, literally, been transformed. As the official policy of NCTE related to fair use in the teaching of English, it is a document worth our attention as students learn to comprehend and compose texts utilizing a variety of forms of media.

“Copyright law and fair use are designed for all of us,” explains Renee Hobbs, Founder of Temple University’s Media Education Lab, and one of the co-authors of the code of best practices. In an interview with me at the 2009 NCTE Convention in Philadelphia, PA, Hobbs suggests that “It will actually interfere with your rights if you don’t learn how to apply fair use to your work.”

While many of us assume that copyright is designed to protect the rights of owners, Hobbs explains that it is also meant to protect the rights of users in order to promote creativity, innovation, and the spread of knowledge. Many educators may not realize that our own reasoning and critical judgment are core components of fair use and, according to the Code of Best Practices, “Copyright law does not exactly specify how to apply fair use, and that gives the fair use doctrine a flexibility that works to the advantage of users” (p. 7).

Most of us have heard about fair use “guidelines.” We may rely on charts that describe how we can use 10% of this kind of work or use 30 seconds of another type, but the unfortunate outcome of these documents is that they actually restrict our use of copyrighted materials in ways that the law never intended. In fact, quite the opposite is true; Hobbs argues that the guideline charts that educators reply on are unduly restrictive. How we apply our rights for fair use depends not on how much of a piece of copyrighted work that we use, but instead on the ways in which we use it.

Hobbs believes that the change in our thinking about copyright that must occur can be stated quite simply: “For many educators, the big ‘aha’ is that, “oh, those guidelines aren’t the law?’” Indeed, the guidelines were constructed mainly through the work of the media companies themselves, and do not accurately reflect all the rights that users have when transforming copyrighted materials.

Thus, Hobbs, along with Peter Jaszi, from The Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, and Patricia Aufderheide, from The Center for Social Media, created the code of best practices. Copyright law, as many of these previous guideline documents tend to suggest, is not static with certain limits on the kind or amount of material used. Instead, fair use requires judgment.

Moreover, as educators, can we leave discussions of copyright only in the norms of academia; even though we ask students to cite their sources as a means of attribution, a common expectation among academics. The code of best practices instead outlines five principles of fair use, one having particular implications for teachers and students that will be outlined below, and invite educators to think about copyright and fair use through a new lens: transformative use.

What is Transformative Use?

The key to applying fair use is understanding the concept of “transformative” use, and Hobbs argues that this is central to the fair use provision of United States Copyright Law. Educators are probably familiar with the “four factors” of fair use, which, according to Wikipedia’s article on Fair Use, include:

  1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
  2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
  3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
  4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. (Wikipedia, n.d.)

These are the factors that have guided the construction of many of the copyright guides noted above. But, there is more to fair use than just determining whether the use of a work aligns with these four principles.

For Hobbs, wrapping our heads around the concept of transformative use is essential if we are to truly understand when and how to apply fair use in our own work and, more importantly, if our students are to apply it to their own work. In order for us to use copyrighted materials, we need to apply a set of reasoned questions about how and why we are using the work.

In short, to use copyrighted materials under fair use provisions, the benefit to society needs to outweigh the costs to the copyright holder. If a copyrighted work is simply retransmitted, then it is a violation of copyright law. But, if the user “transforms” the material in some way, repurposing it in a new media composition, for instance, then fair use likely applies. Again, to quote from the Code of Best Practices, there are two central questions to ask about transformative use:

  • Did the unlicensed use “transform” the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?
  • Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use? (p. 7 in PDF)

If we as educators can invite our students to think critically about their use of copyrighted materials in the process of creating their own digital compositions, and help them understand what it means to build on the work of another in a transformative way, then we can open up thought-provoking discussions about how we compose in the 21st century. One particular principle from the Code of Best Practices, and a tool developed by Hobbs and her colleagues, invites us to do just that.

Inviting Students to Compose Multimedia with Fair Use in Mind

Five principles are outlined in the Code of Best Practices, including discussions of how to create curricular materials and distribute students’ work. One of particular importance to teachers who are asking students to compose multimedia texts is Principle Four: “Student Use of Copyrighted Materials in Their Own Academic and Creative Work.” It states:

Because media literacy education cannot thrive unless learners themselves have the opportunity to learn about how media functions at the most practical level, educators using concepts and techniques of media literacy should be free to enable learners to incorporate, modify, and re-present existing media objects in their own classroom work. (p. 13 in PDF)

This principle encourages teachers and students to think about how they can repurpose existing media for their own compositions. However, it is not an excuse for simply copying and pasting the work of others, or taking it whole without changing it in any way from the original. Both are a violation of the law as well as the norms of academic honesty. In fact, the principle goes on to state that “Students’ use of copyrighted material should not be a substitute for creative effort. Students should be able to understand and demonstrate, in a manner appropriate to their developmental level, how their use of a copyrighted work repurposes or transforms the original” (p. 14 in PDF).

The key to transformative use is thinking critically about how the original material is employed in the new work, and Hobbs argues that getting to deeper questions about how and why to use copyrighted work is where teachers can help their students most. “Most teachers know how to deepen a conversation through asking the ‘why’ question,” she states, and she invites teachers to listen, probe, pair up critical friends, and teach students to support and challenge each other as they think about using copyrighted work. Hobbs and her colleagues and the Media Education Lab have created a thinking guide for reasoning fair use, and encourage students to think about each media element that they repurpose and how it aligns with fair use guidelines.

This process of critical engagement is important in developing a strong classroom community, and in creating media-savvy students. “Teachers give students the power to bring their lived experience with mass media, popular culture, and digital media into the room and students feel valued,” believes Hobbs. Because contemporary media culture does not typically show a respect for civil dialogue, she continues, we have to really practice how to create a respectful learning environment. “Students can learn to reflect on each other’s work when they are invited to offer feedback and when we teach about how to offer feedback to help them develop those skills where we can model disagreeing respectfully.” One strategy she employs, for instance, is to have students take guided notes as they listen and respond to each other’s projects.

Thus, Hobbs suggests that teachers design projects that connect school skills — such as critical thinking, participating, questioning, composing — to something personally meaningful in students’ lives from outside of school. Rarely do they get to compare and contrast the lived experience of popular culture with academic culture, and teaching them to create their own media, and examine copyright implications in the process, allows them to do so. This process can be “really powerful because of the way it taps into students’ own expertise and knowledge,” she concludes.

Given that students are creating products, this inevitably leads to questions about assessment. Hobbs believes that English teaches are well suited to the task, as we are always asking about audience, purpose, and whether a writer’s use of rhetorical devices helps him or her reach a goal. She strongly believes that we need to measure more than the superficial qualities of form and dig deeper into understanding how and why students are repurposing and creating content in new ways. “There is a form/content dynamic. If all we assess is the form, then we are doing students a disservice. We can’t just assess the prettiness of the work, we need to assess the content of the work.” In short, don’t just count words, slides, or images used, but engage your students in broader discussions about the purpose, audience, and effectiveness of their work.

Continuing to Transform: Next Steps for Teachers

Hobbs and her colleagues have created a variety of resources for teachers to use related to fair use. First, the Media Education Lab has a variety of multimedia materials and lesson plans for teachers to explore and use with their students. Filled with lesson plans, informational videos, and other multimedia curriculum resources, this website is the first stop for teachers who are considering how to incorporate copyrighted material into their own work, as well as for students who may use copyrighted work in their own new media compositions. One particular video, User’s Rights, Section 107 by Michael Robb Grieco, highlights the ways in which transformative use works, all to the tune of an upbeat alternative rock song.

Other resources include two wikis. A consistently updated wiki, The End of Copyright Confusion, shares resources related to presentations about Code of Best Practices. Also, award-winning librarian and edublogger Joyce Valenza has a set of resources for copyright friendly works available on her Copyright Friendly wiki. Hobbs and Valenza both encourage teachers to learn more about the Creative Commons license and how students can build on the work of others — as well as share their own — in ways that extend the rights of owners and users of copyrighted work. Understanding the difference between works that are copyrighted, public domain, copyright friendly, and Creative Commons licensed can help students make good choices about how to find and integrate the materials of others into their own work, as well as make choices about how they want to license their own materials.

Finally, in addition to the Media Education Lab website and the wikis, one other web-based resource can provide teachers with an introduction to these concepts. By listening to the Teachers Teaching Teachers episode, “Opening Up to Fair Use,” with an interview from Peter Jaszi, teachers can become familiar with the idea of fair use and gain insights with Jaszi’s brief overview of the Code of Best Practices.

As we invite students to create new media compositions, and use existing copyrighted materials to do so, we need approach their work with the critical lens that fair use allows. Through discussions of fair use and the transformative nature of their own work, we ask them to be critical and creative thinkers, engaging them in discussions with one another about the ways in which they remix the work of others. Also, we need to reiterate that fair use does not mean unlicensed distribution of copyrighted materials. Teaching our students how to repurpose copyrighted materials in a transformative manner is the essence of applying fair use guidelines, and is an imperative skill when teaching them how to compose with new media.

The concept of fair use has the power to transform our teaching in a digital age, and both we and our students will be better readers, writers, and thinkers when we adopt a fair use approach in our classrooms.

Author Information
Troy Hicks
CCCC-IP K-12 Representative
Assistant Professor of English
Director, Chippewa River Writing Project
Central Michigan University

 

Intellectual Property Reports Main Page

Renew Your Membership

Join CCCC today!
Learn more about the SWR book series.
Connect with CCCC
CCCC on Facebook
CCCC on LinkedIn
CCCC on Twitter
CCCC on Tumblr
OWI Principles Statement
Join the OWI discussion

Copyright

Copyright © 1998 - 2024 National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved in all media.

1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, Illinois 61801-1096 Phone: 217-328-3870 or 877-369-6283

Looking for information? Browse our FAQs, tour our sitemap and store sitemap, or contact NCTE

Read our Privacy Policy Statement and Links Policy. Use of this site signifies your agreement to the Terms of Use