Name: Mahli Xuan Mechenbier
Title: Associate Lecturer, English
Institution: Kent State University: Regional Academic Center
Location: Twinsburg, Ohio
Phone: 330-888-6330
Email: mmechenb@kent.edu
Author: ksuchor
Contact information for Lisa Meloncon
Name: Lisa MelonconContact information for Kevin Eric DePew
Name: Kevin Eric DePew
Title: Graduate Program Director, English PhD Program
Institution: Old Dominion University
Location: Norfolk, VA 23529
Phone: 757.683.4019
Email: kdepew@odu.edu
Website: http://ww2.odu.edu/~kdepew/
Contact information for Leslie Olsen
Name: Leslie Olsen
Title: Adjunct Faculty, English and Professional Communications
Institution: Bellevue University
Location: Everett, Washington
Phone: 206-310-5015
Email: leslieolsen@gmail.com
Skype: leslieo310
Contact information for Jason Snart
Name: Jason Snart
Title: Professor of English
Institution: College of DuPage
Location: Glen Ellyn, IL
Phone: 630 942 2033
Email: snartj@cod.edu
Skype: Professor.Jason.Snart
Website: http://www.cod.edu/academics/divisions/liberal_arts/faculty/snart.aspx
Contact information for Heidi Skurat Harris
Name: Heidi Skurat Harris
Title: Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing
Institution: University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Location: Little Rock, Arkansas
Phone: 501-569-8327
Email: haharris@ualr.edu
Skype: hasharris
Website: http://hasharris.com/
Contact information for Debbie Minter
Name: Debbie Minter
Title: Assoc. Prof.
Institution: University of Nebraska – Lincoln
Location: Lincoln, NE
Phone: 402-472-2891
Email: dminter1@unl.edu
Website: http://www.unl.edu/english/faculty/profs/dminter.html
Contact information for Beth Hewett
Name: Beth L. Hewett
Title: CCCC OWI Committee Co-chair; Associate Assistant Professor
Institution: University of Maryland University College
Location: Forest Hill, MD
Phone: 443-904-6424
Email: beth.hewett@gmail.com; beth@defendandpublish.com
Skype: beth.hewett1
Website: www.bethhewett.com
Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing Instruction (March 2016)
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.
- Join the discussion group dedicated to issues of OWI today! (You will need to use your NCTE login information to access the discussion.)
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:
- Pavel Zemliansky, Making Textbooks Affordable and Open in IP Reports
- Clancy Ratliff, Open Access in 2008: The Harvard Policy and the APA’s Attempt to Profit from the NIH Open Access Mandate in Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2008, and
- Clancy Ratliff, The National Institutes of Health Open Access Mandate: Public Access for Public Funding in Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2007 for Scholars of Composition, Rhetoric, and Communication
