Warnock, Scott. Teaching Writing Online: How and Why. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2009. Print.
Warnock’s Teaching Writing Online: How and Why is a fantastic resource for those considering teaching their writing courses online. Warnock approaches the text as tough his reader knows next-to-nothing about online instruction, which results in an effective guide that stretches through the development of a plan for online instruction to effective online teaching strategies. Each chapter offers a focus on a specific aspect of online writing instruction, allowing Warnock to connect online writing instruction both to traditional composition pedagogy and to traditional face-to-face instructional practices, easing the new online instructor into less familiar territory by making many sound connections to what the reader is most likely quite comfortable and familiar with.
This book is a tremendous resource — particularly for those who are thinking about teaching online. In a very general praising of this text, I think it should be required reading for almost anyone who plans to teach online, whether that person is going to teach writing, or not. There is far more to the text that is just plan old good online pedagogy recommendations, as opposed to strictly focusing on teaching writing online. Yes, there are areas that focus on teaching writing, but really, this is a book about teaching online – period. I have nothing to argue with relating to what he suggests. It’s all right on.
Warnock’s strongest recommendation for future online faculty, as I see it, is to really think about who you will be in the online environment. As teachers of writing, we encourage our students to think about the tone they establish within their writing, but I’ve noticed a lot of us don’t take our own recommendations for this as it applies to online education. It is easy to be absent in an online class, seeming, to students, that we don’t care or aren’t involved. It’s easy to get caught in a bad moment of a day and respond to an innocent student email with a harsh tone, even if we really didn’t mean anything by it. EVERYTHING we do in an online class is public, and it all has repercussions, even if they are minimal. I have worked with online faculty who are mean – and their students experience a very negative learning environment. Yes, it can be frustrating to answer questions related to information you feel has already been covered in the course. But isn’t that the job of the teacher — to teach? And maybe the instructor didn’t mean to be mean, but that will most likely keep a student from approaching this instructor again, resulting in an isolated student and an instructor who wonders whether his/her students are engaged. Consider who you want to be, how you want to come across, when teaching online. Working extra hard to be kind can keep students coming back to you when they really need help.
Another key point that Warnock raises is the idea of organization within an online course. The ideas of repetition, pattern-building and consistency are critically important for helping students to succeed within any online course. In an environment where students are alone, exploring the course, trying to make sense of the lay of the land, helping students to see a consistent progression through the work will enable students to get a firmer foothold from which they can proceed through the class. Developing consistent terminology (such as using ‘module 1,’ ‘module 2,’ etc) can help students recognize how they need to progress through the class. Similarly, developing recognized patterns for when assignments are due is beneficial to students as well. This clearly relates to what Warnock discusses in the chapters where he focuses on ‘Organization’ and ‘Pacing and Predictability.’ The less students have to think about how to navigate a course, the more time and energy they can focus on the course content and their learning within that course. Faculty don’t do students any favors by having a class that is a struggle to navigate, having materials that are not easily located (or incomplete) and having a great variety within the scheduling of the course.
Perhaps Warnock’s greatest success in this text is in how he develops logical connections between what is done within a classroom and how these things might be done in an online course. Each chapter focuses on an aspect of teaching — something that is done in a f2f class and something that will also be done in an online course. These are great similarities. A quick glance through the table of contents shows chapters dedicated to course lessons/content, syllabus, readings, conversation, assignments, peer review, grading, feedback, collaboration and assessment. No matter the venue for instruction, all of these things occur in a class. The point that Warnock is making is two-fold: there are commonalities between f2f education and online education; but these commonalities need to be reconsidered in online education. The landscape is the same — course concerns are similar in the varying environments. But the instructor must make necessary changes to adapt what and how one taught in a f2f class to ensure that a similar aspect of the course will work in the online environment. For example, take ‘conversation’ — discussion in class, conversations amongst peers and even conversation in a one-on-one situation between instructor and student will all happen in a f2f class. Many will say that these kinds of situations cannot happen online. But they can; they do. To ensure that these kinds of interactions can occur, the instructor has to develop the right ‘space’ for them to happen. If this is done, in preparing for the class, ‘conversations,’ both formal and impromptu between classmates and instructor can happen. And as a perk, in the online course, these conversations will be recorded, in writing, for a student to revisit time and time again if he/she desires. The valuable conversations that happen in class can be revisited, thought about again and can have a stronger impact upon the student than can similar conversations that occur within the f2f environment.
There are about two brief moments in the text where Warnock references ‘multimodal composition.’ The idea of offering students multiple modalities for developing texts is explored, but briefly. Warnock suggests that possibly, because of the technology associated with teaching online, that this might open the doors for an instructor to offer multimodal options for students (62-63). But he mentions, that offering these assignments can lead to growing pains for the instructor due to the different thinking required for these types of assignments (63). Of course, this idea of pain has been in my mind when I consider offering multimodal projects to students. So as I progress into offering those assignments, I will be recording the struggles that are associated with the inclusion of such projects (if there are any — hey, maybe it will be smooth!).
Warnock offers numerous suggestions for current and future online faculty alike. As a veteran online instructor, much of what he suggested was readily apparent to me, but had I read this book even a few years earlier, it would have impacted my teaching greatly. But still, I did take away a lot from this text, which reinforced a lot of what I do in my online classes and also reinforced my theories on why I do such things.
