A colleague and I are developing a training workshop for teachers (GTAs) at our university interested in teaching our Composition classes online. We have each taught online ourselves, with the benefit of the College's brief introductory training in my case, and we feel that additional preparation is utterly crucial. To get there from here, we need to secure funding, and to get the funding we need information from other institutions/programs.

Below is a list of the questions my colleague and I thought up. Some may look familiar, as said colleague has posted to the [WPA-L] and [techrhet] listservs (with surprisingly little luck, I might add), and is emailing some Big-12 departments directly. I recognize that this is a lengthy list, and that answering all of these questions might be more than is reasonable to ask. Any assistance you can offer is deeply appreciated, and will help us make our case to the powers that be that online education deserves better support than it's currently getting. Reply details are at the end.

1) Does your school/department offer Comp 1 and/or Comp 2 and/or any other writing courses online?

2) If so, how many sections per semester or quarter?

3) Do you offer the instructors of these courses any particular training or preparation?

4) Do you offer the instructors of these courses any particular ongoing support while they're teaching?

5) Do you have any experience requirements for teachers who get to teach Comp online?

6) If teachers are offered special training/support, is it university-wide, or department-specific?

7) Do your online and face-to-face sections of the same course use the same textbooks? Assignment sequences? Writing tasks? Learning outcomes?

8) Do you have or know of any statistics on student retention in online versus face-to-face sections of the same courses?

9) Do you have or know of any research comparing student learning outcomes in online versus face-to-face sections of the same courses?

10) Do you have or know of any research comparing teacher burn-out in online versus face-to-face sections of the same courses?

Reply details:
Daren Allison Young
GTA/GRA, Office of First-Year Composition
University of Oklahoma
Department of English

rhetoricprof@gmail.com

At the moment, we have no firm plans to publish anything related to this inquiry. We're really just working to develop some in-house training. We may, however, wish to move towards publication in the future. If you're interested in collaboration beyond answering a few electronic questions out of the goodness of your hearts, please let me know.