Course: Writing as Inquiry (WAI II)
Instructor: Amy Reed Goldman, Senior Lecturer, Writing Program
Students Enrolled: 43
Technology used: NYU Zoom, VoiceThread, NYU Classes, Google+ Communities, Shared Google Docs, StoryMaps
Amy Goldman is currently working from India. She is teaching Writing as Inquiry II (WAI II), a first-year writing workshop that is mandatory for all NYU Shanghai students. In this class, which emphasizes university-level critical inquiry and rhetorical strategies, students write essays focused on works of non-fiction typically addressing contemporary issues across a variety of disciplines. WAI stands in contrast to NYU Shanghai’s required sophomore series Perspectives on the Humanities (PoH), content-based writing seminars that emphasize engagement with the questions and methods of the humanities’ disciplines. In her three-section WAI course, Goldman is currently teaching 43 students spread across 16 time zones, from Asia though the Near East, Europe and the Americas.
Depending on time zone, students are grouped into three different color-coded Google+ communities that act as virtual classroom spaces: Blue (Americas UTC-8 to -4) Green (Europe UTC +0 to +2) and Purple (Asia UTC +4 to +8). In these communities, students analyze course texts, think critically about the issues they raise, consider responses to study questions, query and respond to one another, and debrief in small group discussions.
Goldman has also created an All-WAI Google+ Community as an administrative forum for all her students to pose course questions about procedures, policies, expectations, assignments, instructions, deadlines, formats, events, and anything relevant to her three WAI II sections.
A second asynchronous platform Goldman uses is Voice Thread. Through weekly audio-visual recordings, she introduces instructional material to all students; she also uses VoiceThread to comment on individual student exercises and essays. For the synchronous components of her teaching, Goldman relies on Zoom, and has set up weekly “drop-in” open office hours to accomodate students’ time zones. She video-conferences one-on-one with students as needed, and organizes her students, based on same or compatible time zones, into small groups of 3-4 for live discussion and/or peer-editing.
The crucial, central hub of Goldman’s three-section course is the rich StoryMaps site she has built, seen in the ancient map image above. Amplifying the syllabus’ semester overview, the site houses and directs the majority of what students need to do on a daily basis, fueling an ongoing “classroom” experience.
Each week, Goldman adds to her StoryMaps a Detailed Weekly Schedule that highlights the course’s key syllabus assignments and gives more specific instructions for the upcoming week’s reading, writing and discussion exercises and assignments. In addition, Goldman constantly adds more substantial sections that highlight specific writing topics and issues through explanations, examples, and links to resources. As such, the ever-increasing StoryMaps site provides students with a deeper and more multifaceted engagement with all elements relevant to the semester’s WAI II writing instruction.
Embedded links to assignments, prompts, examples, and resources repeat throughout the full architecture of Goldman’s digitally-delivered course. The cross-referencing of such assignments and materials is essential to it, for they tighten and unify the digital structure while adding coherence and facility for students. For instance, prompts of all main essay drafts and exercises as well as deadlines, and sometimes examples, are listed and/or available in several places: StoryMaps, NYU Classes and the course syllabus.
In response to course texts, students must post several times a week in their geographically-designated discussion communities by Sunday night, China Standard Time. The content they create and post to their G+ Communities should adhere to a semi-formal tone, follow accurate MLA citation and documentation requirements, and must be proofread.
A screenshot of discussions taking place in the BLUE Google Group for students located in the Americas.
Goldman uses her G+ communities to foster a sense of debriefing as usually occurs in an in-person classroom setting. Where she would normally hand out a sheet of questions and concerns about a text for her class to address and discuss in small groups students in the G+ communities are creating paragraph-long posts, which, once shared in the community, receive comments from peers as well as Goldman. She occasionally intensifies the process by formally assigning students in each community to explore one another’s posts on a certain topic, select one in particular, and then build meaningfully upon that student’s original discussion.
The pedagogy behind interactive small group discussions, Goldman says, particularly in a situation where everything is remote, is that students need to engage with each other as much as possible in order to foster a sense of normalcy, active engagement and commitment to the learning community.
Challenges and Lessons Learned
Goldman says that arriving at a stable classroom size and regular attendance has been a considerable challenge. Enrollment in her classroom increased 160% after her three-section course had officially launched, with students trickling in from around the world day-by-day over a period of two weeks, with some existing as “virtual ghosts” that did not respond to emails or posts. Future distance-learning, she believes, would best tie enrollment to circumscribed time zones. For now, the intersecting zones of Goldman’s class structure encourage engagement and participation among her “global” students, keeping them accountable for consistent and involved response to the texts they read, their classmates, as well as their own writing.
It is also very time-consuming to simultaneously prepare the delivery of digital instruction for the weeks ahead, manage the week’s instruction, review and comment upon students’ current work, and respond both to students’ emails and all they are posting at the frequency that they do–Goldman says she often spends up to 18 hours a day on her computer in order to do so.
Another disadvantage is that the bandwidth currently available in Goldman’s location cannot reliably sustain more than a few people in a Zoom meeting, which is why she has chosen Zoom for office hours–whose participants she can limit in small groups–and for one-on-one calls with students.
Resources
Among the resources that Goldman currently makes available for her students on StoryMaps, a list that expands weekly, are: Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab (OWL), Levels of formality, How to Write Your Professor; MLA; MLA Sample Essay; Punctuation and Formatting Quotes with MLA; Harvard College Writing Program’s What Constitutes Plagiarism and Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Quoting; Grammar; Punctuation; Capitalization; RITS Zoom Toolkit Guide.