This session from the 2009 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) identifies technologies for next generation online writing centers, describing customized solutions for online tutoring and the potential for making these into open-source technologies for other centers.  Presenters will discuss new OWL technologies, definitions for changing technologies, and OWL pedagogy and praxis, as well as usability, development, and sharing/open-sourcing of online tutoring technologies.  The issues raised in this panel are the result of an OWL Technology Summit held in 2007 where representatives from eleven institutions met to explore trends in online tutoring technology development.  This panel brings forward key concepts articulated during work groups formed at the Summit

Conard-Salvo, Tammy

Gilchrist, Matthew J

English

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Purdue UniversityPurdue e-PubsPurdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Presentations Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL2009Next Generation OWLs: Customized Solutionsand the Move Toward Open-SourcingMatthew J. GilchristUniversity of Iowa, matthew-gilchrist@uiowa.eduTammy Conard-SalvoPurdue University, tcsalvo@purdue.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/writinglabpresPart of the Instructional Media Design Commons, and the Rhetoric and Composition CommonsThis document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact epubs@purdue.edu foradditional information.Recommended CitationGilchrist, Matthew J. and Conard-Salvo, Tammy, "Next Generation OWLs: Customized Solutions and the Move Toward Open-Sourcing" (2009). Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Presentations. Paper 6.http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/writinglabpres/61 2 3 First 2 points:  Tammy Unlike using existing commercial or free software like Blackboard or AIM for online tutoring, customized OWLs allow writing center administrators to build software specifically designed for the needs of their own writing centers and the students on their own campuses.  Software designed by and for a particular writing center . Customized OWLs—and in particular, asynchronous tutoring systems like the ones we describe today—can provide greater access to writing center resources to students.  Students who can’t use the physical writing center for any reason, be it time, distance, or mobility issues, can receive writing support.  Second 2 points: Matt Many students who can come to the physical writing center prefer online writing center interactions.  May feel more comfortable/less vulnerable.  May be used to meeting online with peers or instructors.  Often see online tutoring as an extension of online courses or courses with an online presence through CMS.  Customized and customizable OWLs can take advantage of many available technologies—filesharing, complex databases, SIS, existing Internet resources—and may even supplement traditional face-to-face interactions.    We present you two examples of customized OWLs to illustrate why creating a customized online tutoring system is beneficial and why the writing center community should consider the potential for making these systems available as open-source software. 4 -Iowa has offered online tutoring since 2001 through its e-mail tutoring program—originally staffed by one, half time position, now all tutors have some online tutoring responsibility built into their appointment.  -How it works: simple Filemaker database– fill out an online questionnaire, receive automatic e-mail, reply and attach a draft, tutor downloads the draft, makes comments in the file with a letter at the front, comments inserted with Word’s commenting feature, and sends the file back with comments. -the program is easy to set up, but not always easy to use; problems include students’ frustration with many steps, spam to the e-mail account, tutors’ confusion as to which messages need response, no way to limit number of submissions. -we grew out of it. -In spring, 2006, I went looking for a solution, hoping for a single program that would handle online tutoring, and online scheduling Finding no exact fit, I started to pursue a new build, and I found models at MN and UNC. -Iowa’s IT contact helped guide my exploration, and through communicating with his boss, determined that finding a program in use at another campus upon which we could build would likely help us gain the support we needed on our campus.  MN was not ready to share, but Kim Abels at UNC was interested. After leaving the OWL Tech Summit at TX A&M, we both approached our separate IT departments    -Internal Student Computing Fee Grant enabled us to get started: $24,000 was to build online tutor and online scheduler. 18K earmarked for programming with matching efforts from ITS.  9K plus >9K from ITS = >18K spent.  -some aspects of existing software are not easily changed, so even a close match requires flexibility  -significant efforts are required to make programming changes, negotiate server space, guarantee security, and use campus authentication tools. -shared knowledge would likely have sped up our development process, but would also have meant significant energies on the part of IT at UNC, understandable that they would be reluctant to provide “support” for our development.  13 In 2004, we began planning a customized online tutoring system at Purdue, after I had the good fortune to meet with Kim Abels and see the system she implemented at UNC-Chapel Hill.  We began developing the Virtual Consultant at Purdue, or VCaP system, from scratch because we wanted our online tutoring system to meet our writing center’s needs and fit our institutional context, and no commercial software existed to meet those needs.  Creating a customized asynchronous tutoring system from scratch became complicated and difficult, even with the monetary resources necessary for such a project.  However, we knew that depending on existing technologies like instant messenger programs or blogs were inadequate because they were not originally designed for writing tutorials, nor would they sufficiently provide the support to the students we were trying to reach.    Rather than investigate and debate the benefits and drawbacks of synchronous versus asynchronous tutoring, we decided on building an asynchronous system because it would allow students to begin online tutorial sessions at any time of the day and from any place, as long as they had an internet connection.  Students who had mobility issues, who had to work during business hours, who were taking courses through distance education, who were extremely shy, who used assistive technology, who preferred to communicate electronically, or who were—realistically—too lazy to walk over to one of our physical locations could access Writing Lab resources and receive feedback on their writing.  We did not have to staff our online tutoring space with tutors who had to be available during certain hours, and more students could use the Writing Lab.  Most importantly, we wanted the design and functionality of VCaP to reflect our pedagogical values.  For example, the system needed to be flexible enough to accept documents in multiple formats without burdening the student or the tutor with the responsibility of converting one file format into another.  So we insisted that students be able to upload any type of document and allow the tutor to download the file in the document’s native format.  This would allow us to accept multimodal documents, which students are increasingly producing.  14 Here is the main login screen for Purdue’s VCaP system.  Students can register for accounts on their own and use the same login each time they want an online consultation.  On the left-hand side, you’ll notice a queue meter—a concept borrowed from the UNC-Chapel Hill online tutoring system.  This allows students to see what the turnaround time will be for a consultation.  We are still experimenting with how to measure turnaround times, which will be dependent upon the number of staff and hours they work and the number of submissions we receive from students. 15 When students log in, they will see a list of their current consultations.  If a consultation is complete, it will appear in the list and be noted as complete.  The navigation menu to the left allows students to upload new documents, view past sessions, update their information, and learn more about our online tutors. 16 Students are asked to provide as much information as possible before submitting their documents, including details about the assignment, concerns they have about the document, and what they’d like the tutor to address.  This not only provides valuable information for the tutor but also gives students agency in the asynchronous tutoring process.  And, it gives students the opportunity to critically reflect on their documents as they prepare to receive feedback.   17 When tutors log into the system, they immediately see a consultation queue.  At the top of the queue is a list of tutorials that have been assigned to them when students request a particular tutor—or when I, as administrator, must manually assign a session to them for whatever reason.  At the bottom of the queue is a list of unassigned sessions available to any tutor who selects them. 18 Tutors download students’ documents, open them in their native software, and respond in a separate box.  Requiring tutors to respond to students within VCaP, separately from the document rather than within the document itself, helps tutors avoid direct copyediting or “intruding” in the student’s writing with comments.  This decision demonstrated our commitment to supporting writing in all disciplines and formats through a student-centered approach.   In an attempt to facilitate the process of responding to students, and in order to connect VCaP to the resources on the OWL, we added a bank of stock responses that address common, recurring problems with grammar, citation, and so forth.  The stock responses provide a brief overview of a common concern, along with a link to an OWL resource that offers extended explanation.    Tutors are trained to incorporate the stock responses when necessary and avoid adding a string of stock responses to what should be feedback tailored to the students and their documents. 19 VCaP needed to be usable to tutors, and as an administrator, and I could not predict what my tutors wanted or needed from an online tutoring system.  Even with my years of experience as a tutor, administrator, and instructor who used technology often, I could not instruct programmers how to design the system in such a way that it was instantly usable in its functionality and purpose.  I had to take into account what tutors needed in an online tutoring system, so they could best respond to students in an electronic writing center space.  We gathered as much data before the system was built, and later, through usability testing with the assistance of the Professional Writing program.  Instead of being locked into using a system the way it was built, we were able to ask our own webmaster to make initial changes to VCaP based on the comments, questions, and requests of our tutors.    As I’ve mentioned previously, VCaP reflects our pedagogy of online tutoring.  The goal is to make the system student-centered and to allow students to actively engage in the system as much as possible.  Usability testing will allow us to test the system to see if it accomplishes its pedagogical goals—and if those goals can be accomplished in better, more helpful ways.  During the fall 2008 semester, the Writing Lab collaborated with the Professional Writing (PW) program, also housed in the English department, to plan formal usability tests that would provide data on ways to improve VCaP’s functionality for both students and tutors.  The Writing Lab had worked with the PW program on usability testing for redesigns of the OWL’s repository of writing support materials, and the previous collaboration yielded important data for OWL’s redesign and established a relationship of stakeholders between the two programs.  The PW program’s expertise in usability would help the Writing Lab as it developed VCaP, and both undergraduate and graduate students in the program would gain experience working with a real client. We have plans to administer the usability tests and pilot VCaP before gradually making the system available to students at Purdue, and I know from past experience with usability tests on the OWL that the process of testing, revising, and refining VCaP will be recursive and exhaustive—necessarily so. 20 First few: Matt No subscription fees, licensing fees, or upgrade fees; responds to Writing Center community’s evolving pedagogy  Centers collecting like data-sets can compare many aspects of Writing Center pedagogy, from tutor training, to student feedback requests, to campus culture.  For instance, one might compare feedback requests on a campus with a strong centralized WAC program to those on a campus without such a program.    Many options would allow centers to shop around.  Open sourcing could allow campuses to pool resources in order to develop, modify, and maintain a software.  For instance, one campus might be able to host for another who has a crack programmer, but no available server.  Or two campuses working on the same adaptation could collaborate in order to half the responsibilities.  Last 2:  Tammy The customized OWLs we describe, along with similar technologies developed by writing centers and writing programs, demonstrate community-building when these technologies are built, in some way, by the instructors, students, tutors, and administrators who will use them.  Programmatic stakeholders on individual campuses are often involved in software development; customized technologies rely on local and larger communities that include writing centers and professional writing and composition programs.  Finally, the potential for online tutoring system to be distributed as open-source technology taps into the community-building nature of open-source software.  A 2008 CCCC Resolution suggests that open-source software fosters academic knowledge creation as users, developers, and administrators freely share ideas and materials, along with the software and its documentation. Matt: First two:-Online tutoring is both like and not like f2f tutoring, so training a staff of tutors requires deeply exploring many issues that are unique to online tutoring. Iowa has been growing it’s online tutoring focus in the tutor-training class in recent years, but in spite of eight years of online tutoring at Iowa, there remains some animosity from tutors toward online tutoring.  This is of course balanced by the many tutors who prefer online tutoring to f2f tutoring for diverse reasons including that they need flexibility in their schedule, that they are at home in online interactions, and many prefer it because they find themselves able to be more articulate in online tutoring. There is now sufficient literature to use in tutor training, although other aspects of online tutoring still remain to be addressed in research and it is a challenge to keep up with the technology—online tutoring changes very quickly!  -Online tutoring is ever growing, and open sourcing these custom built software solutions might allow that growth to reach institutions that wouldn’t otherwise have the funding support to afford a powerful online tutoring application.  There seems to be much interest in open sourcing, but so far relatively few open sourcing experts in the Writing Center world. Stretching ourselves to find new roles as leaders in an open source community would be a challenge that might pay off by allowing writing centers to pool resources and to create very useable, very powerful online tutoring applications for less outlay of resources by any one institution.  Tammy (last two):  While creating a customized online tutoring system is preferable for writing centers, the cost, time, and resources necessary to build such a system can be enormous, especially when factoring usability testing to ensure the system works and is navigable.    Technical support is an on-going issue.  Any piece of software must be upgraded and changed, either because usability demands changes, because needs change, or because technology itself changes.  Open-sourcing online tutoring systems further complicates the issue of technical support and development.  Although open-source technology is built around a community, someone must take the lead in developing a fairly complete system, along with documentation, and making that available.  It may involve organization of stakeholders, too, since open-source communities rarely spring up and begin instantly collaborating.  Someone—or a group of people—take responsibility for the software and its support. 22 Matt: We are piloting synchronous chat tutoring because of the interest of our tutor, Sam Van Horne, who identified a technology—Meebo—that would accommodate it.  It may be that a hybrid model, such as is being used at MN, might be our future.  In fact, it should be possible to incorporate other online technologies, building on top of or beside online tutoring applications, to expand the use of tools and platforms for writing and collaborating in our tutorials.  Students are composing PowerPoint slide shows, flash movies, blogs, wikis, podcasts, websites, graphic fictions and nonfictions, and hypertexts.  Online tutoring software like Purdue’s allows for multiple formats.  The next expansion of such software might be to add options for interaction—wikis, whiteboards, avatar interactions, chats, process portfolios, and other means of allowing a tutor and student to interact online will create further flexibility and accommodate more discourse models than   Tammy (last two slides):  One challenge for Purdue—which may apply to other online writing centers—is how we can negotiate our new online tutoring identity with our existing online identity, given that our OWL has been known for its repository of writing support materials.  We’ve already tried to address this challenge through usability testing our site to find solutions to the current problem of how to organize the site so that on-campus and off-campus resources can be found by the appropriate users.  The challenge will become more complex when we make online tutoring through VCaP available to our students.    Finally, when considering the next generation of OWLs on our own campuses and at other institution, research is a key consideration.  Writing center administrators and composition scholars will have the opportunity and the responsibility of researching electronic writing support, such as online tutoring, and investigating how students learn online, what constitutes effective technology and effective use of technology, and how best to integrate electronic writing support that reflects the pedagogical values of the  

Next Generation OWLs:  Customized Solutions and the Move Toward Open-Sourcing

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=writinglabpres

Next Generation OWLs: Customized Solutions and the Move Toward Open-Sourcing

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