(uplifting music)
Mary Loder- Welcome to Course Stories,
produced by the Instructional Design
and New Media team of EdPlus at Arizona State University.
In this podcast,
we tell an array of course design stories,
alongside other ASU online designers and faculty.
On today's Course Story...
Michelle Stuckey- We really want them to move away
from thinking about, like,
the five-paragraph generic academic essay,
and to really engage with writing assignments
where they are making knowledge
about topics that are interesting to them.
So they're the ones that kind of steering their learning
in a lot of ways
by doing independent research
on things that are important to them and their communities.
So our curriculum is really focused
on community-engaged writing and research.
We wanna prepare students
to be 21st century digital communicators.
Now, back in 2015,
this sounded a little more radical
than it does almost 10 years later,
because now we're almost a quarter of the way
into the 21st century,
but what I mean by that
is to really be engaged with digital writing experiences.
(uplifting music)
Mary- Hi, I'm Mary Loder,
an instructional designer from ASU Online.
Elizabeth Blythe-Lee- I'm Elizabeth Blythe,
a senior instructional designer at Arizona State University.
Ricardo Leone- I'm Ricardo Leone.
I'm a media specialist at the same place.
Mary - Yeah, we work together.
Ricardo - Let's get on with the show.
Mary- Okay.
Ricardo - Welcome to Season 5 of Course Stories,
featuring me, Ricardo Leon, and?
Mary - Mary Loder.
- And?
Elizabeth - Lizzie Blythe.
Ricardo - And? Elizabeth - I forgot my new last name.
Michael Miller- And Michael Miller, woo-hoo!
Ricardo- Welcome, everybody.
What are we here to talk about today?
Mary- Oh my gosh, so many wonderful things
came up in that conversation.
We're here to talk about the writing composition courses.
Is that the right way to refer to these?
Micahel- So I think technically,
they're first-year composition
if we're gonna look at the catalog,
but the collection of courses is called The Writer's Studio.
Mary - Oh.
Michael- Yeah, and they call it that,
The Writer's Studio,
because it is a process-oriented model,
which we'll hear a lot about.
But they really wanted to set it up
more like an artist studio,
where the work is never done
and you're there working with a mentor
rather than an expert.
And so that's really kind of the reason
why they chose that title, The Writer's Studio.
Mary- Oh, intentionality, I like it.
Ricardo - So who are the individuals that we spoke to?
Michael- Yeah, so we had Dr. Michelle Stuckey,
and she's the program coordinator.
So she is the head honcho
of everything within the Writer's Studio.
Mary - And lovely as a human being,
and, like, accessibility-minded,
and I just love her.
Michael - Yeah, she has been a mentor for me since 2016.
She's the one who brought me to EdPlus when I graduated.
She said, "Hey.
There's this position called a Success Coach.
I think you'd be really good at it."
At the time, I was a store manager for Starbucks
and was pretty happy there.
Looked at it, and I was like, "Spot on."
So she's the one who brought me to EdPlus.
She wrote my recommendation letters for my graduate degrees.
Just, I mean, awesome mentor.
Awesome friend.
Ricardo - Wait, before we go any further,
Michael, who are you?
Michael - Oh yeah, hi, I'm Michael.
So I am a Instructional Designer
and Academic Success and Retention Specialist
on the Learning Initiatives team at EdPlus.
So I do a lot of weird, random things.
We kind of mishmashed some jobs together to create my role,
but I get to support Liz,
who is the primary Instructional Designer for these courses,
and do a little bit of that instructional design work.
But then what the Learning Initiatives team really does is,
a lot of times when you think about course design,
you think about curriculum
and you think about the user experience
of the online course itself.
But there's so many other things
that impact the students' experience,
and so what my team tries to do
is partner with all the different units and departments
and individuals across the university,
and especially at EdPlus,
to really create a system of support for these students
that honestly the students may not even know about,
or may not even be aware of,
of how we're trying to support them within these courses.
Ricardo - And I know you, Michael,
you were on my hack day team,
and you wrote this really great script for a video
about schooling in the future
and there was aliens and all sorts of other fun things,
so I'm not surprised
that you have such a strong writing background.
Mary - I was actually gonna say that.
When I heard them talking about,
like, the course itself and the value that you had,
which you guys will hear it in a second,
I was like, "Yeah, story checks out.
Michael's one of the best communicators I've ever met."
Michael - Thank you, thank you.
Liz - Yeah, I was gonna say,
it's a really incredible opportunity
to be an instructional designer,
getting to work with the LIT Team,
which has the greatest name.
It's the only reason why I'm like so mad
about them being a team
'cause they've got just like the coolest team name.
I wanna be Team LIT,
but neither here nor there. Michael - Wanna know what's weird?
We used to be the Learning Experience
and Student Success team,
which is LESS.
I'm like, "Oh, that's not a great acronym,"
so yeah, LIT is definitely a step up.
Michael - Full spectrum of the acronym there.
Ricardo - But from LESS to LIT.
Liz - Yeah, it's just team LIT, I love it.
But it's so great getting to work
with Michael from the LIT team
because it helps kind of take focus off of data for me.
Like I have kind of like a data specialist
and somebody who is really helping coordinate
managing a lot of the student resources
that we end up needing
and helping us get connected with the Success Coaches
and getting to hear those firsthand student experiences.
Something that, you know, as an instructional designer,
we don't really have a lot of access to students
and student information and data in that way.
So it's really great to have a team like that to work with.
And then Michael's just also a really fantastic designer
and he's just so much fun to work with.
So it's a partnership made in heaven.
Michael - Feeling is mutual.
Ricardo - And you'll hear he's a great interviewer as well.
So who else do we have on the show?
Michael - Yeah, so we also had Dr. Zachary
or Zach Waggoner.
He is the Coordinator for English 101.
So he kind of manages everything,
manages all the faculty
and everybody that's up within the English 101
First-Year Composition course.
We are joined by John Buckley.
He's a instructor and faculty member for English 101,
but he is also the Coordinator for the Writing Mentors,
which I'm sure we will be talking about here
in a little bit.
And then last but not least,
we had Sean Tingle will join us
and he is a faculty member for English 105,
which is the advanced First-Year Composition course
Ricardo - All the way out in Philadelphia.
Michael- Yeah. Ricardo- Okay.
So without further ado, let's do it.
(bright music)
Michael- Hi, I am Michael Miller and I am a Instructional Designer
and academic success and retention specialists at EdPlus.
I work on the Learning Initiatives team,
which supports our 35 highest enrolling
online courses at ASU.
And I'm joined today by some of my old friends.
Let's start with Dr. Michelle Stuckey.
Michelle- Thanks, Michael.
I'm Michelle Stuckey
and I am a Clinical Associate Professor
and Writing Program Administrator
for ASU'S Online First-Year Composition program,
the Writer's Studio,
which is housed in the School of Applied Sciences and Arts
in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts
here at ASU.
Michael- Awesome, thanks for joining us, Michelle.
Michelle- My pleasure.
Michael- And we also have Dr. Zach Waggoner.
Zach Waggoner- Hi, Michael.
I'm the English 101 course Coordinator
for the Writer's Studio,
and I've been working in administration of writing programs
for a couple of decades now.
Michael- Thanks for being here, Zach.
Zach- Sure thing.
Michael- Next up we have John Buckley.
John Buckley- Hi, Michael, yeah,
my name's John Buckley.
I teach English 101 courses in the Writer's studio,
and I also coordinate our Writing Mentor program.
Our writing mentors are course-embedded peer tutors
who provide support to our students and faculty.
I started out as a faculty associate in the Writer's Studio
and worked my way up to,
you know, teaching and administrating.
Michael- Awesome, thanks for being here, John.
And last but certainly not least,
we are joined from afar by Sean Tingle,
who is not only a good coworker here,
but a good friend of mine as well.
So, Sean, welcome.
Sean Tingle- Hey, I'm Sean.
Thanks for having me even from far away.
I've been an instructor with the Writer's Studio
for I think eight years now.
I'm not quite sure on the numbers at this time,
but around there.
And I've also taught in English 101 and 102 in the past,
but I teach 105 now.
Michael- Yeah, and we're happy to have you.
So I am thrilled to have this conversation
with everyone today.
So I often tell people that I grew up
in the Writer's Studio.
So I have a non-traditional path towards a degree program.
I came to ASU through the partnership
with Starbucks in 2016.
And the very first online course
that I ever took was English 105
advanced first-year composition with Dr. Michelle Stuckey.
And what was so great about that experience,
I mean, it's an awesome course,
very high level,
was not what I was expecting at all,
but a phenomenal experience.
And at the end of that course,
Dr. Stuckey reached out to me
and invited me to apply for a writing mentor position.
We'll hear a lot more about the writing mentors
a little bit later,
but it's basically a peer embedded tutor
working within these first-year composition courses.
So after that experience,
it really reignited my passion for education.
And I had spent over a decade in different retail management
and just was finding myself unfulfilled,
but without a degree,
not really able to go anywhere else, right?
So with that position,
I was able to work with the Writer's Studio,
work very closely with really everybody here.
So I was a writing mentor for John Buckley at first,
then for Sean for a few years.
I worked under Zach Waggoner when I was in English 101.
And then of course with Dr. Michelle Stuckey,
we've had a couple of even independent studies
down the road and things like that.
So really, really grateful for everyone to be here
and to talk about your courses today.
So what I thought we would do is maybe start with Michelle,
if you would like to kind of kick us off
and talk a little bit,
just high level, what is the program,
what's different about it, what's special about it,
and what's all this high impact verbiage
that we keep talking about?
Michelle- Sure, Michael, well, that's a lot.
So let me just give you kind of a brief overview
of what we do in the Writer's Studio.
So in the Writer's Studio,
we provide the first-year writing requirement
to all students who are enrolled
specifically in online degree programs.
And so, you know, when Michael started way back when,
and we might've had about 5,000 students a year,
and now we're pushing 17,000 students.
And so as ASU online program has grown,
so has enrollment in our program,
which has really pushed us.
I mean, we're at ASU, right?
So it's pushed us to innovate
new ways of meeting students' need,
meeting the demands of large enrollment online programming
and maintaining quality, engaging, challenging experiences
for students in writing courses.
So I think what sets our program apart,
Michael, as you asked,
is a few things.
One, you know, like many writing classes,
we wanna give students an opportunity
to develop their own transferable writing process.
So when they leave our classes,
they're confident
about the next writing assignment they tackle
and the next class they take.
But also that we wanna give them skills and practices
and habits that they can take with them
to writing they do in other areas of their lives.
That's been one of our core goals,
to help students really develop the skills they need
to be successful communicators at ASU and beyond.
And I think,
a couple other things I think is unique
and sometimes surprising for students who take our classes,
one is that we really want them
to move away from thinking about like the five paragraph
generic academic essay,
and to really engage with writing assignments
where they are making knowledge
about topics that are interesting to them.
So they're the ones kind of steering their learning
in a lot of ways
by doing independent research
on things that are important to them and their communities.
So our curriculum is really focused
on community-engaged writing and research.
And then three, we wanna prepare students
to be 21st century digital communicators.
Now, back in 2015,
this sounded a little more radical
than it does almost 10 years later,
because now we're almost a quarter of the way
into the 21st century.
But what I mean by that is to really be engaged
with digital writing experiences.
And so over the course of our program,
our students get exposed to all sorts of digital composing.
So they create digital portfolios
using things like Google sites.
They compose infographics,
which is a real genre that they might engage with
in the workforce.
They compose PSAs and advocacy ads.
They're working with bringing text and image together,
which I think, you know,
that they're already doing in so many ways in their lives,
but they're really seeing how to do it
in a deliberate and thoughtful way.
So those are a few of the things I think that set us apart.
Michael- Yeah, that's a great overview.
Thanks, Michelle.
And I think for me, you know,
English 105 was one of the most impactful courses
that I have ever taken.
And it's one of those courses
where the skills that I learned
are skills that I use every single day,
whether it's writing a business email,
writing a text to a friend or,
I mean, I'm creating infographics,
graphics all the time.
So those skills I think are so great
to not only prepare students for, you know,
two, four years of academic work
that they're gonna be doing.
These are real-world skills that are directly applicable
into so many different professional settings.
So I think it's a great course.
We were excited to partner with you
for a three-year redesign.
Michelle, can you talk a little bit
about some of your priorities
going into this redesign process?
Michelle- Sure, Michael.
What is challenging for us
as the folks who are designing curriculum,
is to think about how to create classes
that can meet a really broad range of learners.
To meet the needs of a really broad range of learners.
So we might have first time first-year students in a class
with somebody who has been working professionally,
in doing writing professionally for 20 years,
and who has just never finished their degree.
And those students are gonna have a really broad range
of real world experience,
comfort in educational setting,
comfort levels in educational settings, right?
And so how do we design curriculum
that is gonna be engaging and meaningful and challenging,
but still offers a pathway to success
for all the possible learners
who might be coming into our program.
And so what really got us thinking
was we have a constantly changing demographic of students.
Let's take a deep dive
into who's successful in our program, who isn't,
and let's think about what changes we need to make
to include, right, all the possible students
and provide a pathway to success in our program.
John- Michelle, would this be a good time
to maybe bring up the learning contract?
Michelle- Yeah, that's a great segue.
You know, John, I don't know if you wanted to talk about it,
but right before we started this three-year redesign,
we had gone through a year-long process
of developing and implementing
what we call a learning contract.
It's a mode of assessment based on contract grading.
And that was our first step
toward really thinking about how to expand equity
and inclusion in our classes related to assessments.
And so what we did was really develop
a more holistic grading structure
in which students were basically being assessed
on their own individual growth.
And so we believe that the more students write,
the better they get at writing.
And we really wanted to find a way
to just encourage students
to just write without being afraid
or overly focused on points
and how many points they're gonna get or lose potentially.
And so just giving them a path to just get started
and to reduce some of that anxiety
that prevents a lot of students from just writing.
And so that was one of our first steps we made
to kind of think about equity
and expand equity in our classes.
Zach- And this is Zach,
just to jump in on what Michelle said,
historically students do have,
and not just students but people in general
have a lot of anxiety related to writing.
There's a lot of stress.
There's a lot of doubt.
There's a lot of insecurity.
And that's because writing historically for folks
has been very product-based
that they're asked to produce something
and then they're never helped with the process
of getting to that product.
And so of course, if that's academically,
you can see how that has played out over many decades.
But so what we've tried to do with our learning contract
is take the emphasis off of the product
and put the emphasis on the process
so that many small writing assignments
that contribute towards working towards some product,
I suppose, down the line.
But that's not our emphasis.
We care about the stages along the way,
the steps, the habits,
and the skills that you learn.
And so the learning contract allows us
to do that focus on process
in a way that's much less stressful for students.
Michael- Yeah, I love that, and I think,
you know, as a perfectionist myself,
that learning contract just, again,
takes some of that weight off of a student's shoulders.
And you know, Zach,
you were talking about kinda that process-oriented model.
That's a great way, I think,
to really frame the Writer's Studio,
is that it really is all about process, not product.
And I remember, Zach,
something that you've often said
that there is no such thing as a final draft, right?
It's always opportunity for revision.
And so again, I think that mentality really
is infused so deeply into the curriculum
of the Writer's Studio
and those first-year composition courses.
John- Yeah, we actually changed the terminology of our courses.
Specifically based on that,
we used to have a rough draft and a final draft
of our writing projects.
And we've changed those terms to feedback draft
and revised draft knowing that, you know,
yeah, you've done your revision,
nothing is ever final.
So we wanna take that pressure off students as well.
Zach- And the language we use to communicate with students
is super important.
Michael- So Zach, why don't you talk a little bit
about English 101
and some of the changes that you wanted to prioritize
and what you've seen
and maybe how that's impacted students in your courses?
Zach- Well, so as Michelle said,
we have seen an enormous kind of change.
It always influx change in our student population.
And I expect that will continue.
So our redesign is really kind of designed
to be as flexible as possible
to meet a wide range of different students where they're at,
while always also being very proactive and intentional
in thinking about high impact on our students.
We wanna retain our students.
We wanna engage our students.
We want our students to persist at ASU
all the way through to graduation.
And so trying to redesign the 101 curriculum,
to do that has been challenging but also very rewarding.
We've always been process-focused,
but we've kind of, I think,
and since this rebuild,
focused even more on how to be flexible
with the assignment design.
We do have one large project that students are working on,
or two, depending on the session,
and depending on the student population.
And so inside of those large projects,
we have many small invention assignments
to help them complete the steps
of the thinking and writing that's gonna be necessary.
So we've really redesigned those
to be community-embedded, as Michelle said,
to focus on the students' individual,
communities that they value.
And that could be a wide range of community-related topics.
And write students with agency
to select from within their communities
the topic that best fits their own interests
in relationship to whatever the prompt
or the topic that we've selected for that semester is.
And so that's one of the main ways
we've been proactively revamping.
We've also decided on a very heavy-focus in English 101
on primary research as opposed to secondary research.
Many, many students are very familiar
with secondary research of some type
having had other educational experiences before English 101.
But very few students are familiar with primary research.
But primary research is really where you can learn
as a creator,
as a composer, as a writer,
to gain agency in the topic.
You have to go out, for example,
and conduct interviews perhaps,
or you have to go out and conduct field research
if you're doing observation out in the real world somewhere.
So a focus on primary research
with the topic that the student can kind of pick
to their own interests in their own community
has really helped us see a rise
in student engagement and retention.
John- Yeah, this is really something different
from online classes too.
And Michael, even before you mentioned
that your English 105 class was not what you expected,
and that's what we hear from all of our students,
is that our classes is not what they expect.
You know, it's an online class.
Sure, I'm gonna be in front of my computer,
peck away at my keyboard,
but that's not really what we want,
and that's not what ASU wants.
We want our students to be,
you know, embedded and engaged with their community.
So the assignments that we have in both of our classes,
101, 102, even 105,
they get out of their chairs
out in front of their computer screen
and out into the real world
and you know, really engaging with their community.
Michael- Yeah, and I think that's one of the really special things.
And one of the things, like you just said, John,
that was surprising to me
is you see English 101 as a student and you think,
"Oh, I'm gonna read some poetry,
and I'm gonna read "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,"
and then I'm gonna write a critical essay, right?"
And then we walk into these courses in the digital sense
and they say, "No, what are you interested in?
What are your community problems?
How can you work to solve them, right?"
And it's so cool to be able to have that autonomy
and to take responsibility for that writing, right?
And I think, as a student,
it increased my engagement, right?
And I learned things about my local community
that I would never have thought of, right?
So I think that's a great approach.
And Zach, with 101 in the first year of the redesign,
you had an additional challenge with the elimination
of writing across the curriculum 101 that course.
I think your enrollment doubled or tripled in one year.
Do you wanna talk a little bit about that?
Zach- Right, so writing across the curriculum,
which we know as is WAC 101,
was a course that certain students could test into
or opt into that they would take prior to English 101.
And there's a long history of that at ASU
and at other institutions for students
who maybe haven't had enough practice,
aren't as comfortable
with where they wanna be with their writing
before starting English 101.
So the elimination of that course
now places all the students
who before had either tested into a situation
or preselected by themselves into a situation
where they didn't feel ready
or comfortable with English 101,
but yet now all of those students
are gonna be in one English 101 going forward.
So that just broadened the population for English 101,
even more than we had already anticipated it doing.
So the redesign has tried to account for the needs
of that particular audience as well.
Michael- And I think what is a huge success
is that even with that massive increase in enrollment,
we still saw an increase in ABC rates
and a decrease in withdrawal rates.
And that is massive
when we're including that other population.
Before we move on from curriculum,
I'd wanna ask Sean,
can you tell us a little bit about English 105
and what's different about 105
compared to 101 and 102?
Sean- So we take the same kind of concepts from 101 and 102
and put it all into one quick course.
So it's a little bit of a challenge.
And we tend to get students
who are maybe in Barrett Honors College
or who have high test scores
for their entrance exams and so forth.
But it's really interesting to kind of see students
who want to get their first-year writing courses
outta the way really quickly.
So sometimes, we have challenges there too,
you know, students who think they're gonna get it,
you know, get it through really quickly,
and they just want to get it done with.
So bringing them into that challenge
of engaging with their communities
and really thinking hard about,
you know, those critical concepts versus,
"Oh, I thought I was just gonna sit down
and read a book and write about it."
Or, "I thought I was gonna do the same thing I'm used to
in high school in my honors,
you know, AP courses.
I thought I was gonna do more of the same."
So that's been a pretty big challenge that I've experienced.
But once they get past that,
hopefully they accept that challenge and take it on.
I've seen a lot of success
with students who have found it really rewarding
and empowering too.
So a lot of our students have gone on
to reach out to their real world communities
and tried to make those differences actually happen
or engage with others to inform them.
Michael- Yeah, that's great.
And I was gonna say, I remember,
you know, I love kind of the end of sessions
when you get to share some of the,
you know, student stories that you've heard
or that you've encountered throughout.
You know, and again,
what they are going to go on and do with that project,
for some of them,
I think is just so powerful that we're able to do that
in a first-year composition course.
We would not be expected, right?
So kudos to all of you for that.
Sean- Definitely
Michelle- We really take to heart ASU's charter,
as well as ASU's design aspirations,
especially social embeddedness.
And so, you know, we've really tried to design a curriculum
that introduces a first-year students to the ASU's goals
and to the values that we place here in the ASU community
on making an impact beyond the university.
Zach- Which isn't to say that the changes we've made
that we believe are in students' best interests
are easier for students necessarily.
As Sean was saying,
the expectations students have
of what they're going to do in our courses
is often radically different
than what we are actually asking them to do.
And there can be resistance to that.
There can be stress about that.
There can be uncertainty about that.
But I think, as Sean said,
once we get over that with students
when they realize what this course is
and why it is what it is,
there's the opportunity for real deep learning.
And I think most students will appreciate that.
Michael- Absolutely, and I think one of the great things
that y'all have done is include several pauses
for reflection throughout the course, right?
Because sometimes,
in these seven and a half week online courses,
it is just nonstop.
From day one until the very end,
students are just go, go, go.
And they never have time to really stop
and reflect on their learning.
And that's something that y'all have built
into the curriculum that again,
I think is just really special.
Michelle- Thanks, Michael, and actually,
you know, redesigning how we approached reflection,
Zach was in charge of that actually,
you know, three years of working on this,
it's almost difficult to remember all that we did
over the last three years.
But our first year we really decided
we wanted to think differently
about how we were engaging students in reflections.
And for those of you
who are maybe new to the term reflection,
you know, educational psychology
shows that building in these moments for students to stop
and take stock of their learning
and really engage in what we call metacognition
does a lot for solidifying that learning
so that students retain more of what they learned
when they have those moments.
And so prior to our course redesign,
a lot of our reflecting was really focused
on the learning outcomes
and asking students to kind of demonstrate their learning
of each of the outcomes that we had articulated for them
in our courses.
And as part of this redesign,
we started having conversations about student agency
because we felt as a program
that our priority was to give students agency as learners
and that the reflections were a vehicle for them to tell us
and show us what they learned.
But we were also constraining them
by limiting them to only discussing the outcomes.
And so one of the projects Zach works on,
I want him to be able to speak to it if he wants,
was to really think about designing reflections
that were holistic.
And that gave students prompting questions to reflect on
and to really set the agenda for their own learning.
Zach- Yeah, Michelle said it exactly right.
What we did was we vastly simplified
what we were asking students to do in our reflections
with basically two components
on the reflections we're having them do.
No matter if that is a reflection at the beginning
or a reflection at the middle
or a reflection at the end of the term.
In one of those two things
was we asked students to simply look back
what about the experience you've just had,
whether or not it was the first project
or this first section of the course.
What about it was challenging for you?
What about it was surprising?
What about it did you feel confident in?
Which of the habits and skills and processes and practices
that we had you work on were easier for you?
Which were harder?
Just to reflect back over the short burst of time
that we just had been working.
And then the second half is to simply look forward.
Now that you've reflected back,
look ahead, prospect, if you will,
what do you wanna work on
in this next section of the course?
Which habits do you think are strengths for you?
Which are challenging you right now?
Which of the practices that we're asking you to practice
are also more challenging than others?
And so just a basic looking back
and a basic looking forward and a reflection.
Students had great freedom then to select
and tailor it to their own work
and their own kind of metacognitive space.
Michael- And I think that approach
really couples that metacognitive reflection
with transfer, right?
And the ability to think about
how am I gonna take these skills
that I've been working on for these last few weeks?
And how else can I apply those right in my other classes,
in my career, in my community?
And so I love how you've paired
that looking back and looking forward.
Zach- Yeah, reflection is crucial to transfer.
All studies suggest that that's a key component
to transferring skills or practices or habits.
And so glad you said that, Michael, thanks.
Michael- Sure.
Sean- And with these changes,
I've noticed personally with my students
that they are so sincere,
and for better or worse, extremely honest.
It's really nice to see them
just taking that agency and running with it.
Michael- That's great.
(bright music)
Mary- Okay, so let's just stop for a moment
and call what's happening out,
because it's important people know.
When we're talking about student agency,
it kind of goes hand in hand
with the process that they're implementing
around students choosing which communities they engage with
and how they engage with their work and their assessments.
Those are very Universal Design for Learning approaches.
So I just wanted to highlight Universal Design for Learning.
It's a fabulous opportunity
for you to take an intentional look at your course
and find out how you can improve the experience
from the student's perspective.
How can you make it more learner-centered?
Michael- From my perspective with UDL,
where we're trying to get at
is a more authentic learner experience.
And so I know right now,
we talk about a little bit in the episode,
but ChatGPT and Generative AI,
and you know, there's so many concerns about,
oh, were students gonna be cheating
and how are they gonna get around my assessments
and things like that.
Universal Design for Learning,
a lot of times,
is able to get around those sort of stop gaps, right?
Because you are creating authentic assessments for students
and meeting them where they are.
And so again, I think,
not only is it a much more
impactful learning experience for the student,
but when we think about it from the faculty perspective,
and again kind of those fears about Generative AI,
I think again, UDL is a way
to decrease some of those concerns.
Liz- Yeah, and from a design perspective as well,
this course between working with you,
working with some of the other great resources
at ASU and the faculty
that have been helping design these courses,
we've been able to provide
kind of hit the three pillars of UDL
through multiple means of engagement.
Students really get a lot of opportunities
to choose how and when they learn.
multiple means of representation
in terms of how we present content both in video.
We have some podcast kind of forms out there.
We have an interactive textbook.
Just so many ways for the students to be engaged
with the course content.
And then in terms of action expression,
I'd say that that's really well covered
in the profile projects
and the Google site project
where students really get that hands-on experience
and get to create on their own
and get to define how they represent themselves
kind of in this world through that project.
Mary- Yeah, they really do hit the multiple means
of engagement vein of UDL,
like specifically around the relevance and value
of the experience for the student.
'Cause they're picking where they're engaging
and then the sustained effort and persistence
around their self-reflections
and like what are the skills
you're gonna be working on now?
And they choose them and, I mean,
they're creating their own assessment structure
based on what's their baseline
and then getting graded based on their own success,
not on some, you know,
general criteria that's in a rubric
that doesn't actually have personal value to them.
Liz- Yeah, not only that,
but I think that as Zach and everyone here
kind of mentioned at one point or another,
these courses are hard for a lot of students.
There's a lot of anxiety and challenges
that come up with your first-year writing.
There's a lot of negative feelings
that students pick up from writing in previous,
like lifetimes and experiences.
So having that as an avenue
really can also help increase that motivation,
especially when you can see how this is gonna help you,
not just in an academic career sense,
but in like my actual career
and how it's gonna help me in my writing right now today
in my Facebook posts, in my Twitters,
in my exes?
Whatever it's called now. Mary- Identity crisis.
Still I don't know what to call 'em either.
Liz- Or you know,
if you're a NANRAMA kid,
you know, my Nana Ram,
my national writing month,
novel writing month thing,
cut all that out.
Mary- We're not cutting any of that out.
But I do wanna say like that's self-regulation
under the guideline for engagement.
Like that's one of the ninth guideline I think?
And promoting their ability to do self-assessment,
create coping skills,
I mean, just intentionally be reflective
and then action-oriented.
Ricardo- And so part of that too is the multimodal opportunities
that they have to go with assignments.
So what is that?
What's the scope of that?
What can a student turn in absolutely anything
as an assignment
or what are the limits there?
Liz- You know, honestly,
they can almost turn in just about anything.
There is not a lot of limit.
It is really up to the students on what they can do.
There's very few guidelines
and they're very open-ended
just to encourage that creativity
from the student's point of view
and to really make sure that students have that opportunity
to express themselves in whatever means and representations
or means of representation that matter most to them
and help get their point across.
So it could be an all memed paper
if you really want it to be.
Ricardo- Well, then how do you grade something like that?
Or are you hitting certain criteria?
Michael- Well, I think one of the really important pieces of that
is being intentional with what they're choosing, right?
We don't want students
to just give us a Microsoft Word document
where they just copy and paste it a bunch of pictures in
just because we told them to make it multimodal.
We really want them to think about what is the impact
that this image is going to have.
So if I'm writing about,
you know, people who are experiencing homelessness
in Phoenix, Arizona,
I could choose a picture of a empty, dirty alley, right?
Which we might associate
with someone who is experiencing homelessness,
and that could have an impact, right?
But think about an image
where you're looking into the face of a person,
a human being who's experiencing that,
that is the image that we want in your paper, right?
And so those are the types of the feedback
that these faculty are gonna be giving the students
to help them really think about how do I be intentional
with the pieces of media that I'm including
to help really increase the rhetorical impact
that I'm having with my audience.
Mary- And that just is a more authentic assessment process,
not only from the students' experience
of creating the product through the process,
but from the faculty's perspective.
You're not giving the same feedback every time.
It's a different experience every time.
It's an authentic conversation
for that individual student's success.
And that's actually super meaningful,
especially in a class that's at this scale.
Michael- One of the really cool things that they get to do
in some of these courses is create an infographic
or a public service announcement or an advocacy ad, right?
And so one of the fun things that I get to do
is I go to our success coaches
and I actually train them
about these first-year composition courses
so that they can have more robust,
effective conversations with their students
to prepare them and coach them through those courses, right?
And so one of the things
that I always tell these coaches is,
you know, your students may be like,
"Why am I creating an infographic
in a first-year composition course?
This is not graphic design class, right?"
But think about the modern digital 21st century audience.
Are they gonna read an eight-page academic paper,
or are they gonna read a one-page infographic?
It's the latter of the two, right?
So we are arming our students
not only how to be successful in the academic environment
by writing APA style papers,
but we're also giving them that power
and the ability to go out and communicate
in a way that the modern digital audience
wants to receive information.
Liz- Yeah, I think that that's my favorite part
about these classes is that they do give you this skills
and the information that you need
to be a successful student in the academic field,
but they give you this more immediate,
real world writing experience in terms of, you know,
the fact that you're gonna need to write an email tomorrow
for your job
or create an infographic for your work.
I mean, I think you and I make them all the time.
So that's a really relevant skill,
as well as creating the Google site for the portfolio.
Being able to communicate through not just written language,
but also how you intentionally incorporate those images
to help further support what you're trying to get across.
That's very modern, very real.
Ricardo- Very modern, very real.
Though I like Frankenstein and poetry so.
Michael- Yeah, same.
(bright music)
Michael- Okay, so before we switch gears away from curriculum,
we gotta talk about the elephant in the room, right?
Artificial intelligence,
and especially generative artificial intelligence.
So in a first-year composition course,
I can imagine that there might be
some concern, some excitement, some fear, some trepidation,
lots and lots of different feelings.
What are y'all thinking about generative AI
and how you see it potentially being used or not being used
in your first-year composition courses?
Michelle- Wow, yeah, that is the elephant in the room.
I think that everyone's talking about it.
And believe it or not,
it's only been a year, I think,
since ChatGPT 2, was it two, initially?
It launched and a lot has already changed.
And it's really become the focus of a lot of conversations
about not just the teaching and learning of writing,
but teaching and learning more broadly.
So I think what we're talking about now is, you know,
we definitely don't want to try to be an AI detector
or the AI police
because the cat is out of the bag.
And so really, you know,
the conversations that we're having programmatically
are about how we can teach students
how to use it as a partner,
as a tool to improve their writing,
but not as a substitution
for the difficult thinking and learning that they need to do
in all of their classes.
Zach- Yeah, and I would say given our process focus,
I've never been stressed about AI since this has started.
I'm more interested in seeing,
as Michelle said, how it can work
with and for our students in collaboration
to help them generate ideas.
I could see how perhaps teachers
or professors in other disciplines
who are focused on products may have more anxiety
about where's that product come from.
But in a process-based course like ours,
it's more interesting than scary, I would say.
Sean- It's also really easy to tell
when they have used those tools
to do their writing for them.
But I've approached the feedback the same way I would
if they had approached their writing personally,
but they didn't put a lot of effort into it.
So you give the same type of feedback.
Please add more details or specifics here,
especially with their reflections,
because they're supposed to be really sincere.
Some of them might try to use AI to write that for them,
but then you're like,
where are your specific personal examples
and connections to this?
Where are you transferring it in your own life?
Because ChatGPT doesn't know those details.
And because they're writing
about their personal communities,
it's just such a complex process for them.
But I've also leaned into using it as a tool such as,
you know, something I read on Reddit,
another professor said that they've used it
to give their students a 24/7 tutor for their writing
because they can put their work that they've already done
and get quick feedback from a certain point of view.
Here are some prompts you can try
to get different types of feedback
depending on what you're looking for
to improve on in your own work.
So that's what I've kind of done with my students
and I've had some success with it this semester.
John- Yeah, we're actually already kind of starting to pilot
some of that stuff in our courses.
And in the spring, we're gonna be expanding
some of that stuff to more sections, more students.
Yeah, integrating things like ChatGPT and Word Tune
into assignments and asking students to honestly,
you know, tell us how they used it,
what they thought, was it successful.
And some interesting results so far across the board.
Some students love it.
Some students feel weird about using it.
And so it's not all good or all bad.
It's just something that's out there
that we have to recognize and run with.
Zach- In relationship to the writing conversation in AI,
I would say to any teachers or administrators out there
who are on the more stressed and negative side
of AI in this regard,
I would say it's an opportunity.
It's an opportunity to evaluate
what writing you're assigning,
how you're teaching that writing.
If you're teaching that writing to your students,
that's a good opportunity to revisit the assignments,
ask students to do writing in your courses.
Michelle- Yeah, I would say as writing teachers,
we've always fashioned ourselves
as more as coaches and partners in learning
than as the old sage on the stage model.
And I think what AI is gonna really make outdated
are things like people who give lectures
and then assign Scantrons.
Because, you know,
students can quickly complete those exams,
especially in online classes, right?
They can look up the information on AI,
They can input that into ChatGPT,
and so how can you really provide
these meaningful learning experiences for students
that treat them as partners in their own learning, right?
That's really where we wanna go
and continue to go with students.
I will say too though, that, you know,
I think anytime tools like this emerge,
there's rightfully a lot of anxiety among faculty
about how they might be forced to implement this
or what expectations there might be
around something like that.
And I will say, you know,
the conversations that I've had across ASU,
the provost office has stressed that whatever we do with AI,
the human will be at the center.
And I really appreciate the emphasis
that ASU has placed on that.
And I think that in tandem with our new design aspiration
related to principled innovation
should be reassuring to a lot of us
who may be feeling anxious about what this might mean for us
in terms of class size
or, you know, like AI teaching the class.
Because I think, you know,
as Zach and and John have said,
this is an opportunity
to really focus on the things that we love most
about teaching and working with students,
and will give us a tool to do that
in a more sophisticated way.
Michael- I think that we have a new episode maybe for season six
all about generative AI
in these first-year composition courses.
Maybe we can invite you back
to hear about some of these experiments
that are gonna be going on.
Michelle- We'd love that.
(bright music)
Liz- So speaking of doing things intentionally,
I think one of the things that Michelle touches on
is just their intentionality
and how well thought out these courses are,
and kind of how they're using
the ideas of principled innovation in their courses,
which really the core of that to me is intentionality.
Ricardo- What's principled innovation?
Liz- Well, why would you would ask?
Liz- So principled innovation
is the ability to imagine new concepts,
catalyze ideas and form new solutions guided by principles
that create positive change for humanity.
The question is, we can innovate, but should we?
Which really gets back to that intentionality.
Ricardo- Well, where does this come from?
Liz- Oh, this comes from ASU.
Mary- Oh, yeah, we totally branded this thing.
Ricardo- It is an ASU-branded thing.
Mary- Registered trademark.
Maybe not trademark, I don't know.
What's the circle around the R?
That's what it has.
Michael- Registered. Ricardo- Registered, yeah.
Mary- Done registered.
Liz- I was gonna say, I don't know if you've heard this,
but ASU is number one in innovation.
Michael- How many years in a row? Liz- Nine years ago right now.
Mary-We were on eight infinity last year.
Liz- Yeah, but what's interesting about this
is that it really breaks down into kind of four areas,
moral, civic, intellectual, and performance.
I won't necessarily get into the nitty gritty
about what all this means.
Liz- No, we'll put a link.
You guys can get into nitty gritty.
Mary-There's an entire website dedicated to the PI process.
Liz- Yeah, there's a lot of great information there.
But so much of that is thinking about these four areas
in terms of how you're intentionally integrating those
into your courses
and really what that means for students
when they leave here.
ASU is really committed
to not just making you a good student,
but a good, well-rounded human being on the planet
who's thinking about the world around you
and not just what's in front of you,
but what's out there and beyond.
Ricardo- What a novel idea.
Mary- Yeah, shout out to the Mary Lou Fulton's teacher college
for putting that all together.
(bright music)
Micahel- So let's switch gears a little bit
and I wanna talk about
some of the other really special things
outside of the curriculum
that take place in these first-year composition courses.
And John, I'd like to start with you
and hear a little bit about your work
with the writing mentors
'cause I'm sure that that phrase is unfamiliar
to many of our listeners
and then talk about their work in the platform InScribe.
John- Sure, yeah.
So the term writing mentor
has gone through many different variations.
I think they're called writing fellows at one point.
It wouldn't be such a stretch
to even refer to 'em as TAs or tutors.
But what our writing mentors are,
as I mentioned earlier,
they're course-embedded peer tutors.
So, you know, in the Writer's Studio,
we have, what?
A hundred faculty members or so
across all the different Canvas shell,
but they're all teaching the same curriculum,
and they all have a writing mentor
that's assigned to the course as well,
who works with both the faculty and the students.
They're there for peer support,
things like just answering questions,
you know, monitoring and grading discussion
and peer review assignments.
You know, holding drop in labs
where students can come in and ask questions
about assignments that are giving them trouble.
They'll hold workshops where the students,
you know, they can come and work over Zoom
for one-on-one help with their papers
synchronously in real time.
So they're just a really great resource
and really a big part
of what makes the Writers' Studio so special.
Now, as part of the design changes
we've made over the last three years,
we have integrated a community
and communication platform called InScribe into our courses.
What we used to have
in anybody that's familiar with the Canvas course
will know about the discussions,
and we used to have a community forum in every course
where students would just be able to post a question
and then the writing mentor or instructor
would get back to them.
But we found those were hardly ever used.
You know, just imagine a room full of cobwebs
or a tumbleweed drifting across,
you know, a barren landscape.
You'd get maybe a question or two.
It was clear that there's more questions
out there than that,
but that wasn't the right format for those questions
and to help those students.
So what InScribe does is it serves
as kind of a digital study hall
where 24 hours a day,
you know, we have a team
of almost a hundred writing mentors as well
who monitor this platform.
Students can post questions anytime they want.
And within 24 hours,
any number of writing mentors,
you can get 2, 3, 4 responses,
we'll get back to that student.
You get a lot of stuff, you know,
like, what was the due date for this?
Or where do I find that?
But you get a lot of, you know, interesting questions too.
Like, is this topic appropriate
or I'm having trouble finding someone to interview.
And our writing mentors, they're amazing people.
They're predominantly undergraduate peer tutors.
A lot of them come directly from the Writer's Studio,
Michael, like you did.
We'll have instructors reach out and say,
"Hey, you were such a great student.
Why don't you apply to to be a writing mentor?"
So we have, I would say,
it's close to 50% of our writing mentors
came directly from the Writer's Studio.
But we also recruit through Barrett,
through, you know, the English department newsletter,
things like that.
Mostly undergrads.
Some graduate students.
But they're all very high achieving students.
They've succeeded in their first-year composition courses
and they're just here to help students.
And InScribe has really helped really connect our students
and our writing mentors in ways that was needed
and wasn't there before.
Michael- And John, how many writing mentors are there
in each class section?
John- Between 101 and 102,
I think there's around 40-ish in each course.
And then we just have a small handful.
Sean can attest, there's not a large 105 population,
but we do have a handful,
maybe two or three or four 105 writing mentors.
Michael- But is it true that every single course has a instructor
and a writing mentor with them?
John- Yes, one to sometimes two writing mentors,
Michael- Which I think that ratio,
when we think about our high enrolling courses
at a huge university like ASU,
that instructor to student ratio
is incredibly special and incredibly intentional.
Michelle, is there anything you wanna add?
I know you were very instrumental
in kind of getting this program off the ground.
Michaelle- Yeah, well I think,
I know there was talk earlier about high impact practices
and peer-to-peer learning is so important for that.
Just like when we ask students
to evaluate or give feedback on each other's writing,
the process of giving feedback improve student learning.
And so these kinds of relationships
are valuable for everybody involved.
The students who are, you know,
in the class getting support from their peer tutor,
their writing mentor,
the peer tutor themselves,
learn so much throughout the process.
And you know, we've had students stay on
for a master's program,
stay in the program as a writing mentor
throughout their masters.
And then even the faculty member, I think,
often benefits so much from working with the writing mentor
because it gives them an opportunity
to see the class from a student's perspective.
And so it's just really a wonderful
community building program that we have.
And I just wanna add one more thing
and then I'll let John take over,
but I don't know if there's any other,
or any program that's quite as large as ours
that provides this kind of opportunity
for ASU online students to work for ASU, right?
And then to be part of a community of students
in the way that our writing mentors are
who are, as John said,
predominantly ASU online students.
John- I was just gonna say, Michelle,
you mentioned community building relationships.
We have a number of faculty members
who started out as writing mentors, right?
Michelle- Yes, we do actually
who are getting their masters at the time.
John- And instructional designers.
Michelle- And instructional designers, yeah.
Our reach extends broadly.
Sean- And just to quickly add to that,
I love how many of the writing mentors
come from multiple disciplines too.
I have a lot of past writing mentors who were STEM students
and they've gone into engineering for example.
And that's such a cool perspective to bring,
especially for our STEM students in the courses
who might not think,
"Oh, I don't need to learn
how to write or communicate in this way."
John- It's actually almost a surprise
when we have English majors who apply.
It's like, "Oh, they're still out there.
Okay, cool."
Sean- Yeah.
(bright music)
Mary- Mentoring, the writing mentorship.
What is that like? You were one.
Michael- It is a special, special role.
So as the writing mentor,
you're working one-on-one with a faculty
in your classroom of about 25 to 35 students,
just kind of depending
on how long you've been a writing mentor.
And really what you're there to do,
again, is to primarily answer any student questions
that are coming in about the general course curriculum
and content and how to navigate and things like that.
They also really engage with students
on any discussion assignments
to make sure that they feel
that there is that instructor present
within the course as well.
So not only that peer-to-peer interaction,
but that peer-to-instructor interaction as well.
And then before the students are working
on their major project,
their major writing project within the course,
the mentors also host what are called revision workshops.
And these are one-hour workshops where students can sign up,
and they now actually offer them asynchronously as well,
for students like me who couldn't find a time
to meet with someone else.
But these workshops are one hour
to get to meet with somebody for the student
who goes through a training twice a year
about this course, about the content,
about the curriculum,
and really knows the assignments really, really well.
So we would never discourage a student
from going to the ASU writing center
because they are also phenomenally helpful.
But the writing mentors are specifically trained
in the type of writing and the type of projects
students are working on within these courses.
So they're really a great go-to,
and again, being that peer model,
we wanted it to hopefully decrease some of that pressure
of it's not a TA,
nothing official or scary like that.
It's another peer.
It's another student who's gone through this course
and they understand what you're going through.
Liz- Well, that's so nice 'cause it's so horrifying
to be like a brand new student who's like,
"I haven't written a paper
in say 25 years."
And then to be able to go to a peer
instead of you're really super scary,
although secretly really nice faculty member,
but they seem super scary,
and get that feedback from another student.
It's so less like intimidating.
So that's really cool.
And it also,
since there's students who've gone through the course,
it's that sense of like,
"Look, I've come out the other side,
you will too.
Michael- And it's such a benefit to our online students, you know,
to be able to get a job at the university,
like that is huge,
and it doesn't happen very often for online students, right?
And then also to be able to develop those connections
not only with other online students
but with instructors and with those coordinators, right?
And they're developing those mentor relationships
that again are gonna help them
get those recommendation letters
and things that again are very challenging for students
in online environments to often get.
Ricardo- Well, the thing that I'd like to highlight
is this new character that Liz has come up
with Southern woman who's returning back to school 25 years.
Liz- Well, I haven't heard of a web assessment
and why I said 25 years?
It's an old prospect. Ricardo- I haven't touched
the word process, sir.
And I don't know how long.
Mary- Well, I never.
(bright music)
Michael- So before we move on,
I wanna talk a little bit more about InScribe
because that's a new platform
that is becoming really popular
in a lot of our online courses.
And one of the cool things that I know,
the changes that we made was rather than,
you know, in that community forum model,
it was the, what?
25, 30 students and the writing mentor alone
in that community forum.
John, tell us a little bit
about what's different with InScribe.
John- Sure, so InScribe is,
you know, it's available 24/7,
and that really, really helps serve our student population.
You know, as Michelle mentioned earlier,
we have a very diverse population.
It's not just all, you know,
18 to 20-year-old first-time college students.
We have returning students who work a nine-to-five job.
We have military students who are stationed in Hawaii
or Japan or Germany,
you know, stay at home parents,
just students from across the globe.
So if you just consider a typical teacher or writing mentor,
you know, it's not quite a nine-to-five,
but you know, yeah, business hours, right?
But with InScribe,
and we do have mentors
that are from across the globe as well.
And they're available 24/7.
So if a student gets off of a shift at work at five,
they make dinner,
then they get to their homework,
it's nine or 10,
and they post a question,
they could get a response before they go to bed that night.
Or a student in Hawaii that's it's 6:00 AM Arizona time.
There's gonna be somebody keeping track
and hopping on to help them out.
Michelle- And even if it's not one of our writing mentors
who's there responding to questions,
it might be a peer who has the answer to that question.
And one thing that John worked on
over the last few years was,
and I think Sean was involved in this process too,
was collecting resources
and building those resources into InScribe
so that even if the student can't get an answer
immediately to their question,
they can search within InScribe
for resources that we have generated for them,
created for them
to help them potentially solve the question at hand.
John- Yeah, you know, how do I cite an APA?
How do I write a thesis statement?
What's the difference
between primary and secondary research?
So we have resources built in to InScribe
that also link out to places like Purdue Owl
or just other helpful websites that are out there.
So there's not only active engagement
from their peers and from writing mentors,
but there's just static builtin resources as well.
Sean- And they're a lot easier to access than the typical FAQ
because it's powered by AI
to help students get to those answers.
And I just wanted to add also
that this has been a game changer for work-life balance
and just wellness in general for us
because I used to make myself way too available for students
and it has been helpful for me
to be able to firmly but confidently step back and say,
"There are resources for you.
I'll be back tomorrow, yeah.
Michael- Absolutely, Sean.
And what I was gonna say, you know,
I was one of those students getting my degree
where I was working three jobs
doing a full-time student load.
So I was working 90 hours a week.
So there were not,
I hope that y'all were asleep
by the time that I was online doing homework.
But you know, Sean, you touched on that AI piece of it,
which I think is so helpful within InScribe too.
'Cause basically what it does
is as a student starts to type their question,
InScribe's artificial intelligence
is gonna be reading that, right?
And so we pre-populate InScribe with these FAQs
based off of commonly asked questions.
And so that way,
the AI is able to prompt and respond back to a student
typically giving them the answer, right?
And so what's so great is I spent a lot of time
going through the InScribe data
and what we see,
no matter what course that we've added this into
time and time again,
the number of views far exceeds the number of posts.
And that's not always the case
in the community forum, right?
And so what we're seeing
is that InScribed not only allows students
to be able to get their answer faster,
but it also reduces the number of questions
that students have to ask
because they're already seeing that answer there.
(bright music)
Mary- You know, what I like about the InScribe resources?
'Cause I know like students could just go Google it, right?
Like what, how do I cite APA?
Google it.
Well, what if they go to the wrong resource?
Michael- Yeah. Mary- Right?
So like that's what I like
about that intentional resource curation that happens,
and creation, as Michelle said,
like they're creating a lot of these things,
is that you know they're right.
You know, the students are getting the right feedback
and the right pathway to their answer.
Michael- And I think a lot of times
when we've introduced this to faculty,
there's always a little bit of resistance
'cause it is more front work, right?
So think through your community forum,
what are those common questions that you've had?
And then they pass those to be,
"We'll create the FAQ, make it pretty,
and then put it into the InScribe for them."
But they're the course experts, right?
And so the cool thing is though,
once they've gone through
and faculty have taught with InScribe
for at least a session or so,
they're on board
because they have seen the reduction in the number of emails
that they're getting from students, right?
They've seen a vast reduction
in the number of duplicative posts
because if you're using a Canvas discussion forum
for all of your students,
they're not gonna sit there and read every single line
to try and find an answer.
They're just gonna put a new question at the top, right?
And so in the end,
it really does decrease the faculty workload
of trying to manage those same questions that again,
always are gonna come up in their courses.
But again, I think the biggest benefit
is obviously to our students to have that 24/7 support
both through AI, through peers,
and the writing mentors in the course.
Liz- Yeah, I mean I think we did the kind of like stats on it
and it reduced the amount of time
that students waited for an answer to like five minutes.
What's cool about InScribe
is it gives you that data first of all.
But to see a question that might have taken 48 hours
to get a response to,
that 24 to 48 hours is the typical like,
"Oh, you'll get an email from me in this time."
Students were getting answers in five minutes.
That was on the long end.
On the other hand or on the short side,
it was like a minute.
Mary- That's crazy because even in a classroom
like a large lecture hall,
you could take far more than five minutes
to get a question answered if you need an individual care.
Michael- Well, and what I always say is that what we see,
especially with that AI that is, again,
as students are starting to type their question,
InScribe's AI is going to push suggestions to them, right?
And so, so often,
a student's question is answered
before they even finish asking it.
Mary- So cool.
And like that I think is a mind-blowing piece.
And again, when we think about who our students are,
and again, I was one of those students
where I was working three jobs,
I did not have time to wait 48 hours to get a response back.
Now hopefully, I was working ahead
so I wasn't on that time pressure,
but maybe, maybe not.
But if not, being able to go in
and in that moment when I am doing homework online
at 4:00 AM and it's due the next day,
but I have to work both of my jobs
to be able to get that quick answer,
that is key to be able to scale
and still have that really impactful,
authentic online classroom community.
Liz- Well, and that kind of support
is gonna like greatly reduce your like anxiety as well
'cause I know for me,
if I am freaking out about something that is all consuming
and I can't get my work done because I'm so anxious
about figuring out if I'm doing it right and then the,
"Well, should I do it all now
and then fix it later when I get the answer?
Or should I just wait?
Like how's my time gonna be best spent?"
And then to skip all of that spiraling, amazing.
(bright music)
Michael- So as we wrap up our conversation today,
I wanted to talk a little bit about what was so unique
about your course redesign process.
'Cause I think a lot of times
when we hear the phrase course redesign,
we think curriculum
and then we think user experience, right?
But there's so much more
that goes into a student's educational experience,
especially maybe online, right?
There are things like what are they dealing with
outside of school?
There are things like do they know how to get in contact
with their academic advisor?
There are all sorts of challenges that these students face.
And so when you take a systems design approach,
or sometimes it's called a learning engineering approach,
you're really looking at all the spokes in the wheel
and not just one or two areas of improvement.
And so one of the things that my team really tried to do
and help out
was to think about what are some of these other things
that exist within the university
that we can bring into the work
that we're already doing collaboratively
to extend the knowledge about what's going on
and what's so unique in these courses
to all those support instances.
So one of the things that I think is also really unique
about ASU online
is our success coaching center.
And I know that y'all have had
some success coaches on recently,
but they are one-to-one with students as well
and just there to provide any sort of guidance for them.
And so one of the first things that we did
when we were going into this redesign
is we hosted a listening session
with the senior success coaches.
They are literally talking to students
40 hours a week, right?
So they are getting all of the good information
about what's working, what's not working,
what are the challenges.
And so we were able to take that information
and really digest some of that
and make that to be some of those priorities
for the redesign.
So it's not just what do the subject matter experts think?
And then what do some
of the instructional design experts think.
But what do our students think about their experience?
Then how do we then frame that
within the work that we're all doing?
So I think that was one really unique aspect
that the systems design approach brought into it.
One of the other things I just mentioned
with InScribe is data.
And I have grown to really love living in data
and I spent a lot of time with the Writer's Studio data.
But one of the other really powerful pieces
that allowed us to make data-informed redesign decisions
was what we got from InScribe
'cause again, all of those student questions,
I get that in Excel spreadsheet, right?
And so we went through,
we coded those, we found the themes,
and then we took that back
to those subject matter experts, right?
To the faculty coordinators and said,
"Hey, here are what students
are commonly having questions about,
common challenges in the course,
how can we build some of that into the redesign
so that way we're addressing those questions
through the design
and hopefully eliminating the need
to even ask those questions."
So I think that was something kind of special
in the approach.
And then, Sean, I know you did a lot of work
over the past couple of summers
with designing extra support resources.
We talked a little bit
about the student facing resources for InScribe,
but last summer you spent a lot of time
working on faculty resources and helping them be better too.
Do you mind touching on that a little bit?
Sean- Yes, we definitely spent a lot of time previously
working on student facing, as you said,
but it was really nice change of pace to switch focus
on our faculty, especially for new faculty,
as Michelle and everyone else has touched on today.
What we do is a little bit different
than what others are expecting.
Maybe when they maybe just start with us,
much like the students might come into our course
and expect one thing and experience a totally different one.
We have to help those faculty members
kind of get up to speed really quickly
because as you mentioned earlier, Michael,
these courses move quickly as well
and they're just kind of thrown in
and have to hit the ground running.
So I think it's been extremely helpful for that.
And having the data that you've uncovered
through that process helped us focus
on where it was needed perhaps the most
because we could go on and on
for years creating resources probably.
Michelle- Yeah, no, they did a fantastic job.
One of the challenges with scale
is that we often have to hire a lot of folks rapidly, right?
To keep up with enrollment demand.
What we did this summer that Sean contributed to
is really revamp our faculty Canvas site
and really expand our onboarding offerings to new faculty,
again, as a way to continue to be able to provide
high quality teaching at scale
so that when faculty are coming into the program,
we can get them quickly up to speed
and they have the resources available that they need
as they get acclimated to our curriculum.
Which by the way,
I don't know if we highlighted this before,
but we do have a shared curriculum across our program,
so faculty are teaching the same assignments.
And I think that was one of the things
that was so important to us
as we went into this three-year design process,
was to make sure that we included faculty
and faculty's perspectives and contributions
into the redesign of the curriculum.
And Sean has been one of the faculty
who's been very instrumental in bringing in that perspective
as somebody who's really doing a lot of teaching
and having a lot of student encounters every semester.
Sean- Well, I just wanted to add
that one of our biggest goals this last summer
was to make your job a lot easier
because as our program grows, so do your responsibilities.
So we wanted to, you know,
just like with InScribe,
we've heard the student questions,
we were hoping to do the same for you
and the faculty questions.
So hopefully it, it has helped so far.
Michelle- Yes, I appreciate that.
Thank you so much.
Michael- Well, and that's why I think
this whole holistic redesign process has been so unique
and so special
and everybody from the program lead
to the faculty coordinators to individual faculty members
who are writing mentors,
to instructional designers,
to the EdPlus marketing team,
to our success coaches, to our data teams,
there have been so many individual contributions
into this project that I think, again,
it has made it really special
and really successful for our students.
And so I'm so grateful to have been able
to have been a part of it
and I'm so grateful that y'all took some time
to come and share the story today.
Before we head out, any last words,
anything anyone wanted to add?
Michelle- I just wanna, again, highlight
how important the data has been to us.
We really, prior to this,
did not have regular infusions of data
into kind of our decision-making process.
Our resources are thin in our program.
And so having Michael
be able to provide ongoing data to us
so that we can make these informed decisions
has been a very heavy load,
but also invaluable for us as we move through this process.
And hopefully, as we continue
to move through the process too.
Zach- I would say also just that
because writing is a recursive process,
our revision is always in progress as well.
We are always going to be continuing to make changes
to use the data to work with our collaborators
to continue to improve the student experience
in the Writer's Studio.
So our revamp will continue endlessly.
Sean- And I think as challenging as it might feel
in the middle of the semester,
especially in B sessions,
it's so rewarding to get those student emails
sometimes one or two or three years later that say,
"This has changed my life."
It's been, you know,
I still think about that course all the time
because how often do you hear that
from a first-year composition course?
It's really exciting to see those.
Michael- Well, and that's been probably my favorite part
of working with the data
is reading some of those qualitative surveys
from the students writing about
what they have really enjoyed about the course.
And yeah, maybe it was surprising
and maybe it was challenging,
but what they're taking away from it, right?
And what they gained
and how that's gonna be able to support them,
like we said in their academic work,
their personal professional lives as well.
Michael- Awesome, well, thank you again so much
for taking some time and being here.
Sean, from Remote,
we appreciate you zooming in and spending some time with us.
Zach, John, Michelle,
thank you so much for joining us in the studio.
Any last words or anything you'd wanna plug
other than the things that we're gonna add
into our show notes?
Sean- Well, if anyone's interested,
a colleague within the Writer's Studio and I
and her daughter,
we created the "Health, It's Personal" podcast
where we speak with different professionals
such as doctors, psychologists,
and people who have personal experiences,
people who've worked for the EPA and stuff like that.
It's been really cool to kind sit down and talk to them
about things that teenagers, young adults,
and maybe new parents might want to know about,
you know, informing their children or themselves
about health-related topics.
But we kind of really have fun with that.
And we go broad ranging
with environmental health, for example,
or lots of different tough topics that cover everything.
Michael- And I got to be the very first guest
and talk about my love for Christina Aguilera,
so it doesn't get much better than that.
Sean- So if you wanna hear more Michael's
awesome radio voice.
Michelle- Well, this was a lot of fun.
Thanks again for having us.
I think if anyone's interested
in learning more about grading contracts,
there's a great issue that Zach and I have a piece in
of the Journal of Writing Assessment from 2020.
It was a special issue on grading contracts,
which you should be able to find in the show notes.
Michael- Perfect, thanks everybody.
(bright music)
Ricardo- Okay, well that was such a great interview
and I wanna again, applaud you, Michael,
for such a great job in that interview.
Mary- Phenomenal. Michael- Thank you all.
Thank you for having me and for hosting me
and for letting me talk to some of my mentors
and people that have been really impactful in my own life.
Ricardo- Hey, anytime.
Liz- It was great to just be a fly on the wall
for that conversation.
Mary- Yeah, so much.
So much came up.
I love that they were so open
to having the AI question answered.
Like they didn't prepare for that,
so that was really quite lovely to hear them off the cuff.
I mean, beautiful.
The future is very bright in the Writing Studio,
Ricardo- And the future is very bright for season five
of Course Stories.
And we look forward to providing new listeners
with more interesting conversations.
And if people wanna have an interesting conversation
with us themselves,
how can they do that, Mary?
Mary- Well, email us coursestories@asu.edu.
We are waiting with bated breath for y'all email.
Ricardo- Mm-hmm, oh my dear.
I can't. Mary- My luck.
Ricardo- Oh, I'm having palpitations waiting on these emails.
Liz- Thanks.
Ricardo- Bye.
(bright music)
Ricardo- Course Stories is available
wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can reach us at coursestories@asu.edu.
Course stories is produced
by the Instructional Design at New Media Team at EdPlus
at Arizona State University.
If you're an instructor at ASU online,
tell us your course story
and we may feature it in a future episode.
Thanks, listening.
(bright music)