Which is better? Online classes or face-to-face? Synchronous or asynchronous teaching?
These questions have no answer because the question is not really about the modality. It’s about how we use it. The better class will be the one where the teacher is taking full advantages of the affordances of the modality to match their own teaching style and meet their students’ needs, contexts, and learning styles preferences.
Even if I teach exclusively online courses for the rest of my career, I will never be just an online teacher. I have built up my expertise in different modalities, so that I will always see myself as a face-to-face, hybrid, and online teacher. Therefore, my theory of online literacy instruction will always be connected to these other teaching modalities. All these modalities are effective in teaching writing (for the effectiveness of teaching writing online, see Warnock's book Teaching Writing Online: How and Why; for the effectiveness of hybrid writing courses, see Deanna Mascle's blog) . It’s not about which is better, or comparing modalities, or migrating work from one course to another. It’s about recognizing the affordances of each modality and transforming our pedagogy to meet them.
This Venn Diagram represents my theory of OLI, visually.
The image represents a Venn diagram with three circles, each one labeled: online instruction, hybrid instruction, and f2f instruction. In between each overlap, there are three two-sided arrows, and in the middle where all the circles meet there is the symbol of a heart.
The arrows in the Venn diagram is what each modality is teaching you that is useful for other modalities. Whatever I practice in one modality changes me as an instructor, and I bring that change with me to the other modalities.
For example:
Accessibility is often stressed for online classes, but it actually applies to all of our courses (Nielsen, 2016). Accessibility means that our teaching materials and all other aspects of the course are accessible to everyone and allow for a diversity of learning styles to be met. While teaching online, I have learned the importance of making the material available to everyone since we do not meet in classrooms where we would have an opportunity to "fix problems as they arise" (this used to be my motto for hybrid teaching, which means that both my f2f and hybrid courses were not particularly accessible). Teaching online has made me aware of accessibility issues in a way that the other modalities had not done. For example, I had never needed to describe pictures in my f2f courses, so I had never thought about alt text. Now, no matter the modality, I make sure to add descriptions to my images.
F2f teaches us the importance of community, which then pushes us to find ways to recreate it online (Pilcher, 2016). In an attempt to recreate the same energy of f2f peer review workshops in my online classes, I have moved my peer reviews into discussion boards with set groups to help recreate some of the community-building that happens as students discuss their drafts in the classroom. Students can feel isolated in online classes, so creating opportunities for contact is even more crucial than in f2f courses.
Hybrid teaches us that there are different ways to learn (Gedik, Kiraz, & Yasar Ozden, 2012). In my hybrid courses, I have learned to define participation in widely different ways: students could participate in class during our f2f meetings, or in discussion boards online. This is a strategy that I have imported into both online (students could reach me in different ways, in writing or during office hours) and f2f (shy students could count their at-home freewrites as proof of their participation).
All three modalities teach us important things that help us improve our teaching in other modalities, which should be the best reason why we need to keep teaching all three! What I try to focus on is the affordances of each modality:
Affordances of hybrid teaching: Hybrid combine the best of f2f and the best of online teaching into one course. Of course, it has to be done correctly, which means that instructors should be very aware of what is the best of f2f and the best of online, which can make hybrid particularly difficult to teach, thus highlighting one of the difficulties of this modality.
Affordances of F2f teaching: In-class courses create a community, contact, and human aspect to the course that comes much easier than in an online class, where the instructor must be proactive in creating opportunities to make this happens. Of course, this is also the difficulty of f2f: a class can be derailed by too much community, or a lesson plan halved because of too many interruptions and distractions.
Affordances of online teaching: While there is a sense of wild improvisation and possibility of chaos in f2f, online courses are more often characterized by careful organization and planning. If well-planned, an online course is a well-oiled machine of user-friendly content (Greer & Harris, 2018): students are not encountering surprises at every turn, and they find clear instructions, deadlines, and an easy-to-navigate map on how to complete their work. Of course, having a pre-planned course also comes with its own difficulties since we now have to go out of our way to create a sense of community and humanize our way to teach online (Pacansky-Brock, 2017). However, online courses are not limited by time and space, which is an incredible affordance of this modality. When I first realized that, I was a bit overwhelmed by the POSSIBILITIES! One can have too many possibilities on how to do things online, which can lead us to create too much. This is a difficulty of online courses: balancing the creative possibilities with the cognitive load of our students. In online courses, less is more.
Another important aspect of the online modality is that online courses are multimodal (Borgman, 2019), which allow us to fully embrace the Multimodal Literacies Position Statement from NCTE, thus reminding us that literacy is more than just writing (Borgman, 2019). Again, this is both an affordance and a difficulty of online teaching since multimodality embraces different learning styles, but can also increase the cognitive overload of our students.
Another affordance of online teaching is that I have a much clearer idea of what my students are struggling with during their projects, how they are being successful at meeting outcomes, and what questions they have as they figure things out. Online classes do not necessarily represent more work for the instructor, but they are certainly a different type of work. With online classes, I spend hours staring at my computer, responding to student work, be it small weekly homework or formal assignments. Through this frequent responding work, I may not know what my students look like or the sound of their voice, but I have a much clearer idea of their work and their process, in a way that happens to a much lesser degree in f2f classes, and not necessarily with every student.
While the modality does not matter (given that we are fully embracing its affordances and are aware of its specific difficulties), there are some things that never change. The heart symbol in the middle of the Venn Diagram is my teaching philosophy, which never changes, no matter the modality:
I teach for equity and access, which guide my steps in every course, but might mean different adjustments depending on the format of the course. For example, I don't have to worry about video captions in my f2f course in the same way that I do in my hybrid and online courses, but I do have to worry about speaking clearly and having instructions written down for in-class activities. Anne-Marie Womack's article, "Teaching is Accommodation," has been particularly influential to me on how accommodation is not remediation, but a crucial aspect of our pedagogy and a strategy for welcoming everyone.
I want my courses to be student-centered, which is almost automatic in my f2f courses but takes more planning and orchestrating in an online course. For example, I have a lot of group work in my f2f (not necessarily just peer reviews, but all kind of in-class activities) , and this kind of community-building activity gets translated into a lot more peer reviews in online courses so that students become comfortable reading each other's work even though they never meet.
My courses are strategy-oriented so that students can transfer the strategies they learn to any future writing situation. Depending on the modality, students will practice these strategies in different ways. For example, while my f2f courses tend in having students work on the same kind of genre and therefore practice genre analysis together, my online students pick their own genre and practice genre analysis individually. Because I value strategies, I value process and I want students to have a safe space to practice. Knowing that online classes have a heavier literacy load (Sibo, 2020), I create low-stakes assignments and feedback-free zones (Cox, Black, Heney, & Keith, 2015) to ease students into the process without overwhelming them with assignments.
This quick video gives another example of how the different modalities have affected my teaching. Here I describe how the ways in which students can contact me have become more complex and effective as I moved between f2f, hybrid, and online.
All of the artifacts in this portfolio focus on the careful and knowledgeable flexibility of moving in-between modalities. Be it whole lesson plans, peer review instructions, or how we introduce students to our class, the artifacts highlight the affordances and constraints of each modality. They are all meant as a resources for my colleagues in my writing program who might be considering switching between modalities.
Artifact 1: Here I compare and contrast different modalities, from traditional f2f to fully online to illustrate how the same lesson plan would be modified to fit each new modality.
Artifact 2: I illustrate how I did peer reviews in three different modalities (f2f, hybrid, and online), highlighting where I met the affordances of the modalities and where I didn't.
Artifact 3: This artifact is specifically focused on the online modality; I review my "Welcome to the course" video for an online class to highlight how I am following best practices for this particular modality.
Artifact 4: I describe all the different ways that discussion boards can be helpful tools in all three of the modalities, provided that instructors modify their use to match the specific affordances and constraints of the modality.
Artifact 5: Here I show a fully developed unit of teaching for a multimodal assignment in an online course. It has both student-facing and teacher-facing instructions, along with a theoretical rationale.
References
Borgman, J.C. (2019). Dissipating hesitation: Why online instructors fear multimodal assignments and how to overcome the fear. In S. Khadka & J.C. Lee (Eds.), Bridging the multimodal gap: From theory to practice. University Press of Colorado.
Cox, S., Black, J., Heney, J., & Keith, M. (2015). Promoting teacher presence: Strategies for effective and efficient feedback to student writing online. TETYC.
Gedik, N., Kiraz, E., & Yasar Ozden, M. (2012). The optimum blend: affordances and challenges of blended learning for students. Turkish Online Journal of Qualitative Inquiry (3)3, pp. 102-117.
Greer, H. and Harris, H.S. (2018). User-centered design as a foundation for effective online writing instruction. Computers and Composition (49) pp. 14-24.
Nielsen, D. (2016). Can everybody read what's posted? Accessibility in the online classroom. In D. Ruefamn & A. G. Scheg (Eds.) Applied pedagogies: Strategies for online instructions. pp. 90-105. Utah State University Press.
National Council of Teachers of English, (2005). Multimodal Literacies. https://ncte.org/statement/multimodalliteracies/
Pacansky-Brock, M. (2017) Best practices for teaching with emerging technologies. Routledge.
Pilcher, A.J. (2016). Establishing community in online courses: A literature review. College Student Affairs Leadership (3)1.
Sibo, A. (2020). The literacy load is too damn high! A PARS approach to cohort-based discussion. In Eds. J. Borgman and C. McArdle (Eds.) PARS in practice: More resources and strategies for online writing instructors (pp. 71-81). WAC Clearinghouse. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/practice/pars2/
Warnock, S (2009). Teaching Writing Online: How and Why. NCTE.
Womack, A.M. (2017). Teaching is accommodation: Universally designing composition classrooms and syllabi. College Composition and Communication 68(3), pp. 494-525.