Soule 1 Leah Soule 27 March 2010 Virtual Writing Center 2.0 A virtual writing center, or online writing lab, is an ethereal service website designed around the writing center it represents, the resources available to the writing center, and the needs of the institution‟s students. It may include some or all (or more) of the following services: email tutorials, live chat, video chat, quick question hotlines, handouts, workshops, blogs, discussion boards, podcasts, video tutorials, links to other writing resources, pre and post tutorial assessments, and lists of useful books. 1 While the appearance and services of virtual writing centers may differ from one to another, the goal of all OWLs (regardless of budget, tech savviness, and flash) is to offer resources sustained by, yet outside, the actual writing center. A virtual writing center coupled with an actual writing center will accommodate the learning styles and needs of most of our students, and both types of Centers become increasingly important as the student body continues to diversify. In this presentation, I will discuss the definition of virtual writing centers and specifically address the structure, purpose, and outlook of the Tennessee State University Virtual Writing Center. Because the definition of virtual writing center is so flexible, I reviewed several virtual centers recommended by the International Writing Center Association, including the OWL at Purdue, the Writing Center website at Chapel Hill, NC, the University of Louisville Virtual Writing Center, the Oregon State OWL, the Colorado State University Writing Studio, and the University of Richmond Writing Center website. I determined whether or not the writing centers offered email tutorials, live chat tutorials, handouts, workshops, and assessments. To clarify, 1 Beth Hewitt, a professional development consultant for NCTE, claims “There is no such bird as „ the Online Writing Lab‟ (OWL) because, in fact, there are as many variations of an OWL as there are OWLs. Each institution with an OWL has developed it to reflect its own vision of how the virtual writing center should look and how it should serve its clients . . . . Thus, there are as many OWLs as there are institutions claiming one. ”
Soule 2 handouts are printable, written material that can be reviewed and kept; workshops are interactive presentations of material; and assessments are evaluations of the information the student has learned from the handout and/or workshop. I wanted to examine the commonalities between the sites, the services they provide, and their ease of use. By doing so, I can compare the work we have done to ensure its appropriateness and strength and determine the kinds of services we should provide in the future. Most of the VWCs reviewed provided some kind of email or chat service, and a couple of them provided both. Purdue‟s email tutorial service is separated from their OWL and included specifically on the Writing Center website; however, the Oregon State OWL consists only of email tutorials which are capped at 25 emails per week. Colorado State University and the University of Louisville offer both email and chat sessions, and these do not seem to be capped. The University of Richmond provides a service called “Consultants on Call” which appears to be an email service because the email addresses of tutors are provided, but there is no instruction or actual description of the service. All of the writing centers reviewed offer handouts. The content of the Purdue handouts is vast, covering the very basics of comma usage to the demanding intricacies of visual rhetoric. 2 The University of Richmond also offers a large number of direct and easy-to-use handouts published in manual format under the title “The Writer‟s Web.” S ome OWLs (like UNC Chapel Hill and the Oregon State OWL) provide in-depth material geared to an audience with a strong knowledge base. Other websites have limited handouts or simply provide links to a separate virtual writing center (usually the OWL at Purdue) to borrow its resources. In addition to handouts, I determined if the virtual writing centers include interactive workshop-like tutorials. Only two of the websites reviewed did so: OWL at Purdue and the 2 The large numbers or handouts may make OWL at Purdue difficult to navigate at times. OWL at Purdue also provides other writing centers a service by allowing their materials to be published and posted for common use.
Soule 3 University of Louisville. The workshops provided by the OWL at Purdue are listed under “teacher resources” because they are intended to be used by teachers in class rather than for individual student resources. The University of Louisville posts three interactive workshops on MLA, APA, and plagiarism. They incorporate sound, motion, and depiction to provide detailed, yet understandable, information regarding citation. Finally, I determined which of OWLs offered assessments of their handouts and/or tutorials. Again, only two of the websites did so: the OWL at Purdue and the University of Richmond. The OWL at Purdue provides a handout for the student to review; next, the student performs an exercise; and finally, the correct answers are provided. The assessments are created so that they can be printed and distributed. The University of Richmond provides assessments to some of their handouts, but does not provide suggestions or answers for those assessments. Email and chat sessions, handouts, workshops, and assessments should be based on the capability of the writing center and the needs of the students at the institution. This includes the funding provided for the development of a virtual writing center, the technology provided to the writing center, and the technological proficiency of the writing center employees. Furthermore, the writing center must take into account the size of the institution, the access the students have to technology, and the number of students living on and off campus. A VWC with a successful email or chat tutorial function balances the needs of the students with the workload of the tutors, and a writing center creates strong supplemental resources based on the level of students it serves and is prepared to update those resources as information changes. 3 Because handouts may be considered a prescriptivist practice, some virtual writing centers may deem them less important or useful than actual tutorial sessions; however, handouts and tutorials should be designed to be 3 A writing center director must be willing to schedule the appropriate amount of time for both online training and virtual tutoring. Part of a tutor‟s work time must be used for training because email and chat tutorials requir e different kinds of responses than face-to-face tutorials. Additionally, time for email responses or virtual tutoring chats must be scheduled in the same way as face-to-face time is scheduled.
Soule 4 used in conjunction with sessions or student writing rather than as an isolated tool. Furthermore, many virtual writing centers do not see the need for creating their own handouts since so many excellent online resources already exist. 4 However, this is problematic because students differ greatly from school to school, and the resources should reflect the needs of a particular institution. Regardless of the amount of work and training an OWL requires, it should be seen as a venue for serving students who may be unable to attend sessions at the actual writing center or who may simply need to refresh at their own pace. The Tennessee State University Virtual Writing Center was redeveloped beginning in summer 2009 and is built around the incredible diversity found on TSU‟s campus. The majority of the students we serve are not conventional. They are non-traditional students, first generation students, developmental students, and non-native speakers; they commute to campus; they are enrolled part-time; they have full-time jobs and full-time families. To provide our students with easy access to useful resources, the Virtual Writing Center must be flexible, direct, and informative. I will discuss the intent and design of the virtual writing center, the challenges created by building a VWC in a course interface, and finally, other services we intend to pursue. TSU‟s V irtual Writing Center is designed to be used by tutors during appointments in the actual TSU Writing Center and by individual students outside the Writing Center. It is interfaced in the online course software Desire 2 Learn, and it consists of 42 interactive tutorials 5 in the categories of grammar, punctuation, writing, research and writing across the disciplines, business, and computer skills. Each module within the categories consists of a list of learning outcomes, an interactive presentation built in PowerPoint, and a printable pdf handout. In writing center sessions, the tutorials can be used as aids alongside discussion of a piece of student writing, whether to build editing skills or structure a research project. After the session is 4 “T he quality of existing OWLs [is] the best argument for not making their own, ” as Mark Shadle writes in “The Spotted OWL: Online Writing Labs as Sites of Diversity, Controversy, and Identity ” (5) . 5 Since this presentation, the VWC now consists of over 50 tutorials
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