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| INTRODUCTION These pages were created in response to a call for nominations for the KYVC Online Excellence Award. I am submitting my English 401/G Advanced Composition Course for consideration for an Online Excellence Award and hope that it will demonstrate my efforts to provide “high-quality, interactive learner-centered experiences” to all students as described under the goals section of the program on the Kentucky Virtual Campus (KYVC) website. I believe that this course illustrates the successful implementation of Chickering and Ehrmann’s Seven Principles of Good Practice and can be used as an example of “good practice in integrating pedagogy and technology” in a web-based writing course (KYVC Online Excellence Awards). |
| THE CONTEXT OF THE COURSE According to the catalogue description, English 401/G focuses on the “theory and practice in reading and writing various genres of non-fiction” while paying special attention to style, voice, arrangement and advanced writing techniques. In other words, English 401/G is a skills course geared towards improving students’ writing. As the course overview in my syllabus explains, students will have an opportunity to enhance their writing skills by practicing writing, i.e. by constantly drafting and revising. My class emphasizes the writing process, which includes giving and receiving feedback from peers and instructor and rewriting essays based on the feedback. We call these series of activities the workshopping of papers. Assignments are designed to help students learn to function like working writers: they will compose their pieces and, at the same time, study other writers and their professional practices. As the course book claims, this class encourages students to learn the “craft the way most successful writers have learned theirs: by reading what other writers have written, by picking up tips and ideas from writers about the way they write, and by applying specific strategies culled from the readings to their own writing” (Root and Steinberg xvii). The course management system for this course is Blackboard, but I have created a course website and a course wiki outside of Blackboard to help our communication and information exchange. For more information about the course, please review the Eng 401/G Syllabus and Course Calendar in PDF format. You need Adobe Reader to open these files. You can download the program by clicking the Adobe Reader link above. To view the media files linked to the pages of this site, you will need iTunes and Windows Media Player. END-OF-TERM COURSE EVALUATIONS Would you like to know what my students think about this course? I created a file based on some representative examples of the anonymous course evaluations that I ask students to fill out on Blackboard at the end of the semester. |
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KYVC Online Excellence Award Application Submission by Judith Szerdahelyi, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English, Western Kentucky University |
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