Abstract
Being an eclectic instructor becomes a solid pedagogical tool for incorporating PAUSE into online university teaching, learning, and assessment cycles. Following the requests in Chapter 1, this chapter also asks readers to reflect on their own feedback practices and where their own strengths and areas for opportunity exist. Throughout the next few pages, the case is made for why instructors may need to view their feedback practices from an eclectic lens to meet the needs of the online students who sit in virtual seats in their courses.
I really feel this workshop would be beneficial to ALL members of adjunct and senior faculty. As I worked with this student (who had the breakthrough), one-on-one, she mentioned some disheartening information. Faculty members were passing her essays which were not correct. This included giving her false and incorrect information on APA, not including examples on how she could correct her mistakes, etc. A huge error this student was making, for example, was filling her entire paper with giant, bolded, block quotes, which were not cited. She indicated to me several professors accepted papers before my course and never told her this was unacceptable. In a meeting with me she was nearly in tears telling me this. She had spent all of this time thinking she was using APA correctly, and I had to tell her she was not. She was shocked at how much she was using incorrectly. -Faculty Participant
If you are reading this book, I can imagine that you are looking for ways to give feedback in an online higher education setting. Or maybe you are involved in faculty support and are looking for ways to help online faculty give effective feedback. This is important because one challenge in online higher education is providing meaningful and effective feedback (Uribe & Vaughan, 2017). Effective feedback must be embedded into assessment practices so students make necessary connections between what they are learning, discipline-specific writing, and any areas of strengths and needs related to content and writing (Black & Liam, 1998; Quinton & Smallbone, 2010). However, providing feedback can feel daunting to faculty with many papers to grade and students with writing gaps. Still, students must be given feedback that supports the various dimensions required for content-area and academic writing (Mauri et al., 2016).
Students come to us with varying levels of academic capital, making content area instructors and subject matter experts writing teachers. Bringing PAUSE to online feedback provides a framework that will make writing feedback pragmatic for all online subject matter instructors. Cleary (2011) stated that if universities want to keep and graduate more non-traditional students, a new approach is needed to help students learn to write successfully. One new approach for supporting persistence and retention is to strengthen the feedback given to students.
Being an online faculty member brings a host of new ways of approaching teaching, and online learning can require a completely different way of teaching and a different way of approaching education (Stella & Corry, 2013). However, bringing experience in teaching and learning, whether face-to-face or online, is important. Online teaching and learning can be quite a steep learning curve for faculty, so having some prior teaching experience will provide a solid foundation for transfer (Hewitt, 2015a; 2015b).
It is important that online instructors have specific training in how to teach online. Without that training, online instructors might not be as effective as they desire (Paloff, 2021). Furthermore, for instructors who have not previously taught online, there might be unfamiliarity with what planned online courses look like or how they are created. The primary goal of online teaching and learning remains explicit teaching (Hewitt, 2015a). Understanding of what goes into this process can support online faculty’s familiarity with the online teaching and learning process.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Funds of Knowledge: The background experiences that students bring to the online classroom.
Principled Pragmatism: Using the necessary teaching and learning strategies to help students learn, but also being able to articulate what those strategies are and why they are being used.
Educational Gaps: This refers to any missing information students have about the skills and subskills needed to succeed in higher education.
Eclectic Instructor: An instructor who recognizes that there are multipersonal learning environment ways to provide feedback to online university students.
Radical Educator: An educator who realizes that education can be a game changer in the lives of many online students.
First-Generation Students: Student who are the first in their families to graduate from a college or university.
Continuum for Capacity Building Framework: The framework used to position the broader study in the context of online higher education. This framework shows that through the combination of androgogy and pedagogy, while keeping in mind the building heutagogy of online students, faculty can narrow the transactional distance of online higher education.
Online Educational: A space where students and instructors meet via a learning management system (e.g., Blackboard or Canvas) to conduct online courses. For the purposes of this book, online education is assumed to primarily provide feedback in a removed space through written communication.
Discipline-Specific Writing: Types of writing required in the subject matter expert’s field.
At-Potential Students: This is the belief that students enter online courses ready to learn and, with some support, can successfully persist to graduation.
Hidden Curriculum: The skills that some students do not have, but do not quite understand that they do not have them or understand what questions to ask about missing skills.
PAUSE: A framework for giving feedback that reminds faculty to provide praise, and then applicable, understandable, specific, and encouraging feedback.
Feedback: Summary information provided to students to help them understand their areas of strengths and opportunity with the skills and subskills needed to complete assignments or to be successful in the online university.
First-Time, Online: Students who enroll in online colleges or universities without previously taking online courses.