Teaching composition online: Whose side is time on?

Assessing a Hybrid Format

“…For example, instructors must learn (often by teaching themselves) to use new technologies, modify and adapt course materials for new media, and investigate new means of presenting, reviewing, and grading. Research specifically comparing instructors' workloads in face-to-face and online first-year writing courses found that online courses required 85% more work time (Reinheimer, 2005). Palloff and Pratt (1999) suggested that instructors may take three times as long to prepare for and conduct a course online as they take to prepare for and conduct the course in a traditional classroom setting.…”

The Disembodied Classroom: Adapting a Multimodal Business Communication Course for Distance Education

“…To a point. Five of my interviewees noted that their online communication courses were successful in that regard, but that without reducing Reinheimer's (2005) 185% (as described in Chapter One), the courses were unsustainable. All five sources described the same pattern: in the first semesters, tenured and tenure-track faculty jumped at the chance to offer their course online (motivated by the novelty, by the convenience, or by the prestige of being a forerunner in the institution).…”

“…Online composition courses have a reputation for being much more labor intensive than traditional face-to-face courses, because they combine all of the labor-intensive practices of a traditional classroom offering (lesson preparation and the effort involved in assessing student work) with the effort required to learn, adapt to, and re-envision materials for distance education technologies, as well as the effort needed to interact with students in asynchronous, text-heavy formats (email, forums, chat) instead of synchronous, face-to-face environments (classroom discussion, office hours). Reinheimer (2005), for example, compared the relative effort involved in offering an online composition course to that of traditional courses. He equated effort to the amount of time instructors spent, per student, on course activities, either directly (in the classroom) or indirectly (preparing course materials, grading student work, interacting with students during office hours or through email), and on comparison, found that an online course required as much as 185% of the effort of a comparable traditional course.…”

“…To evaluate whether my online section of English 302 is sustainable (that is, whether the collection of effort-reducing technologies and processes I'd adopted for the course reduced the instructor effort, per student, to a sustainable level), I adapted the method from Reinheimer's (2005) It should be noted that my data collection effort differs from Reinheimer's in an important way. A number of significant points emerge from this data.…”

“…In my experimental courses, time spent on what Reinheimer (2005) categorized as corrections (assessment of exercises and essays) formed one of the largest blocks of instructor time investment. As such, assessment is a ripe target for time saving efforts: even minor or incremental reductions in the time it takes to respond to student work can add up to substantial time savings over the term of the course.…”