Redesigning English 302B

A team of faculty began the redesign of the course in the summer of 1999. However, I did not begin to work on the project until the fall of 1999. During that semester, a team of faculty, including two English faculty, one faculty member from the School of Business, and one Instructional Designer (myself) worked on the course. As designed for the Spring of 2000, the course contained the following features:

Schedule
his is a link to an online schedule listing all class assignments, due dates, and class activities. The schedule itself was a simple HTML page uploaded to WebCT and linked to the homepage.

Syllabus
The syllabus was a series of HTML files organized using WebCT's "path" function (link to a picture of a WebCT path).

Course Tools
Links to the online grading system and student tracking, as well as the tool to change one's password, chat rooms, and WebCT internal e-mail. WebCT does provide internal e-mail that is independent of regular Internet e-mail. Many students in the course had regular e-mail as well, so both WebCT and Internet e-mail was used to varying degrees, depending on access to Internet e-mail and ease of sending attachments with Internet e-mail. For example, many of the students who normally used Pine for reading their e-mail made use of WebCT e-mail to send easily their assignments to me as attachments.

Assignments & Handouts
Links to all handouts and assignments for the course, organized by assignment. This information is simply a series of HTML files organized into units, with each unit having a table of contents and navigation tools generated by WebCT. This information could be displayed all at once or set to display only when that particular assignment was being worked on or discussed. Again, the information itself is contained in a series of simple HTML pages uploaded into WebCT and organized using WebCT's "path" tool.

The way the English 302B was taught online in the fall semester emphasized a few large projects, primarily 2 proposal-writing assignments (one individual, one in a group) and a cover letter and resumé. We decided to redesign the assignments to focus more clearly on writing as a process, to add more research skill practice, and to "chunk" the assignments so that distance students would not get overwhelmed when they first looked at the requirements for the assignments. The model that we ended up with had three major projects: a resumé and cover letter, a company profile report, and a proposal.

The latter two projects were linked in that students would write their proposal as if they were either an employee of the company they had researched pitching an idea to their superiors, or a vendor trying to sell a product or service to the company they had researched. In order to keep the workload manageable for both the professors and the students, companies and proposals were chosen beforehand with assistance of faculty from the School of Management.

The company profile and the proposal were also broken down into smaller assignments that focused on different stages of the writing process, for example, researching, organizing, and peer review. Team work was built into the course by having students divide up the company profile into different sections, which each student reporting on a section and sharing information with the other students on their company team.

ENGL 302 (Business)

Redesigning English 302B (con't)