This study explores student engagements with hybrid writing courses, revealing their experiences and perceptions of a modality that blends in-person and online instruction. Hybrid learning as a format is often overshadowed by its association with fully online instruction. After a number of writing courses on our campus were redesigned for hybrid delivery, we conducted interviews and focus groups with students taking those courses. What we found, among other things, was that students largely saw hybrid writing courses as striking a balance between the flexibility of online learning with opportunities for human contact and the social presence afforded by in-person class meetings. Even more intriguing, though, was how students talked about the purposes of—and relationships between—the online and in-person components of their hybrid courses. In other words, it was not just the case that students appreciated hybrid learning, but also that clear patterns emerged in the meanings and values they ascribed to the constituent elements of these courses and the perceived cohesiveness of instruction across the modes. This study ends with implications for the design and implementation of hybrid writing courses, and it emphasizes the need for further scholarship that recognizes the unique affordances and challenges of this instructional modality.

This empirical study of a virtual writing marathon (Write Across America) theorizes a dynamic online ecosystem in which the five realms—virtual place, design, writing, sharing, and emotion—interact in the process of writing. The study has implications for students and for the professional development of writing instructors.

We surveyed 803 undergraduates at a large public university about their online writing practices. We find that despite wide platform access, students typically write in a narrow range of spaces for limited purposes and audiences, with a majority expressing rhetorical concerns about writing in digital spaces. These findings suggest rich opportunities for writing instructors to better help students negotiate the terrain of online public discourse.

This article shares our experience designing and deploying writing assessment in English Composition I: Achieving Expertise, the first-ever first-year writing Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). We argue that writing assessment can be effectively adapted to the MOOC environment and that doing so reaffirms the importance of mixed-methods approaches to writing assessment and drives writing assessment toward a more individualized,learner-driven, and learner-autonomous paradigm.

This essay examines the current state of online writing instruction in light of changing technologies and everyday literacies in order to understand their impact on access to higher education and on the material conditions of teaching writing.

MOOC Response about “Listening to World Music” Steven D. Krause What I Learned in MOOC Jeff Rice