COWL Kick-off meeting 12 November 2008
COWL Coventry Online Writing Laboratory
Headlines JISC funded £200k 1 October 2008 to 30 September 2010 Under the “Transforming Curriculum Delivery Through Technology” programme One of a raft of projects brought together under the broad banner of “curriculum design and delivery”
Why are we doing this? CAW is a success The CAW approach is a little different from that pursued in many universities CAW’s current delivery is predominantly F2F CAW’s services cannot be readily accessed by some students The current CAW model is not scalable There is expertise overseas which we can access We have something of wider interest to say The development of CAW is a very high priority for us
Meeting the challenge Serving the needs of diverse groups of learners in flexible ways Raising retention rates Supporting non-traditional students Enabling students to use their own personal technologies and developing learning practices which suit them Providing academic writing support both as a transferable skill and as a means of helping students to improve their learning in their subject areas Providing academic staff development in the teaching of writing in the disciplines, including ways of giving online support
What we are going to do Deploy new technologies imaginatively in the area of academic writing Help discipline-based teaching staff develop their teaching skills in academic writing Move towards more collaborative teaching approaches Develop new pedagogical models for academic writing Exploit social softwares Learn from the experience of teaching academic writing skills in other countries Explore the affordances of e-learning tools for academic writing learning and teaching
The Team Lisa Ganobscsik-WilliamsProject Director Sharon SimkissProject Manager Jon GuestBES Lead HLS Mark Garrett “Technical” TeamJohn Tutchings, Clive Teed, Ray Summers, Andy Syson “Pedagogy” TeamMary Deane, Amanda Hardy, Juliet Hinrichsen, Mark Childs, Billy Brick Evaluation teamSusan Moron-Garcia, Erik Borg, Christine Broughan
Workpackages Review of current practice (Lisa) Develop new curriculum delivery plan (Lisa) Develop new pedagogic approaches (Mary) Integrations and implementation if new tools (John) Pilot implementation (Mary) Embedding across the university (Lisa) Evaluation (Erik)
Project management Project Board Chair: David Morris Project Director: Lisa Project Manager : Sharon Faculty Support Workpackage Leaders Team members
Meetings, reporting and all that Project Board meets every two months; workpackage leaders asked to provide a simple progress report against their wp template Six monthly reports to JISC; Sharon will lead on these using the wp reports as a base Please also blog with us at Participation in JISC events Research reports, conferences, workshops, etc We are using the CURVE approach which has proved useful