stanford online writers studio

stanford online writers studio

Exploring the Impact and Effectiveness of Online Writing Studios: A Case Study of Stanford Online Writers Studio

1. Introduction to Online Writing Studios

At its core, Stanford Online Writer’s Studio is an online platform that enables writers to assemble for once-a-week, evening-hour, non-for-credit, or continuing-education writing classes. What, at first glance, appears to be a somewhat straightforward video conferencing room, the Studio incorporates numerous pedagogical and UX experiences that purport to promote online engagement, camaraderie, and group cohesion and to replicate, where possible, the bricks-and-mortar workshop or seminar. The workshop aims to have participants experience the instructor experience and participate in a discussion of the online studios’ attributes, features, and functionality.

Digital tools and platforms offer new modes of teaching writing. Pinging Back the Panels: Stanford Online Writers Studio constitutes a timely and relevant practical workshop that discusses and troubleshoots the features and format, engagement strategies, and best uses for Stanford Online Writer’s Studio, a branded, powerful Zoom-based online learning platform that can, in addition to its branded campus initiatives, be co-opted and leveraged for a variety of educational purposes and educational communities. The focus of the workshop is on innovative and effective forms of teaching or training through the new affordances and platform constraints imposed by the COVID era: addressing the newly widespread, worldwide need for improved online educational tools, techniques, and platforms.

2. The Evolution of Online Writing Education

Research has shown that the students in online writing classes have the same quality of learning experience as do the students in traditional face-to-face writing courses. In fact, some studies suggest online classes help students to improve their writing better than traditional classes. The effectiveness of online writing education led many universities and private online education companies to explore online writing pedagogy and open various online education institutions.

The earliest studies that explore online writing instruction date back to the 1990s. Today, such work is common in the teaching and learning field. Over the years, online writing instruction has taken various forms: non-synchronous correspondence via email, online conferencing through computer-mediated communication tools such as 4titles, chat, listservs, and electronic mailing lists, and web-based distance learning. Gold (1995) argues that listservs in writing courses have the potential for developing a strong community of writers, people who get to know each other through their email relationship and thus form a team of readers who care about other students’ writing.

3. Case Study: Stanford Online Writers Studio

The case study results presented in this chapter challenge the view that meaningful engagement between faculty and students can only occur in traditional classroom settings. This study may hold implications for understanding the value of real-time activities in learning digital rhetoric, and online writing instruction in general; whether this real-time activities model is successful in other types of literary studies; and what types of verbal-visual digital transcription tools can be employed to enhance real-time engagement in such classes. Also, this study examines how the Stanford Online Writers Studio functions. Also, it uses the studio as a “reasonably controlled” space to further understand the teaching and learning strategies that may work in digital writing instruction. While only offering a small glimpse into what such digital literacies classrooms look like, this case study offers a first step into exploring digital rhetoric teaching in the online, real-time meeting space.

How does effective writing instruction happen in online writing courses and other types of online writing instruction? More importantly, how is that effectiveness achieved, and what can studying online writing instruction tell us about creating effective writing instructional spaces? This chapter articulates some surprising answers to these significant questions and explains why online writing pedagogy is important. It articulates analysis of the aims and effectiveness of the Stanford Online Writers Studio (Stanford OWS), the web-based creative writing studio operated as part of the Stanford Professional and Academic Directory, which makes Stanford faculty and their pedagogy available to remote students. The Stanford OWS operates using time-of-day synchronous real-time meeting technology augmented by a number of features that support asynchronous, non-real-time interactions to facilitate student-student and student-faculty engagement.

4. Benefits and Challenges of Online Writing Studios

Administration, as many of them are seeking professional careers directly related to the new professions. Digital interaction is a common part of the learning process between students and their teachers, as well as among students at international business schools. Students want authentic digital experiences in which they are able to apply learning processes to various purposes. By combining an increase in student diversity with a demand for customized educational experiences, teacher flexibility has become a critical factor in global managers. The student diversity factor is characterized by students from many different countries and educational practices. It also includes differences in English language proficiency, as this is the official language of instruction at most business schools located outside English-speaking countries.

So far, we have framed our discussion by saying that online writing studios are a good option for students but have not gotten into specificity about studio benefits and challenges. We have outlined some benefits of synchronous online writing studios. These include better organization, dissemination, and management of resources, more engagement in virtual environments, increased flexibility for scheduling, and spring reliability. When computers are not functioning, students have access to their virtual team. First, studios help students with writing and also their navigating digital genres and literacy within the digital environment. Additionally, virtual studios help to ameliorate students’ sense of isolation and class disconnection. Members of virtual studios use computer-mediated communication and digital tools to conduct their research and create their written work.

5. Best Practices and Recommendations for Online Writing Studios

Our experiences and findings from the Stanford Online Writers Studio hold a number of implications for successful online writing studio implementation. Designed with the support of in-depth data analysis, these best practices should be useful to writing studio developers and participants, and even potentially to teachers of remote writing classes. In the following section, we offer a condensed list of the key findings and lessons learned of the Stanford Online Writing Studio, outlined as best practices and recommendations for the design and implementation of online writing studios in order to improve the perceived effectiveness and learner satisfaction of such remote learning environments.

In this final section, we provide a summative set of best practices and recommendations for online writing studios, synthesized across findings and data from our treatment group participants, researcher diary, and our interviews with the Stanford Online Writers Studio instructors. In the following section, we offer key categories of findings and wrap up with a list of best practices and recommendations for the design and implementation of online writing studios and, by extension, potentially other remote writing centers.