Jessica Gordon

During the summer of 2014, six faculty members taught a cMOOC at Virginia Commonwealth University. The course, which was called Inquiry and the Craft of Argument, is a general education course focused on three skill areas: written communication, critical thinking, and information fluency. This study is an analysis of the students’ final multimodal compositions, defined as projects that combine academic argument and research with a variety of multimedia, such as images, videos, animations, and internet links. Our findings indicate that there are five trends that are common to the students’ work and that they struggled to transfer their knowledge of print composition to their digital multimodal projects.

In this paper, we provide an in-depth view of the Undergraduate Teaching Assistant (UTA) program at Virginia Commonwealth University as a potential model for other large research universities who might wish to implement similar learner-centered initiatives in their first-year experience courses. Unlike graduate teaching assistants, whose primary objective in the classroom is to assist the professor, the UTAs assist the students by facilitating student engagement, offering peer-to-peer assistance, and modeling successful academic practices. The UTA program, founded in 2008, is integrated through all levels of VCU’s University College. This paper explores the benefits offered to all stakeholders: faculty, students, and undergraduate teaching assistants.

During the summer of 2014, six faculty members taught a cMOOC at Virginia Commonwealth University. The course, which was called Inquiry and the Craft of Argument, is a general education course focused on three skill areas: written communication, critical thinking, and information fluency. This study is an analysis of the students’ final multimodal compositions, defined as projects that combine academic argument and research with a variety of multimedia, such as images, videos, animations, and internet links. Our findings indicate that there are five trends that are common to the students’ work and that they struggled to transfer their knowledge of print composition to their digital multimodal projects.

This quantitative content analysis examines the way social presence was created through original posts and comments in a Facebook group for an undergraduate writing course. The author adapted a well-known coding template and examined how course members—one instructor, two undergraduate teaching assistants and twenty- two students–used language and image to generate social presence. Language is categorized by purpose, and each category is a social presence indicator. The results show which social presence indicators are used more frequently by course members and that social presence is higher when certain social presence indicators are utilized. Since existing research indicates that social presence is associated with increased course satisfaction and learning, these findings provide practical knowledge for faculty seek- ing to increase social presence in their classes. This is a case study with a small population, but these results indicate the need for additional research to further explore how language and image are used to generate social presence in Facebook.