1999 Final Report

Below is the complete text of the final report for the Litonline team's courseware project.  Each of the 6 original goals is weighed.

ENG 112 Courseware Project Final Report
January 31, 1999

The ENG 112 Courseware Project team includes Eric Hibbison, Project Director; Donna Reiss, Founding Director; Rosalind Blunt, Ron Carter, and Cathy Simpson. The course home page is at-- http://vccslitonline.cc.va.us.

This project had 6 goals. Here's what we've accomplished for each one between May 15, 1998, and January 31, 1999. To see samples mentioned in this report, point your browser to the site address above, click on the site map ("contents") link, and look down the genre column for the title mentioned.

Goal 1: Increasing the interactivity of lessons. Method: College-to-college responses to WebBoard and FrontPage 98 forums on specific works read simultaneously by at least 2 classes.

Interactions that occurred during this grant period came mostly under our proposal category of "cooperative projects" from two or more colleges:

During summer, 1998, Reiss's and Hibbison's students used her TCC WebBoard site in groups set by the instructors. Topic: "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold. Website-- http://www.tc.cc.va.us/faculty/tcreisd/INFO/webboard/doverbch.htm

Repeated during fall with an anonymous "assessment" option.

During fall, 1998, Carter's and Hibbison's students collaborated on a Front Page 98 forum for "Trifles" early in the semester.

During January, 1999, Simpson's and Hibbison's students used a renovated (blank) version of the same site-- http://vccslitonline.cc.va.us/trifles

Evaluation: Two sections of online ENG 112 collaborated in summer and fall on the TCC WebBoard, with a few students from the RCC online section adding comments late during the Summer. Instructors randomly assigned students to one of four questions. In the fall, 1998, effort 20 responses were logged for question 1, 17 for 2, 16 for 3, and 13 for 4. 18 summaries were posted separately in response to the third step in the sequence of 3 postings each student needed to complete for full credit. Students were told to write "about 150 words" (TCC) or "10 to 20 lines" of commentary (JSRCC) to answer the question assigned. Student participation was graded as a checkmark for full completion (TCC) or up to 20 points as a quiz grade (JSR).

Six students responded to the "Assessment" question: Reply to this topic with a few sentences to assess the use of this collaborative discussion to expand your understanding of the poem and the topic. Was it helpful? If so, how and why? If not, why not? You are welcome to select "Anonymous" from the check boxes under the topic box.

Five of the six stated that the experience was enjoyable, "useful," or "beneficial." Reasons included the chance to see diverse opinions (unusual for a distance education course, one noted), to see more than the instructor's views, and to see underscored that well supported interpretation matters more than a "right" or "wrong" answer. Complaints were logistical rather than centering on the use of a writing forum--server down time and lack of threading clearly. One student did complain that some respondents only amplified the views of others or of the poem's speaker rather than giving "their own views" on love.

One student suggested in this anonymous assessment response that the course instructors should also respond to the question or to students' submissions in some way, so Hibbison and Reiss added their own commentary to each of the four basic questions after the final deadline for student responses.

In the JSRCC section, only students who actually finished the entire course with passing grades completed this "Dover Beach" collaborative assignment in early to mid-October, 1998. Grades ranged from 5 to 23 points out of 20, depending on whether students fell shy of or exceeded the grading expectations for the 3 tasks. The bi-modal distribution of grades showed either meager to minimal participation or thorough and superlative participation by students.

Comparison of the answers for question 2 between the summer and fall uses of the WebBoard indicates that the fall answers were generally more plentiful (due to larger enrollment and therefore larger participation) but also more substantial.

These other subgoals from our proposal were also met in the ways stated below:

Casual introductory contact in the "Cyber Beach" forum is a first-week assignment in Hibbison's syllabus but is not yet an inter-collegiate practice. Reiss, for example, uses the WebBoard to have students post introductions for each other. Carter did have students use the Cyber Beach in the fall.

Regular use of existing forums on individual works of literature remains a goal, but individual instructors and colleges have preferences for software that must be used. Nevertheless, RCC and NVCC students did use more Litonline forums during 1998-99 than 1997-98.

Reiss also had already established Webfolio sites for her students to post their work at-- http://www.tc.cc.va.us/faculty/tcreisd/litintro/1998su77/classweb/. They also participate in a closed e-mail discussion list.

Although the team members visited advisor Ann Woodlief's web site developed to support the W.W. Norton ENG 112 text, we did not gravitate toward learning JAVA to make pop-up notes. Instead, one new web site that was added to VCCS Litonline this summer used a number index to list commentary about a short story and an essay about that story. See "Hills Like White Elephants."

Student Web Pages: Although not a grant goal, student web pages became part of the course activities. Donna Reiss has her students make web pages using the template at-- http://www.tc.cc.va.us/faculty/tcreisd/resource/webfolio/ and users of Web Course in a Box, e.g. Cathy Simpson of NVCC have an included utility students can use to make their own web pages. Ron Carter's students at RCC can use its proprietary software for connectivity beyond the Litonline materials.

The English Peer Conference Workshop

On October 16, 1998, four team members presented a hands-on workshop to orient interested faculty to using Litonline resources in their own courses. Approximately 10 faculty stayed for the entire workshop with 8 submitting completed evaluation forms and 9 contributing to a trial of WebBoard by reading the "Dover Beach" WebBoard site and commenting on its potential in their pedagogy.

Seven of the eight rated the workshop "excellent"; the one who rated in "very good" thought the workshop objectives were too broad. A few wanted to learn how to make WebBoard or Front Page forums themselves--including the convention keynoter who participated.

Comments at the WebBoard praised the specific assignment's structure and ability to clarify students' thinking by means of peers' comments. Specifically, one praised the synthesis required of students who were required to summarize all comments about a question submitted by the first deadline of the assignment. Another praised the independence of thought in the student comments that she read at the WebBoard site. A third praised the "degree to which [such a forum] insures active student involvement with the literary text as well as participation in discussion with other students." One adjunct teacher who uses groups in class noted that online forums would allow him to "hear" everyone's thinking and not just that of a few in a room heard as he walks among groups.

Also see Appendix A for a list of interactive features built into the Litonline webs.

Goal 2: Replacing the "scratch pads" in some modules that had been placed there to elicit first impressions of students working through the lessons. Method: Downloadable files and forms for email and database submission.

Cathy Simpson has her students use the questions in her fiction module, "Understanding Fiction," to make an electronic journal. She and Hibbison developed a format for signaling writing tasks during a lesson that replaced a form (on a server without an email function) with a one-cell table and icon (e.g. a royalty-free photo of a hand on a keyboard) smaller than 20 Kb. The typing hand icon at left is used throughout the instructional modules to signal a writing task.

The project team also saw the benefit of gathering such questions from a website and packaging them in a downloadable file to which students would simply add their answers on the word processor contained on whatever computer they used to work the module. So we have begun to add files in Word 7 (.doc), Rich Text Format (.rtf), and Text with Line Breaks (.txt) to the modules that have questions designed to elicit preliminary thinking about one work of literature and the process of reading. One sample of a set of links that students can use to open the word processor on their computer and begin typing is at page 3 of "Understanding Poetry." Most instructional modules have these files linked from their sitemaps.

Finally, due to a relocation of the website to a new server with a new server master, we can now have our students complete forms and "Submit" their responses directly to our email addresses, in addition to being preserved at the website. Our first use of this new capability was to ask our previous students (summer, 1997, through fall, 1998) to complete and submit an evaluation form for their experience with Litonline.

Evaluation: Team members sent email and regular mail requests to all of their former students in December asking them to fill out a survey with a set of mostly open-ended questions by 1/4/99. Responses went to Hibbison's email address in the form of an .html definition list, as well as to a tab-delimited file on the server. Of the nearly 300 students who have been enrolled in Litonline sections at the five college campuses since Summer, 1997, nineteen responded. Most respondents to the form at-- http://vccslitonline.cc.va.us/evaluati.htm took the online section of ENG 112 during 1998; 13 of the 19 were enrolled in fall, 1998. None of the students reported a learning disability on this anonymous form; 5 answered that they have taken an online course since taking the Litonline section of ENG 112.

All respondents noted that they enrolled because of the flexibility of time use for the course--although a couple needed to adjust from a schedule of weekly due dates to exact and incremental due dates during a week. All respondents stated that the online version is either "hard work" or harder than the distance education or on-campus courses they'd had previously. All respondents agreed that they would recommend the Litonline version of ENG 112 to peers--or stated that they had already--if and only if the student were disciplined and didn't mind working hard.

These results parallel those found by Stanley Kroder, Jayne Suess, and David Sachs in "Lessons in Launching Web-based Graduate Courses" (T.H.E. Journal May 1998: 66-69). Their "post-class survey" also turned up reports by students and teachers that their Web course took more time than an on-campus class, largely due to time spent on their WebBoard forums for reading. They also saw a claim that some of us have seen in students' comments after the course--that students in Web-based courses can access their instructors and felt more able to approach the course instructor than they did in their on-campus classes (68).

Goal 3: Revising existing modules.

This massive undertaking began and continues with evolving a style guide and slowly regularizing the look of the various webs. All of the instructional webs and nearly all of the discussion forums now follow the same model--a central (photo)graphic image surrounded by major links for the site. A style template for the core webs is linked from the Credits page. For samples, see the Litonline root web cover http://vccslitonline.cc.va.us/ and covers for the "Barn Burning" and "2 Ballads" forums.

One "shortcut" developed this summer is to add resources to forums rather than to make a separate module about each reading assignment in a course. (FP98 facilitates this process.) For example, the "2 Ballads" forum incorporates background on the 1963 Birmingham bombing that killed four little girls. One variation of this "shortcut" that allows us to mix Litonline sites with others is to place background resources inside Litonline. The "Dover Beach" site, which supplements the WebBoard site at TCC, includes references that allow users to look at 2-D and 360-degree views of Dover, England, that were made by the town council.

Three acceptable designs for a navigation bar have been drafted, with encouragement to each author to include graphics appropriate to their site, such as "rose" icons that point left, right, and up for the site on "A Rose for Emily" to mark links to the previous and next pages, plus the site map for that web. A set of navigation links was added to the revised "Understanding Drama" web.

Other incremental changes have slightly increased the unification of appearance for the Litonline website that students and other reviewers have noted should be used to characterize the Litonline webs.

Each genre introduction is linked to intermediary pages between the contents page and the introductory web itself. These intermediary pages do share a common design, thus extending the root web design a bit further.

A quilt piece from the website cover is being used to represent each genre and the root web pages. This unifying design motif was slightly modified during the grant period.

Via email the team traded references to more a dozen other Internet sites for their design features, resources, or free graphics. Team members also continued to share evaluations of modules from their students to the author of the site. Over the past 10 months of using the instructional modules (now 11 in number), dozens of critiques have been transmitted with hundreds of comments and suggestions. The team continues to process these suggestions, using the feasible and most helpful to make changes for content and clarity on individual pages and occasionally across an entire web site.

The team has resisted the advice to make the modules use the same background and color scheme, opting instead for backgrounds and colors and arrangements of material that seem appropriate for the topic. For instance, the cloud background for the module and forum that concern "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" makes more sense for those two webs than the beige background chosen for the root web. Similarly, the permissioned movie stills in the web on The Glass Menagerie are strikingly different from the graphics used in all other modules.

Style Guide and Templates: To facilitate the revising process, a survey of the team was conducted about some design options. Agreement and results of that survey and the subsequent email and videoconference discussions it provoked are embodied in a draft style guide embedded in the root web of the Litonline site. See <http://vccslitonline.cc.va.us/StyleGid.htm>

The team also has a few experimental pages embedded in the root web of Litonline for demonstrating features of FP98, such as a "banner" that will show multiple images in one spot on a page. Some features, such as page-turning effects familiar to users of Power Point, look terrible on the slower, modem-fed computers students (and faculty) have in their homes.

Other subgoals for revision led to these activities:

Since it took weeks to get the software ordered for the grant, 3-D options are just now being explored. FP98 will bevel the edge of a graphic image; unfortunately, other effects, such as object animations, can only be seen via the Internet Explorer 4.0 browser.

The Asymetrix Web 3-D software was used to create an animated 3-D logo (chapter 3 of the manual walks users through the steps), but this logo has not been adapted to the site since the cover page already takes quite a while to load. See the sample at-- http://members.tripod.com/~hibbison/default.htm Such work is labor intensive, however, and team members who have a few hours to work on a website have generally found it more efficient to deal with incoming student work or to "tweak" existing pages.

In addition to the software purchased under the grant, which has been sampled by at least one user, Hibbison bought a collection of royalty-free animation and video files. The trick, of course, is to integrate these meaningfully into a web page. All users and reviewers of the Litonline site agree on its academic rigor, so we are loathe to undermine that "ethos" with gratuitous animations. For example, contrast the animations in "Understanding Drama," which team members and students have praised, with the animations used from the purchased set used on this page-- http://vccslitonline.cc.va.us/mrcte/teachseq.htm

No new webs were added to Litonline during this grant period.

Evaluation: Kathy Kleppin and Julia Harbeck reviewed Hibbison's syllabus in October, 1998. Although most of the comments concerned editing design features of selected pages, Kleppin did praise the introductory voice greeting, the student information form, the advice on student success, and she inferred much of what happens at the introductory meeting for that section. It's unfortunate that time did not permit more intense scrutiny of the Litonline website itself, but her comments suggest that much needs to be done to clarify for colleagues who might want to use the Litonline resources exactly how to go about doing that.

Goal 4: Get and learn a gradebook in order to put grades online anonymously.

Micrograde from Chariot Software Group was purchased with grant funds and delivered to all 5 team members. Two, however, work at a college unit that forbids posting of students' grades in any form. Hibbison uses the software as his default gradebook, but he maintains a separate grade roster, posting grades by student-selected nicknames. See-- http://www.jsr.cc.va.us/staff/ehibbison/112onlin.syl/grades.htm

Goal 5: Increasing contact with and among students with videoconferencing, WebBoard, vclitol (listserv for faculty), webfolios, and possibly a student listserv.

Donna Reiss has been instrumental in making progress on this goal. She and the student assistant at TCC-VB, Sadie Cornell, tested videoconferencing capabilities. We used NetMeeting at the suggestion of Leslie Smith and Ron Carter of RCC; most of the team has tried it out in 2s or 3s. Although NetMeeting, a free downloadable software from Microsoft, seems superior in video and sound quality to Connectix software that ships with its camera, the superiority comes mostly from establishing a direct TCP/IP link. NetMeeting will support multiple users for chat and whiteboard, but it supports only two-way video and audio.

Technical support at each campus did install the videocamera, if a new one was purchased, or gave ready access to a team member to use an existing videocamera and microphone for videoconferencing.

Donna also established the WebBoard asynchronous discussion site used or viewed by the team for the "Dover Beach" interaction that involved student input from 3 of the 4 colleges which have online sections this summer.

Donna also revived the vclitol-fac listserv <vclitol-fac@listserv.cc.va.us>, which we plan to introduce to faculty who attend our pre-convention training session for using Litonline at the upcoming VCCS English Peer Conference. That notice was sent today, along with announcement of an online copy of this report. (See Appendix B for a copy of the email.)

Donna is currently in progress converting sample student essays to .pdf files using Adobe Acrobat, an authoring software that has users download Adobe Acrobat Reader for free to view files.

Because of the jumpiness and unreliability of the videoconferencing images on a pc using freeware to make connections between camera-equipped pcs, we don't plan to use this feature for conferencing with students. Compressed video meetings among ourselves would be more cumbersome to set up but more efficient. We did get to the point, however, where three of use could be linked together and share a whiteboard in NetMeeting.

Goal 6: CD-ROMs, even hybrids, vs. the Internet

These have been the slowest and most cumbersome of the purchases. Ron Carter considered the "American Poetry" CD-ROM, which required specific screen resolution and a specific, older version of "Quick Time for Windows," which it installs itself, to work.

"Shakespeare's Life and Times" was available only for the MAC. Instead, we purchased two other CD-ROMs on social and cultural leaders. A CD-ROM on "A Doll's House" was ordered from Annenberg/CPB for Rosalind Blunt to augment her own CD-ROM on that Ibsen play, which she is doing collaboratively with Robert Brown of NVCC-Loudoun. Her CD-ROM on "The Glass Menagerie" was adapted as her website for Litonline. This collaboration should tested the issues involved with making a hybrid CD-ROM that would also access the Internet to locate specific, relevant resources.

Although JSRCC and other colleges represented by Litonline team have the capacity to make CD-ROMs, the technology is still very volatile, able to copy only the cleanest of CD-ROMs, for instance. Until Web 2 is completed, though, CD-ROMs and hybrid CD-ROMs are the best way to share large volumes of music and video, as well as huge amounts of text.

Research and Recommendations

InteractivityA: We deliberately chose an inexpensive technology--FrontPage--to deliver our online sections, but technologies such as WebCT and Convene offer versatile and flexible, albeit more expensive, options for interactivity and course management. Syllabus magazine reports on a set of grants for faculty at the University of Iowa who learn to use WebCT with Claris Home Page and PowerPoint. Included features that are not in Litonline are "chat rooms, a bulletin board system, student record management tools, quizzes, and glossaries" ("Case Studies" June, 1998: 50).

InteractivityB: The rest of the team and other teachers may want to consider adapting Donna Reiss's application of the "webfolio" concept, such as those from her Humanities 105 students at-- http://www.tc.cc.va.us/faculty/tcreisd/techarts/1998FA77/webfolio/index.htm (Click on the student names and scroll down to the "my Humanities 105 web" links for each to find the actual webfolios.) These webfolios are akin to the "cyberspace museums" developed by Prof. Bill Dalton's English 104 students at De Paul University. See-- http://www.depaul.edu/~wdalton/museums3.html

InteractivityC: Dr. Lynne Adrian and Richard McGraw incorporated "Web research, shared journaling, and email discussion groups" into their test website for the American Studies Electronic Crossroads project ("Technology Across the Campus" Syllabus April 1998: 34). Although their courses are graduate level, some applications of such collaborative activities could be adapted to lower division courses if they are required. Research is a part of Simpson's and Blunt's ENG 112 sections at NVCC (as a departmental requirement) and in Reiss's ENG 112.

InteractivityD: Scott Chadwick and Jon Dorbolo report several interactive features in their InterQuest philosophy course. In "InterQuest: Designing a Communication-Intensive Web-Based Course," they mention using these features:

Forms that elicit public responses to course readings, which email these responses to other students in the class. This could be accomplished in Front Page 98 by filling in all students' (or groups of students') email addresses in the Forms Properties Options box for the "Submit" button

Setting a minimum number of collaborative interactions as a course requirement

Writing comments on the "class conversation form"

A class email list

Online computer tutorials to help even the skill levels of course enrollees, including a tutorial on using the navigation bar next, previous, home, tutorial, and sitemap links and appears on every page of the site.

The "Dear Author" letter pairs students. One asks a "serious" question posed as a letter and sent by email; the other poses as the author of the work that both students have read and answers the question as the original author might. A email "conversation" usually results (In Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum edited by Donna Reiss, Dickie Selfe, and Art Young [Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1998: 120-122]).

InteractivityE: We tried "virtual office hours," getting online at a particular time and the equivalent of chat by trying to get our offline students onto one forum during the same hour. The latter worked best with on-campus students who could be taken to the campus lab to post and reply to messages and questions during an hour and have an online conversation. We might try a chat site such as www.delphi.com, but this would require getting a website as a Delphi member (for the instructor) and having students get user IDs to logon onto the chat site. NetMeeting's chat feature is another option. Whatever might be used, the conversation needs to be archived every 20 - 30 minutes or it is lost. Such archives could be summarized for absentees or used for textual analysis of online style.

RevisingA: Although Reiss (Allusion Icarus) and Hibbison (Sonnet 116) have both linked to sound files available on the Web, only the Sonnet 116 web uses streaming audio to any extent. Much more needs to be done with Real Publisher, but it requires a microphone to make original voice files for variant readings, directions, discussions, debates, and other sound bytes that can be used pedagogically for good effect. The process also involves "importing" the .rm sound file and its .ram "metafile" into the server's web and linking to the .ram file from the relevant web page. (Hibbison is working with a group of 21 faculty this semester under a Perkins grant to train them to use this software, purchased under the grant, and this relatively cumbersome process. In one afternoon, most of the 19 participants in a training workshop successful converted .wav and .avi files to streaming .rm files, many created .ram files, a few made the necessary link on their local computers, but none successfully uploaded all the files and the linked page. The process is described in 18 subdivided steps at-- http://vccslitonline.cc.va.us/SG-audio.htm .)

RevisingB: The Litonline team should reconsider selecting one "theme" from the FrontPage 98 list of nearly 3 dozen themes and apply it to all forums and most instructional webs. Choosing a consistent look would aid navigation and the coherence of the site for users. On the other hand, this revision would entail learning to place "navigation bars" accurately onto web pages--a rather tricky process in Front Page because it requires working back and forth from the Front Page Explorer "Navigation View" and FP Explorer's "Tools" - "Shared Borders" menu, along with the shared borders of inidividual pages in each web, which can use the default shared border or reset navigation bars that apply to a single page only.

RevisingC: The Litonline team should consider revising their layout to echo the design of Donna Reiss's Allusion Icarus web, which uses "a narrow scan column and a wider text column" to "offer greater flexibility and also increase the legibility of long text blocks." The "top of the scan column is used to provide local navigation links within the site" (Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton are writing about a Dartmouth side in their article, "Refining Web Pages: Effective Design Strategies for Educators" in the February 1998 Syllabus [page 42]; but the design is very much like Donna's most recent web.)

RevisingD: PowerPoint--The Litonline team should seriously consider learning PowerPoint for themselves to package "high-resolution media" for students on-campus to open using Internet Explorer 4.x or 5.x Microsoft has split with Real Networks and stopped being compatible with their Real Player G2 in its IE5 release. Regardless of the politics, teachers and students of Litonline could use PowerPoint to "package" presentations about specific works that could include "stills synched with audio to form slide presentations," along with "digital video" (Royal Van Horn, "Tomorrow's High-Performance Courseware." Phi Delta Kappan 79.7 [March] 1998: 556+ [accessed in VIVA as http://web7.searchbank.com/infotrac/sessions/288/301/21730145w3/6!xrn_2&bkm ]).

Hybridization: Adobe Acrobat should be used to "freeze" the form of extraordinary documents, perhaps illustrated student essays permissioned for archiving in Litonline. It should not be used for ordinary, print-only documents and reports since there's no reason these could not be linked to as .doc or .rtf files or even reset at .html files that could be read online or printed. For the next 1-3 years, CD-ROM technology will still be very handy; the trick is to obtain rights to use pieces of selected works, e.g. movies of dramas, for pedagogical purposes. Although Rosalind's success at obtaining permission to use stills in her website on The Glass Menagerie holds promise of reasonable applications of copyright, we will probably have to wait for DVD technology to gain widespread use before it becomes common practice to see parts of works applied to lessons.

Expansion: Proper application of resources such as those in the Litonline site can either form rigorous online courses or support activities for on-campus sections. Using forums, for instance, in on-campus classes can lead students to be "prepared to hear a complex argument about the text, not a simple introduction" and can cause instructors to marvel that they "had never seen students so well prepared" (Larry Friedlander and Charles Kerns, "Transforming the Large Lecture Course," Syllabus June 1998: 55). The VCCS student email systems can make communication across sections at the same college every bit as easy as inter-college communication, if not easier. Today's note to attendees of our 10/16/98 workshop is one of only a few offers we have made to reach out to our colleagues and share the resources we have amassed.

Litonline is a viable resource and it should stay viable for at least a few years even in its present condition, but it should become a living resource, a growing archive of high-quality pedagogical instruments to serve teachers interested in literature and critical thinking. After all, it has helped us on the Litonline team to shift paradigms even more and faster than we might have had we remained classroom teachers only. The benefits of increased participation, even by shy students, and the independence and flexibility that this form of distance education demands of its teachers and students all help foster a more interactive kind of education.

Interactive Features in Litonline

links to original works, e.g. "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," Shakespeare's sonnet 116, and other literary works online

links to secondary sources, e.g. websites on Faulkner's life and works at Old Miss., to Tennessee Williams' life at St. Louis, to Spike Lee's "Four Little Girls" website as background for "The Ballad of Birmingham."

animations, e.g. enlivening and tone-setting animations in "Understanding Drama" and "Understanding Fiction"

paintings, e.g. Brueghel's "Fall of Icarus"

photos, e.g. Depression-era photo collection as background for "The Glass Menagerie" and translating metaphors and allusions in Sonnet 116

sound files, e.g. comparative readings of Sonnet 116,variant readings of selected lines for students to choose the most sensible reading of the line, musical representations of the Icarus myth

choices of paths, e.g. which of four essay prompt sets to follow for writing an essay about "The Glass Menagerie" or whether to study background on sonnet development and Shakespeare or go straight to instruction on Sonnet 116

multiple-choice practice questions with feedback pages for "bark" in Sonnet 116, plus which musical selection best represents the tone and idea of the sonnet

email to instructor, classmates, and even peers in other online sections

options for writing assignments, e.g. list of topics on "Trifles" at the end of "Understanding Drama"

questions to answer while studying a module, e.g. for "Oedipus the Wreck," Sonnet 116, "Hamlet," "A Rose for Emily," "Trifles"

writing to a forum, e.g. on "Oedipus the King"

writing to a forum or webboard to respond to a posted essay draft, a forum statement by a classmate (e.g. for a Frost poem, "A Rose for Emily," or "Hamlet," or a forum or webboard statement by a peer at another college regarding "Dover Beach" or "Trifles"

Appendix B

Email to ENG Peer Litonline Workshop Attendees

THANKS!

Thanks for attending our workshop at the ENG Peer Conference on October 16, 1998. The Litonline team's final report is nearly done and will be posted as a link on our cover page for a while. (If you have WordPad or Word 7 on your online computer and click on the report link at http://vccslitonline.cc.va.us the report should open in your computer's word processor.)

AN INVITATION

If you would like to join the listserv for Litonline for a while, you would have one way of "listening to" and contacting other teachers of ENG 112. Our current topic is arranging sharing some of the forums this semester. Cathy Simpson (NVCC) and Eric Hibbison (JSRCC) just had their classes visit the "Trifles" forum. We just assigned each of our active students to one of four questions during the week when our online classes are reading the play and working through Ron Carter's (RCC) online study guide at--

http://vccslitonline.cc.va.us/drama/ReadingDrama.htm

Cathy made it optional for her 42 students (yes, 42 NVCC students enrolled in an online section), while Eric made it mandatory as a "quiz" grade equivalent for his 15 students. Take a look at the directions given to students and the results at--

http://vccslitonline.cc.va.us/Trifles/

To join the Litonline listserv via your emailer, do the following--

1. Send an email message to the server asking to join: Format it exactly as follows, filling in the "your" stuff, of course--

TO: majordomo@listserv.cc.va.us

FROM: your email address

SUBJECT:

===============

subscribe vclitol-fac youremailaddress

2. That is, the server address goes in your email message's TO: line, your email address is probably already in the FROM: line. The SUBJECT: line stays blank, even if your emailer says that's weird. The only message is your subscription request that end with your email address.

It's not a very active listserv at the moment, but you can change that if you wish by sharing this message with your colleagues who teach ENG 112.

SEND MESSAGES

To send an email message or question to the listserv, whether you have subscribed or not, put this in the TO: line--

vclitol-fac@listserv.cc.va.us

As of this moment, the only subscribers of this listserv at the 5 faculty who made the Litonline site--

Donna Reiss (TCC)(founding project director), Rosalind Blunt (NVCC-Loudoun), Ron Carter (RCC), Cathy Simpson (NVCC), and Eric Hibbison (current project director).

We hope you'll join the fun, and visit the website at--

http://vccslitonline.cc.va.us

EH