The end is in sight!... or is it?

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The 3-Year eWriting Grant is slowly winding down after nearly 5 years of intense effort from dozens  of writers, programmers, designers, consultants, Webmasters, trainers, publishers, and test bank developers .  The project team created a fully online writing lab program in six levels, each level consisting of forty-five Learning Objects. This competency-based program prepares ESL students to pass the writing section of the College Placement Test, write successfully, and compete for grades with native speakers of the language in college-level classes.  eWriting addresses the College's ESL students' need for flexible access to instruction by providing them any time, any place access to high-quality interactive lessons that fulfill their ESL Writing Lab “seat-time” requirements.  Students can do their lab hours using eWriting in WebCT, in the free version of the Internet, or (starting in August) in Angel. 

In addition to academic writing skills, the eWriting grant also produced a series of multimedia tutorials for Word Processing.  With 19 narrated movies, each with follow-up activities, students learn about and practice skills such as readability, footnotes, grammar check, thesaurus, word art, along with the basics such as double-spacing and aligning text.   The CPT Prep reading modules help students prepare for the section of the College Placement test that our ESL students find most difficult: Reading.

A very special thanks goes out to the Interamerican Campus (IAC) faculty and staff who have been piloting and debugging the eWriting program for the past two years .  The IAC lab instructors have piloted the program with over 8,000 students over the past two years, providing weekly (sometimes daily) feedback and suggestions.  Thanks to IAC, and especially to Tom Meyer and John Kolasinski, we are happy to report that one of our most ambitions goals, to enroll 5,000 students by the end of the grant was been met last year.  This year, over 6300 students at five MDC campuses used the eWriting program. 

One of the grant's more ambitious goals was to make the program available to ESL students beyond the College.  By posting the program at Merlot (the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) , the eWriting materials are now accessible to anyone with access to the Internet. 

Scope and Content of the eWriting program

The eWriting project has been a huge undertaking.  It started big and got bigger.   Writers (full-time ESL teachers) from five college campuses developed the eWriting content, basing each lesson on the ESL competencies for Writing and Grammar. The efforts of the writers’ team have been featured in Grant publications and national conferences over the past three years.

The eWriting team decided early on to call the lessons inn eWriting "learning objects" or "LOs."  For the purposes of the eWriting Grant, they defined an eWriting LO as "a one hour, self-contained, reusable unit of online instruction that does not link out to, nor depend on other LOs for pre or post instruction." Each LO (in the WebCT and Angel versions) pre-tests students’ knowledge of the target concept, tracks student time and progress, and measures learning through a post-test.  Between the pre-test and the post-test, students receive a 3-pronged lesson beginning with a movie (a narrated, animated, Impaticized PowerPoint presentation) that explains the first segment of instruction.  This is followed  by the lesson page (a text-based lesson with animated graphics covering the content of the movie)  and then by one or more interactive activities that check student comprehension and offer prescriptive feedback for each incorrect guess.  This sequence of movie==> lesson==> activity ==> is repeated up to three more times on the scope and difficulty level of the lesson.  The next section is a comprehensive interactive review of the LO, and a writing activity in which students practice what they have learned. Lastly, students take a comprehension test (with feedback for incorrect guesses) to check their comprehension of the lesson and finally, a graded post-test assessment (with final score only) before proceeding on to their next assigned LO.

The eWriting learning objects were designed using a wide variety of technology tools carefully chosen to create interactive activities that appeal to multiple learning styles: Visual/Verbal, Visual/Non Verbal, Auditory and Kinesthetic/tactile.  These technologies include HotPotatoes, PowerPoint, Impatica, Camtasia, SnagIt, Respondus, Flash, DreamWeaver, FrontPage, Wimba, Flashlight Surveys, Animation Factory, GifArt, WebCT, Angel, and more.   

Close .......but No Cigar

After four years of development, the eWriting program was almost finished.  The final touches were being added when disaster struck.  Or at least, that's what the team thought.  For a number of reasons, the College changed Learning Management Systems (from WebCT to Angel). After a traumatic few months, much commiseration, and finally acceptance that our long journey was far from over, the eWriting team dug in and rolled up their sleeves.  One last eWriting team was assembled:  (Helen Roland, Rene Izquierdo, Marcia Cassidy, Margaret Shippey, Bertha Sanchez, Kathy Biache).  This team was among the first people at the College to be trained on Angel and are just now finishing up the conversion of eWriting from WebCT to Angel (thousands and thousands of pages to link... test items to export / import / configure / check).  You can read one of our team member's observations on the new ANGEL LMS in this issue of Connections. 

The final eWriting product will be finished by August 2007, and it will be available in three formats:  free over the World Wide Web ,  as a WebCT course,   and as an ANGEL course. 

If you would like to try out any of the lessons, go to http://flang1.kendall.mdc.edu and click the "curriculum" tab.   jgarcia@mdc.edu