Content area
Full Text
This article recounts the experiences of a team of faculty, graduate students, and instructional technologists facilitating Rhetorical Composing, a writing-focused Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). When first offering the MOOC, we recognized quickly that we needed to emphasize the global makeup of our learning cohort to foster a stronger sense of community, diminish concerns about peer review, and inform participants about various ways that people all over the world learn English. In response, we developed a curricular unit focusing on "World Englishes" that included video lectures, guest speakers, discussion forums, and an invitation for individuals to submit their own learning experiences. We also designed an in-house peer-review software platform, which provided focused training for all participants, regardless of language background. Here, we analyze demographic data for the course, participant writing, and other content generated within the MOOC.
"As the linguistic diversity of the student population has become undeniably clear, and as the institutional urge for globalization continues to grow, second language writing is beginning to gain recognition as a concern for everyone involved in the field of composition studies. "
-Paul Kei Matsuda (2012)
In contemporary composition classrooms, teachers and scholars such as A. Suresh Canagarajah ("Ecology"), Bruce Horner and John Trimbur ("English Only"), and Paul Kei Matsuda ("Myth") encourage faculty to make what Wendy Hesford calls the "global turn" (787), to explore not only issues of multilingual education but also pursue with increased energy, focus, and understanding the expanded possibilities of an "imagined global geography" (788). Such efforts have proven both complex and difficult, however, as rhetoric and composition faculty-often without adequate preparation in teaching students with different language backgrounds-struggle to deal in productive ways with the different cultures, languages, and educational values introduced by an increasingly international student body in the U.S. and elsewhere (Horner, NeCamp, and Donahue; Jordan; Matsuda, "Myth"). One educational environment dramatically illustrating the importance of Hesford's call and Matsuda's point in the epigraph above-that second language writing instruction is increasingly becoming a central focus for the entirety of composition studies-is the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), where participants from all over the world representing a diverse spectrum of ethnic, class, professional, and linguistic identities come together to participate in a collective learning experience.
Since their rise in...