Composition MOOC Resources: Another Reason to Like the KUWC Facebook
WAC Team members all agree: 2013 was awesome!
by Chrissine Rios
2013 marked a year of collaboration, innovation, and progress for the KUWC with a new website and Plagiarism Information Page, a new full-time tutor, Amy Sexton, and record numbers of students and faculty using our writing resources, workshops, Live Tutoring, ELL Support, Fundamentals, and video review services.
The KUWC Facebook page grew from 400 likes in January 2013 to over 1400 by December 2013, and our Director, Mike Keathely even won the 2013 Spirit of Kaplan award in part for his and the WAC team’s work on the new Composition MOOCs that will launch in 2014.
The MOOCs project provided me with my 2013 trail-blazing role as a Subject Matter Researcher (SMR) too. As the SMR, I researched automated essay scorers and listening-skill assessment, provided instructional design support and development guide reviews, and I curated and created materials that students would need to learn composition in a self-paced environment.
The bonus of having a Writing Center Tutor on the curriculum development team was access to so many pre-existing materials in the KUWC Writing Reference Library.
We selected about 60 writing resources from the KUWC including podcasts and video tutorials to enrich the Composition I and II curricula. MOOC students will not log into KU Campus to access their open courses or materials, however, and all the Writing Center resources live in KU Campus, so curating these resources meant rebranding and editing them so each one could stand alone outside KU Campus. (Hyperlinking our internal resources to other, related internal resources seemed like such a good idea at the time!)
The Writing Center had already begun branding and reformatting select resources over the past year to share on our Facebook and Twitter pages, but because of the MOOC project and the teamwork and editing skills of KUWC Tutors Molly Starkweather and Kyle Harley, and WAC Specialist Melody Pickle, the Writing Center now has a large collection of core composition materials to share publicly along with a rich sampling of graduate-level writing resources introduced in CMO107 as examples of professional writing.
While 2014 promises to be the year the KUWC builds a searchable database for our public-facing writing resources, we will first debut them on Facebook and Twitter as a heartfelt thank you to KU faculty and students.
Here’s a handful that we’ve posted on FB already. Please share them with your students:
· Make your writing matter. This KUWC video tutorial, “Why Write?” tells you how: http://bit.ly/18quvXj
· Too stressed to write? One of our favorite KUWC resources provides cures for writer’s block: http://bit.ly/18mjzaO
· Pie may be great at the holidays, but have you tried the PIE paragraph method? Learn it here: http://bit.ly/1bL36Ql
· Whether you are new to APA or an old hat, you’ll want our most popular APA Resource: APA Common Citations: http://bit.ly/1clBvUn
· Are you sure you haven’t plagiarized? Take this Interactive Self Assessment: http://bit.ly/1dbLxFZ
There are many more writing resources to come, so if you haven’t yet “liked” Kaplan University Writing Center Facebook page or Followed us on Twitter, you might want to, and please invite your students to join too!
