Digital Low-Stakes Writing Assignments
Discussion Boards
Asynchronous discussion boards offer you an opportunity to build community—either the full class or small groups—around course content. They also allow more flexibility for students regarding when and where they might engage in the activity.
For information on setting up a Discussion Board in Canvas, check out this resource from the Canvas team.
Tips for Improving Online Discussion Boards
Divide students into smaller discussion groups
- Gernsbacher recommends sections of 6-8 students. Dividing a class into smaller groups creates a sense of intimacy and the opportunity to engage deeply with classmates. It also means that students are forced to engage with one another, rather than just answer the prompt and walk away.
Articulate clear expectations of what participation looks like
- Rather than just posting the prompt, make sure you are “directing traffic”: telling students who they are responding to, when the post is due, and so on. If you are asking students to post an original contribution and also respond to another student’s post, make the due dates for the two assignments at least one day apart (otherwise, there’s no guarantee that enough students will post until shortly before the first deadline). Provide feedback and coaching to help students understand the type of engagement you are looking for.
Use “action” verbs to give students purpose in their posts
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Rather than asking “What did you think about…?”, ask students to find, compare, analyze, describe, or more. This gives them a clear purpose to their task, rather than a free-floating invitation. Resist writing prompts for which only one response is acceptable because one one student responds correctly, there’s nothing more for other students to add.
Student and Class Blogs
Blogs are an incredibly versatile platform, combining text with visual functions and hierarchies and allowing your students to experiment and customize features. They can also span from informal journaling to final projects. Finally, blogs allow students to develop skills related to writing for the public. For these reasons, blogs are widely used, can fit in almost any classroom, and can develop community between you and students in an online setting. Below, we’ll focus on using blogs as a low-stakes writing activity.
For instructions on setting up a WordPress blog, check out this resource from UW’s Software Training for Students. Also check out this post on teaching with blogs in Another Word, the blog of UW-Madison’s Writing Center.
Types of Writing Students Can Do Using Blogs
Reading Responses
- Student blogs (or a class blog) can be a valuable space to ask students to post reading responses to course content. Because of the personalized space of the blog, students may write in a more personal and less “academic” tone. This allows them to experiment with and develop their writing voice without being overly concerned with its impact on their grade.One concern that you will want to address early on is the issue of privacy. Though you can set certain security features on blogs, they still exist in the public domain of the internet. Establish protocols and guidelines for your students’ engagement on blogs
Personal Reflections
- Blogs offer an informal medium in which students can open up about their lives. Especially in a moment with such uncertainty, low-stakes blog-writing can be a place for students to share their concerns and anxieties about the class or about their lives in general. You may consider asking students to reflect on what they want to get out of the course at the beginning of the semester, and have them re-visit and respond to/revise this post at different points throughout the semester. Using blogs in this way would allow you to connect with students and lean into the informality of the medium.
Writer’s (B)log
- In a writing-heavy course, having your students keep a writer’s (b)log can be a simple way to identify how they are growing as writers throughout the semester. With a writer’s (b)log, students can keep track of and provide justification for the changes they make over time and across multiple drafts of an assignment, which allows you to emphasize that writing is a process. Students are rarely asked to reflect on how their ideas change from one draft of an assignment to the next, and asking students to regularly update a writer’s (b)log will force them to engage with and think about writing in a new way.
Online Writing Sandbox
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If your class involves other types of online writing like website design, using blogs as an “online writing sandbox” can allow your students to experiment with the different affordances of online writing—crafting titles, aligning pictures with text, adding hyperlinks, writing captions. Again, because of the informality of the platform, blogs can offer a blank canvas for students to practice writing to an online audience and formatting language and visuals to online readers.
