Text revision practices in an e-learning environment: fostering the learning by design perspective

ABSTRACT

Text review activities in formal schooling settings are by and large carried out vertically and often in an authoritarian way, in which teachers usually assign text production activities for students whose only readers and reviewers are their own teachers. Consequently, students rarely have the experience of sharing their texts with one another. Conversely, in the Scholar e-learning environment, students have different experiences of both assessing their peers’ texts and commenting on the peers’ reviews (feedback on feedback). In order to understand how Scholar enables horizontally text reviewing practices, this article aims at developing a qualitative analysis of the peer reviewing process carried out in the Scholar e-learning environment for one online graduate course. To do so, this article is based upon the Learning by design approach, which is sustained by the theoretical concepts of Multiliteracies, New Literacies, Space of flows Design, Agency, and Knowledge Processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Text revision
• learning by design
• new literacies
• E-learning
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Petrilson Pinheiro has PhD in Applied Linguistics, University of Campinas, Brazil. Post-doc in Education, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is Coordinator of the group research ‘Multiliteracies in Schooling through Hypermedia’.

ORCID

Petrilson Pinheiro http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4066-9636

Notes

1 The New London Group was formed by Allan Luke, William Cope, Carmen Luke, Courtney Cazden, Charles Eliot, Gunther Kress, Jim Gee, Martin Nakata, Mary Kalantzis, Norman Fairclough, Sarah Michaels. The manifesto also became a book published by Cope and Kalantzis (2000).

2 Agency is also a key concept in the Transformative Education (Cope and Kalantzis 2011), which, differently from didactic and authentic pedagogies, is the basis of the authors call New Learning.

3 In the NLG Manifesto (1996) the four dimensions (the ‘how’) of Multiliteracies were: situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing and transformed practice. Later, in applying these ideas to curriculum, Cope & Kalantzis reframed these dimensions into the more immediately recognizable pedagogical acts or ‘knowledge processes’ of experiencing, conceptualizing, analysing and applying. For details, see (Kalantzis and Cope 2009).

4 Some MOOCs provide interactive forums to support community interactions among students, professors, but they are by and large restrictive for participants to create their own works and provide feedback to each other. This is the main reason to have chosen Scholar as the e-learning platform as the research context for this study.

5 A detailed description of each working space in Scholar environment is available on: http://cgnetworks.org/scholar/tutorials

6 In Scholar, it is also possible to add updates, a resource that works as a blog post wherein participants can write and about their projects and interests, and share them with their peers. Yet, for limitation of space, this article will only analyse papers created on Creator.

7 As Scholar is an environment that belongs to Common Ground Research Networks, a not-for-profit corporation which publishes and stores journals in different areas of knowledge, Creator also enables to create journal articles and journal issues.

8 In Scholar, it is possible to insert different criteria and weights to the rubrics.

9 The author of this article participated actively of all the online activities concerning the course. Information about the course is available on https://cgscholar.com/bookstore/works/ubiquitous-learning-and-instructional-technologies?category_id=higher-education-modules.

10 Each participant may review two or three other participants’ works.

11 Some works might be reviewed by three peers. The peer reviewing distribution is made by the publication admin and depends on the quantity of students per course.

12 For ethical purposes, the students’ real names are not used in this article. It is also important to highlight that peer reviews on both courses are anonymous. Only admins are able to identify peer reviewers’ names. As one deals with empirical primary data (students’ reviews and comments), all the students give their consent to participate in the research through an online consent (see the Survey for Students’ Consent attached).

13 Some courses count on experts to review students’ works. For the two courses mentioned in this article, there were three expert reviewers (PhD scholars who research the Scholar environment).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo: [Grant Number 2016/19123-3].