Motivation, Literacy, and Embodiment: An Analysis of the Constraints and Benefits of
Online Learning at Three Sites of Inquiry
As colleges and universities multiply their offerings of online writing courses,
composition scholars have increasingly debated the field’s stance toward online education and its
attendant digital technologies. At present, such debate remains largely framed around binary
questions of pro and con, a frame implicated by the structure of the recent “Symposium on
Massive Open Online Courses” published in College Composition and Communication and
featuring Steven Krause and Jeff Rice casting roughly opposite judgments about the value of
(Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The questions which underline their reflections on
MOOCs echo concerns for online writing classes as a whole: will the advent of online-only
courses spell the end of the teaching of writing as we know it as well as to all of the pedagogical
practices we have come to theorize and value in face-to-face courses? Will such courses foster a
capitalist business model of education that divorces students from personal contact with teachers
as it divorces students from opportunities from gaining critical awareness? Or does the growing
body of online classes signify educational progress—the evolution of education into the twentyfirst century. Within these debates, discussions of the affordances and constraints of electronic
courses are placed in subservience to overarching positive and negative value judgments.
In this essay, I seek to investigate the opportunities and constraints that online learning
environments pose for the teaching (and learning) of writing, but I do this not for the purpose of
casting judgment. Rather, in identifying the strengths and weaknesses in how online writing
courses mediate the experiences of teaching and learning, I hope we might use these
understandings to then develop pedagogical strategies, course designs, and technological tools
that capitalize on those strengths and respond to those weaknesses. I thus take the position that
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the growth of online-only writing courses is—for good or for ill—inevitable, that the successful
future of responsible writing instruction in the twenty-first century requires us to involve
ourselves productively in shaping the face of online-only education, and that to do this we must
engage in problem solving that aligns the practices and spaces of electronic classrooms both with
our expertise of what constitutes good writing instruction and the needs of our students.
Toward these ends, the remainder of this essay examines the constraints and affordances
of online teaching environments at three sties: student motivation, digital and cultural literacies,
and (dis)embodied communication. At the site of student motivation, I argue that the physical
separation of students from teachers poses negotiable challenges to communicative activities
that, under optimal conditions in a physical classroom, help to motivate struggling students to
manage the pressures and tasks of the writing course. At the site of digital and cultural literacies,
by reiterating and extending the work of Cynthia and Richard Selfe in “The politics of the
interface,” I expose the assumptions that the designs of course management technologies and
other online course tools make about the digital and cultural literacies students are expected to
bring with them to the writing course, assumptions that place non-white, non-middle-class
students at a disadvantage in electronic learning environments. Finally, at the site of
(dis)embodied communication, I explore problems and opportunities inherent to the disembodied
forms of communication between teacher and students available to electronic courses. At each of
these sites, I also briefly offer suggestions for improving online-only courses as modeling for the
kind of productive problem-solving that I see as necessary to make online writing courses work
for us, and to help us move beyond the pro/con debate.
Student Motivation
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The physical separation between teacher and student in electronic learning environments
offers unique obstacles in motivating students to undertake the challenging work of the writing
course. Whereas in physical classrooms the instructor has copious incidental opportunities to
interpret and respond to oral, written, and non-alphabetic messages indicating that a student is
struggling, the inherent limitations of communicative technologies used in online classrooms
restrict both the semiotic channels through which the instructor can receive those messages and
the number of opportunities for transmission. Teaching in a face-to-face classroom, for example,
an instructor may notice difficulties from reading a student’s confused facial expression or
disengaged body language—semiotic information that is difficult to glean from using only
communicative technologies embedded in course management systems—and institute a number
of interventions to assist the student in getting on track—from verbal clarification, to face-to-face
conferences, to emails. It is, of course, still possible to intervene on students’ behalf using digital
technologies alone, but such intervention requires more from the instructor than simply being
observant in the classroom: it more than likely requires interaction with an electronic text to
either diagnose a concern or prescribe advice, and the student may not always be readily
available for contact. That the student can more easily become invisible—withdrawing from the
class silently without attracting the instructor’s attention—has resulted in the need for students to
exhibit a higher degree of self motivation—to advocate on behalf of their own needs in response
to their own difficulties—in order to be successful in an online-only learning environment.
The increased demand for student self motivation in online-only courses is well noted in
composition scholarship. Hoy and Blair for instance, link student motivation to retention rates in
describing their intermediate writing course serving adult learners: “successes and limitations
were due less to the technology than to the varying motivation levels and academic priorities of
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students enrolled in the course” (36). Additionally, Scott Warnock, in Teaching Writing Online,
makes similar assertions connecting the necessity of student self-motivation to success in online
learning environments, explaining that his institution ceased offering completely online firstterm courses for traditional students because they were concerned that “first-term, on-campus
students might have trouble if they viewed the online writing course as an easy way out–simply a
way not to get up and go to class” (13). In making such a decision, Warnock’s institution was
clearly concerned that incoming students generally lacked the necessary behaviors, skills, and
attitudes to ensure their success in a predominantly self-motivated learning environment. Finally,
Krause, in evaluating the effectiveness of the MOOC, suggests that the course’s abysmal
retention rate—just over 2,700 of the more than 36,000 students who originally enrolled in the
course actually completed the written assignments—at least partially “reflects the number of real
students in the course” (691). By applying the label “real students” to those who completed the
assignments, Krause implicitly connects success in online courses to higher degrees of selfmotivation, a motivation perhaps all the more impressive considering the instructors facilitating
the course did not actually grade student responses.
If the examples above indicate that online-only courses are less effective for lessmotivated students, I would also add my concern that fully online courses may not be best for
students who are first generation college attendees or whose home culture is far removed from
the middle-class literacies that dominate instructional practice both online and in physical
classrooms. While I will focus on explaining the unique literacy obstacles imposed by onlineonly courses on students not fluent in dominant discourses in the next section, I wish here to
emphasize the connection between literacy fluency and motivation. It should come as no surprise
that humans tend to be more highly motivated to do things that they have familiarity with. Thus,
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many of the students who will be most motivated to direct their work in an online-only
classroom will also likely be more fluent in the dominant forms of discourse through which that
work is communicated. I fear that, for minority students, for working class students, for first
generation college students, the well-documented difficulties they face in navigating the
university’s cultural practices, acquiring academic literacy (not to mention new course-specific
digital literacies), and learning contextually appropriate modes of communication could prove
overwhelming in the absence of face-to face interaction to encourage them. In my experience
teaching first year writing at Wright State University, many students from these groups tried to
fade into the background, rarely asked for help when they needed it, and simply gave up on
courses (usually by stop coming to class) as they got too difficult. Often the instructor’s reaching
out is critical to these students’ success–a feat difficult when the student is physically present,
and one I think that is nearly impossible online without a reliable, shared mode of
communication between student and teacher as well, an increased effort on the instructor’s part
to connect to the student, and methods for creating a positive, affective, virtual community.
But I am hopeful that motivational challenges are surmountable because they are already
being addressed. Blair and Hoy’s piece provides evidence that online-only courses can foster
meaningful interpersonal interaction that facilitates students’ academic success. Interestingly,
they more highly attribute the development of one-to-one “neighborly” relationships amongst
students (and between teacher and student) to their successful completion of the course over the
traditional model of collective “community” cooperation typically fostered in physical
classrooms: “the most sustainable, effective relationships” forged in the course “were not among
larger groups but among pairs, both student-to-student and instructor-to-student, more of a
coaching and tutoring rather than a traditional teacher-centered model” (40). Furthermore, Hoy
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attributes the on-time completion of the course by her student, Susan–who faced several major
life difficulties while performing the work of the class–to the supportive dialogues created
through private email exchanges. Thus, digital technologies, when employed purposefully, can
help to foster productive, motivating relationships, though they may be better suited to this work
on a smaller, more-personal scale than physical classroom interactions.
The issue of student motivation is also deeply interrelated with the design, curriculum,
level of instructor oversight, and pedagogy of the online writing course itself. Consider, for
example, the differences in design and execution of a MOOC and the tiny (8 students or so)
writing classes taught by Blair and Hoy. In regards to his MOOC experiences, Krause notes that
the massive amount of students enrolled created an unmanageable workload for the single
professor and small number of graduate students attached to the course. As a result, there was no
oversight regarding areas like the evaluation of student responses, which were left to the students
to evaluate amongst each other. Such lack of oversight contributed to an unproductive attitude in
Krause and many of his classmates toward their work:
It didn’t really matter what I wrote because no one (including myself) cared, and I
was destined to get the same grade no matter what I did. It was garbage
in/garbage out—though I am happy to report that I did earn a “certificate.” (694)
Krause’s frustrations can also be partially attributed to the fact that the course was ungraded, and
unaccredited, leaving no external motivating stakes for students to complete their work. Still, the
reason the course lacked these motivating stakes is partly because of the teacher-student ratio,
which precluded responsible instructor evaluation and personalized attention. Illustrating the
negative impact of bad pedagogy on student motivation, Jeff Rice—while generally optimistic
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about the future of MOOCs—concludes that the traditional lecture/response format by which his
experience was structured is less engaging when ported directly to a digital environment:
I was not entirely attracted to [. . .] the very nonsocial media environment of
quizzes, short writing tasks, and pretaped video lectures. None of these
pedagogical tools maintained my attention in an environment (the Web) with far
richer sources. (699)
In contrast, Blair and Hoy’s course design, though remediating some traditional writing
workshop activities like peer-review, successfully motivated students by clearly articulating
expectations, employing interactive pedagogy, establishing personal relationships, and providing
meaningful feedback and individualized attention.
How then, can we ameliorate the problems of student motivation in online writing
courses? For one, we can begin by designing curricula that “favor social, collaborative
approaches to student success and move students toward more authentic and audience-based
pedagogies that foreground student responsibility and active, constructivist learning” (Blair &
Hoy 36). Such work entails remediating much of what we already know about the teaching of
writing in physical classrooms to the electronic classroom. In short, we need to design instruction
that promotes students’ interactions with one another, that engages them in the production of
authentic texts for real audiences, and that involves them in developing motivation for their own
learning. We might next use our expertise to lobby administrators to select online course
structures that best represent our belief that good writing instruction requires personalized
attention between teacher and student so that we might counter the perception that teaching
online requires less work and that instructors can therefore accommodate larger class sizes.
While courses like MOOCs offer a tempting economic incentive to cash-strapped institutions, we
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must persuasively make the case that long-term student retention is tied to motivation, which is
in part cultivated by the affective responses of teachers working closely with smaller numbers of
students. Finally, we need to accept that the teaching of online writing courses entails an ethic of
outreach and intervention—that we have a duty to help keep half-visible students from
disappearing completely in the online writing space.
Digital and Cultural Literacies
Online course management systems (CMSs), digital software tools, and even the means
by which instructors communicate important course information online problematically presume
students to be fluent in certain types of digital and cultural literacies. One location at which to
examine the literacy assumptions that online course systems make is in the design of their
interfaces. As Cynthia and Richard Selfe argue in “The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its
Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones,” the design of software interfaces construct “an interested
version of reality represented in terms of both language and image” (487). Furthermore, because
this version of reality privileges the discourse and culture of dominant groups (white, middleclass males), interfaces take part in the same practices that “marginalize and oppress groups of
people due to their race, gender, or ethnic background” taking place in physical classrooms
(483).To access and navigate this interested version of reality when taking an online course,
students need fluency in the cultural, alphabetic, and digital literacies which the design of the
software privileges. Students whose situated-ness does not well match that of the intended
“ideal” user are at a significant disadvantage in using the software and accessing course
materials, obstacles which must be managed prior to and alongside any struggles in engaging
with content.
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As an example of how online CMS interfaces privilege groups with certain cultural
literacies while restricting access to other users, consider the design of Bowling Green State
University’s course management system, Canvas, which is used to host both physical and onlineonly courses. According to Selfe and Selfe, one embedded feature of most interface designs is
the privileging of logocentrism, a principal which entails that interfaces are typically dependent
upon a “hierarchical representation of knowledge, a perspective characteristically—while not
exclusively—associated with patriarchal cultures and rationalistic traditions of making meaning”
(491). Marcia Farr identifies many of these same features, “an emphasis on logical order internal
to the text, with an ‘attention to syntax and especially to internal relations among sentences,’” as
characteristic of Essayist Literacy, the discourse of power operating within the academy (9).
Course materials housed on Canvas, as well on most CMS sites used for online-only courses, are
similarly arranged hierarchically “within a strict syntactical system of propositional logic” (492),
an arrangement evidenced in the design of the navigation menus and layout of the front page of
my Fall 2013 first year writing course (see Fig 1.1, below). The menus indicate logical headings
or groupings of information, arranged in order from left to right and top to bottom based upon
the perceived significance of each section in relation to its use in the course. Many of these
headings feature drop down sub menus or link to text-laden pages featuring hierarchically
categorized and subcategorized hyperlinks to assignment handouts, course notes, and sample
essays. The content of the page itself reproduces this hierarchical structure, featuring several
levels of headings followed by subordinate body text. In an online course setting, to be able to
begin interacting with the content of the course, students must first possess fluency in the rational
modes of meaning-making entailed in navigating the interface’s design.
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Fig. 1. 1: Screen capture of front page of first year writing course in BGSU's course management system,
Canvas
Of course, the difficulties of students navigating privileged literacies are not unique to
online-only classes. However, in online settings, they are compounded by the lack of embodied
face-to-face communication—the nature and affordances of which I will discuss in greater detail
in the next section—which may be employed to mitigate, mediate, and remediate mismatches
between essayist and student literacies. The features of this face to face communication include
body language, impromptu oral dialogue, and performative gestures. To illustrate how literacy
mismatches are mitigated in the face-to-face classroom, I offer discussion of the course syllabus
for the General Studies Writing courses at Bowling Green State University, documents which,
largely standardized for all courses across the department, both highly rely upon the features of
essayist literacy in their design and demand students’ advanced proficiency with essayist literacy
to be comprehended. Like the design of the course management system, this contract-like
document (usually 8-10 pages long and written in an 11-point type font) consists of
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hierarchically organized sections and subsections. Course policies are communicated in lengthy,
carefully interconnected, and syntactically crafted paragraphs. These features, because they
obfuscate the requirements of the course, contribute to the low numbers of students who actually
read the document. In physical classrooms, this lack of reading poses less of an operational
problem for students, as it is standard procedure for the instructor to orally summarize, visually
emphasize, and dialogically clarify the most important parts of the syllabus. If, however, such a
document is ported directly for use in an online classroom (and it often is), students would be
expected to glean the important information about the course from their reading alone, a difficult
task for many of our students, even those who come from privileged discourse backgrounds.
Online-only courses also pose many of the same literacy challenges—as well as some
unique ones—for ESOL and international students, albeit magnified by broader gulf between
students and the academy along the axes of language, discourse, and culture. Indeed, cataloging
international and ESL graduate student perceptions about the benefits and disadvantages of
online learning, a study by Tan Fuljuan, et al. cites a significant body of educational research in
describing the nature of cultural differences that create difficulty for ESL students in these
contexts:
International students taking classes in countries different from their home
countries often face learning situations compounded by lack of knowledge,
understanding of values and language of the teaching culture, and strong values
and perceptions of their own. [. . . .] Distance and other learning technologies are
dominated by Western culture and cater to its teaching styles and preferences at
the expense of students from non-Western cultures, making the imposition of
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Western chauvinism a constant, if unintended, danger for Western instructors
(10).
In the absence of embodied, face-to-face interaction which can dynamically mitigate the
communicative difficulties inherent when speaking across languages and cultures, online-only
courses risk alienating international students from acquiring (spoken) English linguistic
proficiency, developing interpersonal relationships that fostering appropriate cultural behaviors
necessary for success in the course, and denigrating students’ home cultures, values, and modes
of meaning-making.
Fortunately, Fuljuan et al. offer a springboard for developing solutions that mitigate
discursive, linguistic, cultural, and literate disconnects between ESL students and the academy in
online courses, solutions which would likewise broadly benefit students from non-dominant
discourse backgrounds. Specifically, they imply that the design of course interfaces and other
software tools should use multiple semiotic modes to foster learning and communication: “Audio
and visual strategies should be more fruitfully used to foster ESL listening and speaking skills”
(13). But rather than limit such design suggestions to the author’s narrow application of ESL
speaking and listening, I argue that we might more strongly consider how we can design all
online-course materials to better match the meaning-making practices of a variety of
discourses—to consider for instance, how we might mitigate the dense language and hierarchical
organization of the standard syllabus by communicating course expectations through audio and
visual means as well as through alphabetic text. Perhaps we might start simply by recording our
condensed explanations of course policies and posting these to the course website alongside an
alphabetic copy of the syllabus. As Selfe and Selfe suggest, we might also begin to foster
collaborations with CMS designers with the aim of producing software with multiple, more
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flexible methods for presenting and organizing information that also better support the
incorporation of multimodal texts. At the very least, we should reflect upon the rhetorical design
of our instructional materials, as well as how our decisions variously open or constrain our
students’ access to online courses. Under such considerations, perhaps the standard 8-page GSW
syllabus is inappropriate to the discursive and cultural backgrounds of our students.
(Dis)Embodied Communication
As I have perhaps alluded to above, many of the drawbacks inherent to online courses at
the sites of student motivation and literacy are also drawbacks related to embodied
communication. What differentiates the online classroom most profoundly from the physical one
is the separation between bodies that necessitates the mediation of communication solely through
digital technologies. In this section, I mean to enumerate the advantages offered by embodied
communication and briefly suggest how online writing courses might employ current
technologies to interact with students using the most pertinent capabilities of embodied
communication.
The embodied communicative acts of face-to-face classes are characterized by a unique
constellation of affordances. While various digital communication technologies can mimic one
or more of these affordances, no one technology seems to be to able to recreate them all in
unison. Firstly, in face-to-face classes, teachers and students may read and respond to one
another’s non-verbal, non alphabetic communications, increasing the semiotic channels through
which students can mediate their progress through the class and learn to navigate privileged
discourses. Secondly, these mediations can happen dialogically and synchronously at the precise
moment of need. A struggling student in a physical classroom can ask a question, get response,
query for clarification, and receive confirmation within seconds, and the student can have this
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interaction not only with the teacher, but with other students as well. Thus, thirdly, physical
classrooms allow for a multiplicity of simultaneous communications in diverse forms. During a
workshop, for instance, some students might compose silently while others review one another’s
work in pairs and another asks a question of the circulating instructor. Finally, face-to-face
interaction allows for the most direct communication of affective responses.
No singular communication technology, at present, offers quite the same potential for
communicative versatility as that of physical bodies interacting dynamically in the same space.
Instant messaging technologies can create synchronous dialogic response, but they struggle to
replicate the nuances of vocal intonation and body language. Video chat technologies like Skype
likewise allow for synchronous dialogue and even enable non-verbal communication, but they do
not facilitate the rapid alteration of attention that takes place between bodies in a multi-person
conversation, making chat with more than one other person difficult. Perhaps virtual
environments like Secondlife come closest to achieving the sum of communicative affordances
inherent to face-to face interactions in that they remediate physical bodies into virtual ones. Even
in this remediation, however, communicative versatility is restricted. The use of body language
to communicate ideas, for example, is limited to the range of motions programmed into the
software, and such communication is easily lost in the visual spectacle of the virtual realm.
To ameliorate the problems of disembodied communication inherent to online-only
learning spaces, I stress the need for instructors to think deeply about the affordances of each
communicative technology—specifically, which aspects of embodied communication the
technology best replicates—and apply those technologies to instructional contexts in which those
aspects of embodied communication are most important for student success. If, for instance, the
class is meeting synchronously to resolve questions about an assignment, perhaps the most
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important exigency of such a meeting is the ability to respond rapidly to a larger audience of
students, and perhaps instant messaging programs best meet these demands. On the other hand, if
the situation calls for meeting a student to discuss complex writing issues manifested in a draft,
perhaps here the exigency is having available a full range of semiotic systems—visual, aural,
performative, and alphabetic—to facilitate the usually messy, imprecise dialogue of a writing
conference, and perhaps video chat programs like Skype best service this need. Whatever
technologies are employed, the selection of software should be a careful rhetorical decision
based on the audience of students and the purpose for the communicative act.
Conclusion
In moving beyond the debate over whether or not online learning environments and their
attendant technologies portend good or evil for the teaching of writing, I think it would be more
productive if we accepted the inevitability of their increase so that we might move instead
toward asserting our voices in the shaping of these courses and the design of their technologies. I
offer this assertion not as a fatalistic acknowledgment of the death of the face-to-face
classroom—I do not believe that online-only environments can sustain all types of learning for
all types of students, nor do I believe that physical classrooms will disappear. Rather, by
participating in the articulation of questions and solutions regarding online classrooms at sites
like student motivation, literacy, and embodied communication, and by opening channels of
dialogue between compositionists, school administrators, and designers of software to express
these concerns and negotiate these solutions, we may come to help ensure that these
environments and technologies come to reflect the values and practices of our field. If, for
example, MOOCs pose serious dilemmas in the areas of student motivation because of the
unsustainable student to teacher ratio, then we need to be able to suggest other feasibly, ethically,
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theoretically, and pedagogically sound models of online instruction to those who make policy
decisions.
What is at stake here is the extent to which online learning spaces—which are likely only
to increase in number and prominence in the near future—are ethically reconfigured to represent
the expertise of the field and the learning needs of our students, and we, as caretakers of
responsible writing instruction, must participate in the fashioning of online classrooms if we
hope for all of our students to have a chance at learning within them.
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Works Cited
Blair, Kristine, and Cheryl Hoy. “Paying Attention to Adult Learners Online: The Pedagogy and
Politics of Community.” Computers and Composition 23 (2006): 32-48. Print.
Farr, Marica. “Essayist Literacy and Other Verbal Performances.” Written Communication. 10.1
(1993): 4-38. Print.
Selfe, Cynthia L., and Richard J Selfe, Jr. “The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise
in Electronic Contact Zones.” College Composition and Communication 45.4 (1994):
480-504. JSTOR. Web. 19 June 2013.
“Symposium on Massive Open Online Courses.” College Composition and Communication 64.4
(2013): 688-703. Print.
Tan, Fuljuan, Lee Nabb, Steven Aagard, and Kioh Kim. “International ESL Graduate Student
Perceptions of Online Learning in the context and Second Language Acquisition and
Culturally Responsive Facilitation.” Adult Learning 21.9 (2010): 9-14. OhioLink. Web.
19 June 2013.
Warnock, Scott. Teaching Writing Online: How and Why. Urbana: National Council of Teachers
of English, 2009. Print.