My name is Robin Evans, and I am a doctoral student at Oklahoma State University, as well as an Assistant Professor at Wilberforce University. I am conducting an IRB-approved study on teaching and assessing new literacy skills in first-year writing courses, using Online Writing Instruction (OWI) delivered in technology-enhanced, hybrid, and wholly online formats for my dissertation. If you currently teach first-year writing at a private HBCU, or have taught first-year writing using online writing instruction methods, please consider participating in this study, or forward this message to your colleagues for their potential participation.
The purpose of this study is to collect information on best practices to teach and assess new literacy skills in first-year writing courses to students at other private HBCUs. I am particularly interested in learning how faculty members teach and assess these skills without having an extensive budget for technology, tools, and training. The first-year program at Wilberforce university is considering offering writing courses using OWI methods; technology-enhanced and hybrid classes, then wholly online writing courses in the summer of next year. This information will be helpful to understand how other faculty members at private HBCUs are teaching and assessing these skills and the tools that they use; in addition, it will be useful information about web-based learning and will help improve online courses at Wilberforce University and other HBCUs.
If you participate, your obligations will be low. You will complete a short, anonymous survey via the Internet that will require approximately 15 minutes of your time, and will be returned to me via Survey Monkey, an online data collection service. If you complete a survey, your responses will be returned to me anonymously. I will not be able to identify your e-mail address, your IP address, or any other information that would inform me as to your identity, or your location. If you choose to inform me of your identity, please contact me at the telephone number or email address below. Your identity will be kept confidential, and used only to compile overall faculty profiles of those instructors who completed the survey and demographic information about your institution.
Completing this survey is voluntary. You may skip questions, and can quit any portion of the research at any time. Please feel free to contact me or my advisor at the telephone numbers and email addresses below.
