Speakers:

Rebecca Burnett and Karen Head

Title:

"Promises and Practices: Creating and Implementing a Composition MOOC"

Abstract:

Composition MOOCs—which offer participants opportunities to critique and compose written, oral, and visual artifacts—present particular challenges, some of which are distinct to courses in humanities. During their session, Burnett and Head will comment about the benefits and challenges in their project related to curriculum, pedagogy, and technology in the development and implementation of their MOOC. One of the challenges is figuring out ways to incorporate what we know to be best practices in humanities pedagogy into MOOCs. In addition, their experience indicates that faculty need to consider factors such as participant demographics, costs, available support systems, concepts such as classroom and collaboration, the role of culture, issues of security, the role of gender, course repeatability, and intellectually credible assessment.

Bios:

Speaker 1:

Rebecca E. Burnett (PhD Carnegie Mellon University) is Director of Writing and Communication at Georgia Tech. She holds an Endowed Professorship in Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication. Burnett has diverse research interests: risk communication, conflict in collaboration, assessment of multimodal artifacts, digital pedagogies, visual literacies, technical communication, and communication practices of women students in science and engineering. Her interest in international communication has led to work and travel in countries including Canada, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, and more than a dozen others. Collaboration is her oldest research interest; for more than 20 years, she has investigated ways in which teams and groups handle various kinds of productive and unproductive conflict. In 2012-13, she was part of the GT team awarded a Gates Foundation Grant to develop one of the first Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) focused on college writing, and she has given several presentations about the experience. She is author of one of the country’s most widely used technical communication textbooks. Burnett has a long history as a communication consultant for businesses, industries, and government agencies and as an adviser about curriculum and professional development for educational systems. She has also developed extensive documentation for proprietary processes in industry. As an expert witness in products liability cases, she deals with the adequacy of text, visuals, and information design, particularly in instructions, manuals, and warnings.

Speaker 2: 

Karen Head (PhD University of Nebraska) is Director of the Communication Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. Since 2006, she has been a Visiting Scholar at Technische Universität-Dortmund, Germany, where she serves as the primary consultant for their academic center. Her research areas focus on writing and communication theory and pedagogical practice, especially in the following areas: implementation and development of writing centers, writing program administration, communication ecologies, technical communication, business communication, multidisciplinary communication, and creative writing (especially as it applies to extended risk-taking in subsequent communication projects). In 2012-13, she was part of the GT team awarded a Gates Foundation Grant to develop one of the first Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) focused on college writing, and she has published several articles about the experience. She has also published three books of poetry (Sassing, My Paris Year, and Shadow Boxes) and exhibited several acclaimed digital poetry projects. An award winning teacher, Head’s courses center on analyzing, critiquing, evaluating, and creating a variety of texts that demonstrate an understanding of audience and adaptation of multimodal rhetorical strategies and tools. In 2013, she won Georgia Tech's CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Award.