The Web Site of the COWL Project

Present: Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams (Project Director); Penny Gilchrist (Project Manager); David Morris (Project Chair); Peter Hartley (Critical Friend); Christine Broughan (Workpackage Leader); Joanne Opie; Sally Patalong; Dimitar Angelov, Peri Yavash, Rebecca Wilde, Cynthia Barnes, Holly Vass, Sarah Wilkerson; John Tutchings; Tracy Cullis; Billy Brick; Brett Lucas; Catalina Neculai

Apologies: Colleen McKenna; Mary Deane (Workpackage Leader)

As this was a larger than usual meeting, with several stakeholders present who had not attended before, everyone introduced themselves, giving an overview of their involvement in the COWL project.

An update on recent events was given:

• Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams and David Morris attended the JISC programme meeting on 11 May 2011. At the meeting, Lisa presented the COWL maps and both Lisa and David took part in a ‘Dragons’ Den’ style activity, where they were grilled about the product (COWL), sustainability and who the stakeholders are.
• The next Cluster Group meeting will take place on 20 July 2010 in Newcastle
• Each of the three universities in the Cluster Group (Coventry University, St Georges London and University of Newcastle) have been invited to attend the Learning and Teaching Experts meeting in Birmingham on 20 October 2010, and to give a presentation about their project. More details will be distributed when they are known.

An overview of project achievements to date was presented:

• The second interim report has been completed and written feedback received. One question asked was for more concrete information about our plans for evaluation and the data we will be using.
• In order to disseminate the COWL project, members of the CAW Team will be attending the following conferences, where they will be presenting and/or distributing a flyer about the project:
• o EWCA 2010 (Paris) May - Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams, Mary Deane and Dimitar Angelov
• o WDHE 2010 (London) May - Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams, Mary Deane, Erik Borg
• o Zurich ‘Forum Academic Writing’ June - Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams
• o ELATE 2010 (Coventry) June - Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams, Mary Deane
• Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams has been approached by the Health and Social Policy Subject Centre to disseminate through their newsletter. This offer will be followed up when the project is at an appropriate stage.
• Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams was interviewed by Rhona Sharpe of Oxford Brookes for regarding a project on Student Learning and the Learning Experience.
• The CAW Tutor Training course on on-line tutoring has been completed. This will be extended over the Autumn term to offer sessions to new members of staff and other interested parties.
• As the leader of workpackage 6, Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams gave a report on planned activities for embedding new practices:
• o On-line tutor training
• o Two hour faculty based workshops - faculty staff will come to CAW to learn about COWL and experience it hands-on
• o Start working on a good practice guide, which will include contributions from Mary Deane, Mark Childs and Ray Summers.
• o Schedule the roll-out plan

• For the benefit of those stakeholders who had not attended previous meetings, an overview of the project pilots was given.
• Christine Broughan informed the meeting of her progress with the evaluation of the project, outlining the methods of evaluation and the key findings so far.
• John Tutchings updated the meeting on the technologies being used for the project, the changes implemented and why. Work in progress is the merging of the synchronous and asynchronous platforms into Moodle to give a common platform. A discussion took place around the benefits this would bring to both staff and students.

Future planned activities were outlined:

• The Academic Writing Tutor training course for online tutoring will be developed further, using the lessons learnt from the first instance of the course.
• Good practice guides for online tutoring, the administration of synchronous and asynchronous tutorials and the technology used will be produced.
• Workshops will be offered to teaching staff within the disciplines in order for them to hear about COWL and to experience COWL hands-on.
• Further evaluation will take place, dependent on the next stage of the project. If further random pilots are carried out they will be evaluated. If not, we may re-interview members of the project team at the end of the project.

A final COWL Project meeting will be held in September/October 2010.  Once details are finalised, invitations to attend will be issued.

Present: Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams (Project Director); Penny Gilchrist (Project Manager); David Morris (Project Chair); Peter Hartley (Critical Friend); Christine Broughan (Workpackage Leader); Colleen McKenna (UCL); Brett Lucas (HEA);Tracy Cullis; Sandra Harrison; Sally Patalong; Catalina Neculai 

An overview of project achievements to date and the interim report were presented.  Discussion then took place around the following topics: 

• CAW Academic Writing Tutor and Economics Lecturer training for the COWL project- Lessons learned
• The COWL Economics and Paramedic pilots
  - Vastly increased Economics student numbers, and how the project team have dealt with this    
  - Lack of IT skills amongst 1^st-year Paramedic students
  - Difficulties experienced, and how they have been overcome and/or possible solutions
  - The necessity for flexible teaching methods    
• The technology used for the pilots
  - The problems experienced with MegaMeeting and the decision to trial Skype with Mikago
  - User guides- Emerging technologies which may be worth considering for the future
  -The interfaces being used and their capabilities
• The COWL Moodle module (synchronous) and the COWL website (asynchronous)
  -The ordering of information and instructions
  -The amount of text on the page
  - The possibility of merging the two interfaces
• Evaluation
  - Evaluation activities carried out and planned
  - Evaluating the impact the COWL project has had on students’ writing and ways of doing this 

Present:  Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams (project director); Sharon Simkiss (project manager); David Morris;  Peter Hartley (critical friend); Colleen McKenna (UCL); Brett Lucas (HEA); Sandra Harrison; Hilary Mills; Tracey Cullis; Peter Samuels; Sally Patalong. Christine Broughan; Mary Deane, John Tutchings (workpackage leaders).

An overview of project achievements to-date was presented.  The group then discussed the existing CAW and projected COWL enhanced models.  Suggestions for improvements included:

• The student record could also be retained online to enrich the information available to the tutor - reference to University of Glamorgan project on lab reports. Drop-down menus would make the entering in of information easier.  Data protection issues to be investigated
• Need to be careful how the face to face sessions are replicated online, to avoid them becoming too clinical/avoid denegrating the process. 
• Suggestion that the 50-minute face to face online sessions would be too long for online and might be better broken up into three sections i.e. 10 minutes for the loading of papers/submission, 25 minutes to provide feedback and a further 15 minute session to provide for follow-up via email.
• Suggestion that the map is not the student journey, it needs to contextualise the student journey.  It would be useful to see how students move through the COWL services.
• Suggested also that the enhanced COWL map was now the post-project, long-term aspiration map (developmental)  and needs to be revised to reflect the current pilot position.
• COWL should focus on raising awareness in the University of what’s on offer.
• Could COWL be integrated with the VLE to create a ‘My Writing Space’? Referred to the University of Glasgow for work in this area. With regard to peer review the creation of a peer environment could be beneficial - reference project at Queen Mary’s.
• Request that COWL also link through to the subject librarians.
• Could the electronic writing resources be moved into the same area as the other asynchronous activities.
• Again reiteration of need to test video-conferencing as against audio feedback - suggestion that video-conferencing can be difficult over a sustained period.

A briefing was provided on the pedagogic tools chosen for the pilots, with an outline of the programme for the pilots  and details of the composition of the pilot groups.

The analysis of the results of the existing CAW student demographics was also presented to the group.

Present: David Morris (Chair); Lisa Ganobcsik-Willliams (Project Director); Sharon Simkiss (Project Manager); Peter Hartley (Critical Friend); Mary Deane, John Tutchings; Christine Broughan, Erik Borg (Workpackage Leaders); Hilary Nesi; Joanne Opie; Tracy Cullis; Sandra Harrison; Sally Patalong; Peter Samuels (University Representatives)

The Role of the Steering Group and that of the criticial friend were outlined.
An overview of JISC and the existing CAW operation was provided.
The importance of the need for the outcomes of the project to be transferable to other institutions was noted.
A discussion ensued with regard to the nature of OWLS and Writing Centres to aid understanding.
A report was given on progess made to date with regard to the initial project definition phase and the research findings, software applications to be trialled, and pilot groups to be used.
Useful feedback was provided to the project team with regard to the consideration of a ‘Triage’ approach to prioritising demand and additional software add-ins relating to integrations of Corpora and speech recognition software.
The question of diversity was raised in relation to the two pilot groups chosen for the study and a useful discussion followed, emphasising the need to ensure that these groups were as representative as possible to maximise transferability. A matrix of diversity factors would be drawn up with a check made on how the pilot groups measured against this.
The Evaluation Plan was also discussed and feedback received.
The focus of the intial evaluation question would be changed to look at ‘Where do students go for academic writing support’. Accessibility and usability issues were also discussed.