Assistant Professor John Roche has been referred to as the "new kid on the grid" in RIT’s Office of Online Learning’s internal newsletter, the Online Learner, because he is the first professor to develop and teach a new two-part Writing and Literature class online.

"I had some trepidation at first about whether you can create an intimate or personal atmosphere through a rather impersonal medium," says Roche.

Often in a traditional writing and literature class students need to participate in class discussions and provide feedback to each other’s writing in order to get the most out of their learning. Could it be done effectively in the online mode?

"I found some students were more willing to speak up online than in the classroom," he says. "I think that their familiarity with chat rooms has made them bold in terms of using computer mediums to express themselves. So it seems to me that they were quite responsive, and I was relieved."

Forming small teams of students to interact with each other on various writing and research assignments seems to be working best, he says. "I simply ask the teams to basically give feedback on each other’s rough drafts of their papers, what’s called peer editing. I give questions for the groups to discuss and for someone in each group to report back to the class as a whole on what their group had done. This seemed to work."

Nonetheless, Roche claims that enhancing online group interaction is still a work in progress. "I’m trying to find out the right kind of balance to make the groups more effective," he says.

Part of the challenge is to provide discussion topics and information that will get students interested. To possibly accomplish this Roche decided to step up his online class with some multimedia content.

For instance, when the College of Liberal Arts Student Affairs Division sponsored an on-campus lecture by Beat Generation poet Janine Pommy Vega, Roche provided streaming video as well as transcripts of the event to his online class. "We put those online for our students to have the same ability as on-campus students," he says. "It seemed to work for most of them. Additionally, Roche provided streaming video of a special lecture given by College of Liberal Arts Associate dean Glenn List on Tessa Bridal’s novel The Tree of Red Stars, chosen as the Common Novel for 2000-01 and taught in all Writing and Literature I classes.

Other links take Roche’s students to a number of interesting online literature resources, such as hypertext archives on great poets and authors. At the William Blake online archive (www.blakearchive.org), for instance, visitors have access to "high-quality electronic reproductions" of Blake’s work that include Blake’s pictoral cannon "with both images and texts organized, interlinked and searchable," according to the website.

"With RIT being the kind of place where many students have a great interest in digital imaging, here they can see original engravings and drawings," says Roche. "They don’t have to just read the words; they can look at the corresponding pictures." Accordingly, in one of Roche’s class assignments, he had students provide their feedback on the Blake website. "That’s the kind of assignment that’s easy to do in an online class," he says. "A simple click and you can see the manuscripts in front of you."

Overall Roche says that as he continues to teach online he continues to find more "opportunities" to make his classes more exciting and engaging. "It takes a little bit of work, obviously. It’s the kind of thing that keeps developing."

In the article about Roche in the Online Learner, Roche perhaps best summed up what the dynamics of an online class are all about when he wrote: ". . . as in a physical classroom, every class (online) has its own personality, and there is no one-shoe-fits-all approach that works. So another stereotype of online learning, that it lends itself to a Player Piano-type homogenity, proved false."

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