A New Way of Looking at Completing College

An article, New National Tally of College Completion Tries to Count All Students, by Katherine Mangan in The Chronicle gives many community colleges some hope that the statistics on college-completion rates may come closer to the realities of our many students who can only attend one or two classes per semester. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center released a report that looks at the non-traditional path many of our students take toward a college degree.

The report, "Completing College: A National View of Student Attainment Rates," concludes that when such nontraditional but increasingly common patterns of enrollment are considered, the national completion rate jumps to 54 percent, from 42 percent. Among full-time students, 75 percent earn a degree or certificate within six years.

While those numbers are lower than most educators would like, they aren't as alarming as the figures that state and federal policy makers have decried in calling for policies that tie budget allocations to colleges' graduation rates.

Many students who are balancing classes with family and work obligations attend more than one institution and take longer to earn a certificate or degree, the report points out. "Conventional measures of success, such as graduation rates for institution-based, first-time full-time degree-seeking cohorts, are insufficient for recognizing the distinctive pathways these students take, or for understanding the particular risks and supports that shape their academic careers," it says.

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From Local Center to Global OWL: An Interview with Muriel Harris

The PCCC Writing Center Blog welcomes Muriel Harris, founder of the Purdue OWL. Muriel Harris is professor emerita of English, Writing Lab Founder and Director (retired), founder and current editor of the Writing Lab Newsletter and founder of Purdue's award-winning Online Writing Lab (OWL). She has published books, including The Prentice Hall Reference Guide and The Writer's FAQs through Pearson. In this interview, Harris talks about the Purdue OWL best practices, its humble beginnings, and what's next for the online lab.

PCCC Writing Center: The OWL at Purdue is known as the oldest online writing lab but also one of the most comprehensive. How did the OWL get its start? Can you talk about the process of establishing an OWL?

Muriel Harris: The Purdue OWL started as a small e-mail service and morphed into a huge website along with the technology that was available at each stage of its growth. Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and there was no Internet, most writing centers had cabinets filled with paper handouts to use in tutorials. When the earliest e-mail became available (before web browsers), I decided it would be helpful for students writing their papers at night (especially on Sundays) if we could make the handouts available online. Somehow, by securing small bits of funding, I managed to find students who could type those handouts in ASCII characters and upload them so that they’d be available 24/7 by e-mail request. The attempts at formatting were minimal in that limited online environment. But a student with programming skills was able to set up the service so that a user could send an e-mail requesting the index and get an instant response. Then, the student could browse through the index and request specific handouts listed there, send off the e-mail request for them, and again get an instant response.

Initially, Purdue students were infrequent users (many not yet computer users back then), but somehow people all over the world learned about this resource when it was written about in various computer magazines. Usage increased with startling speed. Since this was all happening via e-mail, people needed an e-mail address to send their requests to. We had considered something such as “Word,” but feared the wrath of Microsoft for infringing on the name of their word-processing program, Word. One student who was working on this project suggested that since our writing center is the Writing Lab, we could simply call it the Online Writing Lab or OWL, and that became the address.

Later, in one of those rare moments of serendipity, a grad student from another department who had previous extensive IT experience at a software company before starting grad school at Purdue heard about the project and came over to the Lab to see if he could work on our burgeoning OWL. He introduced us to the earliest web browser, Mosaic, which had become available, and designed the initial website, uploaded the documents, and launched our fledgling OWL on the web. Since then a number of graduate tutors in the Lab and I worked on updating the resources that were there, plus creating new handouts. As I was able to secure funds for grad students to serve as OWL Coordinators, they enhanced their own computer skills as they worked on improving the OWL’s appearance, ease of use, materials in different media, and ways to respond to questions sent in by users. Among other projects, we ventured into PowerPoints for teachers to use, and moved forward as technology advanced and added services. Because I’m now retired, I no longer have access to the OWL or to the Purdue students who are continuing to develop it.

PCCC Writing Center: Share an OWL best practice.

Muriel Harris: The best practice for any particular OWL depends greatly on the technology and resources available to that writing center and the needs of students and teachers at that institution. When I retired, there were no usable software programs that would allow some visual and verbal synchronous contact between tutor and student, a format I consider necessary for tutorial interaction. Because talk is the pedagogical format in one-to-one conferences in a writing center and because I value the generative and clarifying power that back-and-forth dialogue permits, I didn’t have any means to explore ways in which an OWL tutor could interact more effectively with student writers. Now, there are some highly sophisticated means for tutors and students to communicate online, and I assume some best practices are being defined. And, I hope, writing center specialists will continue to think about the theory and pedagogy of online interaction which, finally, is not the same as f2f interaction.

PCCC Writing Center: Did you ever envision the OWL becoming as popular as it has? What does the future look like for the OWL?

Muriel Harris: No, initially, I hadn’t envisioned the OWL being anything more than a local resource for students and teachers. Then, at a few conferences I suggested to audiences of other writing center people that they could develop their own OWLs. Then we could create a national database of writing resources by pooling and coordinating all the OWLs and their resources into some grand writing center mega-site. Some people who didn’t have their own resources to create an OWL linked instead to the Purdue OWL. Because of this and the continued growth of users around the globe, the Purdue OWL developed a life of its own and became both a national and international resource. When we read some of the marvelously appreciative messages sent by people who had found our site, we were delighted to be able to offer this free resource. Ironically, though, I’ve had complaints from textbook representatives. They tell me (and my unhappy editor) that they occasionally are unable to convince composition adoption committees to select either of my first-year composition textbooks because instructors prefer the free Purdue OWL. While I appreciate the sales of those texts, I too am an academic and, like all academics, want to share information freely. I appreciate hearing that the Purdue OWL continues to be so widely used.

So, no, I never envisioned what the OWL would become. Sometimes, when we recognize a need, we can step out into the void without knowing where we’ll land or what the goal is, especially if the goal keeps changing.

PCCC Writing Center: Did you ever consider adding a component to the OWL that address writing for the web as either an online student or a professional (e.g. discussion boards, blogs, social media)?

Muriel Harris: I have a number of ideas, but again, because I’m retired, I no longer have a venue for developing any of such tempting components. If I were still actively involved with OWL, I’d focus on more interactive means of working with writers and think more about visual presentation of information. Instead, because I continue to edit the Writing Lab Newsletter (a publication with articles by and for writing center specialists, https://writinglabnewsletter.org/), the Development Editor, Alan Benson, and I continue to expand the resources and forms of interaction on that website. But WLNis a journal, not a writing center, and so we’ve focused on creating spaces for people in writing center to interact and build collections of resources they find useful. And WLN has Twitter and Facebook sites where we post writing-related content and pass along notices of conferences and materials on the social media sites of writing centers.

But there are people in various writing centers who are currently developing their websites in interesting, new ways. For example, the website for the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, under the direction of Brad Hughes, continues to add a wealth of resources: http://www.writing.wisc.edu/. They have incorporated a variety of new media, including a blog, podcasts, Twitter, and YouTube videos. Other writing center websites have training videos for tutors, YouTube videos that introduce and help publicize their writing center, online handouts, etc.

PCCC Writing Center: What advice can you give writing centers wishing to add an online component to their services?

Muriel Harris: I’d suggest they first define for themselves how they want to enact the theory and pedagogy of writing centers in an online environment. Then they can formulate how they want to interact with writers and teachers along with thinking about what they want to offer on the site. And they need to study both their student population and the instructors of writing to see what is appropriate for their context. Of course, it’s also necessary to secure funding sources to develop an online site and to recognize the amount of work this adds on, e.g., deciding on hardware and software and ongoing updating; training tutors for online tutoring; designing the website; publicizing it, developing it further as technology advances, etc. Writing center people generously and enthusiastically tend to take on more and more projects as their writing centers develop, but they also need to step back and assess the extent to which all this gets folded into their already overloaded list of responsibilities. However, developing online components can be inordinately enjoyable as tutors and directors work together to develop new, useful, creative ways to interact with students. I look forward to seeing where technological advances and the imaginative minds of writing center tutors and directors will take us next.

Social Development and the Need for a More-Knowledgeable Other

The PCCC Writing Center Blog would like to welcome guest blogger Shawn O’Neil. O'Neil is the Assistant Director for Academic Skills at the Learning Assistance Center—a learner-centered organization that provides tutoring and academic skills instruction for students at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. For more information about his program, click HERE.  


Lev Vygotsky: you might not know his name, but I’m pretty sure you’ve demonstrated his Social Development Theory at some point between Kindergarten and today. Vygotsky posited that social interaction is pivotal to learning and that consciousness and cognition (you know, things otherwise known as “thinking”) are the product of socialization and social interactions.

His work has three major themes. He believed that social interaction plays a fundamental role in learning, and that, everything you learn, you learn twice—once on a interpsychological level (between you and others), and once on an intrapsychological level (inside yourself) (Vygotsky, 1978). He also coined the phrase “More Knowledgeable Other”—someone who has a better understanding or higher ability level than the learner, who helps the learner learn.

The More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) is what I’d like to focus on in this post. Basically, this person can be anyone—a coach, a teacher, another student (of any age), or even a computer. This is someone who guides you in how to grow and improve, and who does it by interacting with you. Vygotsky would say that the MKO is someone who helps you go from not being able to do something, to being able to do it with help, to being able to do it on your own.

[image: Zone of Proximal Development] 

This person is pivotal in your ability to learn, and is the reason why tutoring programs are important. Vygotsky believed that the reason why we learn at all is to serve a social function, such as to communicate our needs. By going to a tutor or writing assistant with homework questions, you can talk with someone who knows where you’re coming from and can guide you in a better way to look at the material.  Your job as the learner is to try to internalize the processes that you’re shown by your MKO—whether that’s a friend, a tutor, or your instructor. Their help is not supposed to be just to make sure you got the “right answer”—it’s a way to get you thinking about how you think, and to learn the tips and tricks you need to know to do the work yourself, later.

So when someone corrects an error or makes a suggestion on how you can improve, try to think of their help narrowly, in terms of just that one assignment or project, but as a way to improve yourself. What steps did that person take?  Try asking questions like, “how did you know to change that expression?” or “where could I look up this information, if I need it again?” You don’t have to do what they do how they do it, but by learning how they learned, you’ll be in better shape to internalize the processes and make them make sense to you.

This process is something you repeat over and over again. Each time you learn how to complete a task on your own; you’re ready to learn another. So let’s keep learning!

How do help guide students through the learning process in an academic support center? What are some strategies your center has incorporated during a tutoring session to help tutees better understand content?

 Sources:

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind and society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.