1. Overview

Relevant OLI Principles & Tenets

Principle 1: Online literacy instruction should be universally accessible and inclusive.

• Tenet 1: All stakeholders and students should be aware of and be able to engage the unique literacy features of communicating, teaching, and learning in a primarily digital environment.
• Tenet 2: Use of technology should support stated course objectives, thereby not presenting an undue burden for instructors and students.

Principle 3: Instructors and tutors should commit to regular, iterative processes of course and instructional material design, development, assessment, and revision to ensure that online literacy instruction and student support reflect current effective practices.

• Tenet 3: Instructors and tutors should commit to ongoing professional development and training in appropriate OLI-focused reading, alphabetic writing, and multimodal composition theories for their instructional environment(s).
• Tenet 4: Instructors and tutors should migrate and/or adapt appropriate reading, alphabetic writing, and multimodal composition theories from traditional instructional settings to their OLI environment(s).

2. Introduction

[1] In asynchronous course contexts, students’ engagement experiences don’t resemble those of traditional, in-person classrooms. In addition to the modality itself lacking synchronous (or real-time) interactions, participation is difficult to foster in asynchronous classes because of course content, students’ schedules, and even expectations from students or instructors. In my early teaching of asynchronous writing courses, for example, I found myself striving to mirror what in-person student participation entailed based on my own predominantly in-person learning experiences, such as creating activities that might give students experiences similar to the benefits of small, in-person group discussions. However, I’ve come to understand that designing asynchronous participation activities with the intention to create an experience comparable to that of face-to-face classes is a mistake. Instead, my goal in asynchronous classrooms now is fostering asynchronous participation activities which create opportunities for students to develop community, engage critical thinking, and incorporate personal interests.

[2] Though Kahu (2013) states that “student engagement is a current buzzword in higher education, increasingly researched, theorised, and debated” (p. 758), as an instructor of writing, I attest that student engagement is essential in my classrooms because conversations about writing process, feedback from peers, and reflection on these interactions improve and diversify a student’s writing strategies, process, and confidence. In the asynchronous writing classroom, I’d argue that creating ways for students to interact and reflect are critical given how the modality shapes peer-to-peer engagement. Moreover, instructors of online, asynchronous writing courses must think expansively as we consider our students’ participation: Who might be disengaged or excluded if an instructor pursues student participation that is in misalignment with the course modality? How does grading participation privilege certain forms of engagement or possibly disincentivize any individual’s unique engagement practices? How does and doesn’t the institution and its distinct student population shape course design and specific activities? In this article, I’ll discuss my “participation contract” as a student-centered strategy toward inclusive and transparent participation expectations. The opportunities and affordances of a participation contract make this a flexible effective practice for student participation.

3. Institutional Context

[3] At the College of DuPage, the largest community college in the state of Illinois and a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI), I support many different student populations: first-generation college students, adult learners, enlisted military, and veterans. I teach these students ENGL 1105: Workplace Writing asynchronously, and in this course I frame “student participation" as the general expectation and responsibility for a student to “show up” in the course–they need to engage with the course, including texts and other learning materials, assignments, and projects. Compared to an in-person course’s in-class participation, “showing up” asynchronously might include reading or watching assigned texts, writing and revising assignments, contributing to class notes, etc. In contrast, I define “student engagement” as any activity which encourages a student’s deeper investment in their learning, such as connecting personal knowledge to course materials, asking questions about what they’re learning, or taking ownership of their writing and ideas. Often, these kinds of experiences can be fostered through in-class activities in face-to-face courses through small group discussions and activities; however, teaching writing asynchronously requires some imagination to create opportunities for students to engage deeply. The distinctions between engagement and participation I outlined above–as well as their difference from in-person teaching contexts–are crucial to how I structure my asynchronous writing classrooms and how I maintain my philosophy that student learning and writing process are more valuable than a grade on a particular assignment.

[4] My effective practice is the implementation of a “Participation Contract,” a contract which every student completes to self-select specific participation tasks they perform for the duration of the course. While the participation contract is my own design, it parallels Asao Inoue’s (2022) labor-based contract approach and Jesse Stommel’s (2023a) “ungrading” structure. While Inoue (2022) considers how labor-based assessment pursues antiracism and specifically language justice within writing-intensive courses, Stommel (2023b) centers his ungrading approach as a means for teachers and students alike to “examine the structural inequities of education and to revise all our pedagogical approaches” (para. 7). My experiences as a first-generation college student and those of my two-year college students have shown me that hidden or null curriculum within higher education deeply impacts learning experiences and expectations. The contract mitigates hidden participation expectations by asking students to pick and complete tasks of their choice at regular intervals. I also grade each task credit/no-credit to potentially disconnect engagement from grade and hopefully invite creative extension of course materials as well as relationship-building with peers. As Stommel (2017) says, “We can't participate authentically, can't dialogue, without first disrupting the power dynamics of grading” ("Participation Grades" section). I will explore theses theoretical connections in greater deal in the Implementation section.

[5] Because I believe that instructors should frequently reflect on our teaching and revise our course materials, the activities and assignments as well as their labels in my gradebook have evolved semester-to-semester. For example, when I began teaching workplace writing asynchronously in Spring 2024, I strived to create student participation opportunities that looked just like the in-person writing courses I took and taught in the past. Within the first three or four weeks of class, however, my students taught me the importance of structure and accountability in the asynchronous course context as interesting and interactive participation activity ideas remained just that: “ideas.” The following semester I taught the course, Fall 2024, I clarified the typical “participation grade” section of my syllabus and implemented a division that I hoped better outlined the structure and expectations of participation in my asynchronous writing course. To this end, I divided students’ participation grade into two categories: “formal engagement” and “informal engagement.” Formal engagement consists of assignments that all students complete–homework as it is typically understood–including readings, group annotations, writing exercises, and other activities which support students' progress toward learning objectives and their major writing projects. On the other hand, informal engagement involves the more ambiguous parts of “showing up” in the asynchronous context. The usage of “formal” seeks to frame work that all students complete as commonly recognized and required coursework; whereas “informal” intends to evoke the sense that engagement tasks are likewise required coursework but “lower stakes.” (Writing about my contract has led me to reconsider this word choice, and I’m weighing replacing “engagement” with “participation” in future iterations.) To be clear, students are expected to complete both “formal engagement” and “informal engagement.” Within “informal engagement,” the contract outlines tasks for deeper course engagement and the student picks three specific tasks—one of “higher” engagement and two of “lower” engagement—to complete on a biweekly basis.

[6] To facilitate students’ “informal engagement,” the participation contract is a useful way to document participation responsibilities and create a clear structure and accountability for participation expectations (see Figure 1). Completing the contract itself is one of the earlier assignments in the course, and then throughout the semester they complete the tasks they picked in the contract assignment. If a student pursues a self-designed task, we have a discussion over email or direct messages in our learning management system; typically, this consists of suggestions around scaling back the amount of labor or reorienting the task to align slightly more with workplace writing via genres, reflection, etc. There is also ample opportunity for students to revise any selected task(s) or incorporate a self-designed task(s) at any point in the course by resubmitting the contract; usually, I will have a brief dialogue with the student to confirm that I saw their resubmission and discuss the changes and/or self-designed task. As I will elaborate in this article, this practice centers students’ individual interests and agency while it also encourages greater investment in their learning.

[7] Since Fall 2024, I have maintained the formal and informal divisions and the contract, carefully revisiting and revising the contract each semester. I have seen the contract create explicit expectations for each student’s engagement in the asynchronous course context, while it likewise allows students to define a level of engagement which aligns with their lives beyond my virtual classroom. These benefits, I believe, are critical for online learning broadly as well as the non-traditional student populations that I support at my large two-year college. While there is plenty of data on which student populations engage at a community college campus due to the annual Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE), the relationship between community college students’ engagement experiences inside and outside the classroom with their personal and professional outcomes is understudied (Schudde, 2019). Using CCSSE data, Price and Tovar (2014) find that “active and collaborative learning” as well as student-faculty interaction are statistically correlated with institutional graduation rates. Like Price and Tovar argue, I believe it is imperative that two-year college instructors develop a culture of engagement in our classrooms regardless of modality. For online and synchronous courses, this might include increasing peer-to-peer and peer-to-faculty activities during and beyond class meetings; for asynchronous courses and specifically my institution’s student population, I offer the participation contract as a structured means with which to foster student-faculty and peer-to-peer activities that center student interest and investment.

4. Opportunities & Challenges

[8] Because I’ve taught the same workplace writing course for several semesters and Spring 2024 was my first time teaching asynchronously altogether, my approach to asynchronous engagement as well as my participation contract have evolved in response to the opportunities and challenges of supporting my student population in particular. Over time, I have seen students engage with the same tasks course-to-course differently as well as propose tasks that put course topics into conversation with their unique interests and goals. For example, a recent self-designed task a student pursued was writing summative memos of science fiction books he read; we had a great dialogue about scaling back the workload to memos of chapters, rather than whole books, as well as reflecting on any course concepts that might appear.

[9] Another self-designed task students often pursue is a combination of examples of workplace writing in their lives with weekly reflections as they explain their excitement at seeing what they’re learning in the course in their jobs, other courses, and beyond. Every semester, students pursue locating and analyzing an example of workplace writing, and it is interesting to see the examples they pick as well as read the different ways students interpret analyzing and connect the example to workplace writing: websites from prospective workplaces, emails they sent or received, reflections on major writing projects in the course. Over time, I have also observed students opt to forgo informal assignments altogether–both students who submit a contract and those that do not submit one–as well as students who choose to consistently complete only one “informal” assignment per biweekly submission. For example, I often have students who consistently submit only reading notes. Other times, students will engage consistently and critically with informal engagement–students sometimes facilitate conversations and reply to peers in GroupMe far more frequently than is required. Though I follow up with students who do not submit a contract or who skip tasks and I encourage them to engage by making transparent the potential learning opportunities and reinforce the tasks are graded credit/no-credit, I understand that a student may prioritize another course assignment or an academic or personal responsibility over their participation in my class. In cases where students engage at different levels or forgo informal engagement altogether, I view the participation contract serving as a valuable exercise in student agency and clarity of course expectations. Every student in my workplace writing class has the power to revise and the agency to decide what they have capacity or interest in.

[10] In the context of supporting such a wide breadth of students, I view the contract as an opportunity for increased attention to diversity and equity because each student agrees explicitly to tasks which they personally select or propose. In my workplace classes, I have supported students who are first-generation college students, adult learners with jobs and children, currently enlisted military and veteran students–all in the same semester. To support such a diverse group of students with complex and varied lived experiences and professional goals, being as explicit as possible regarding what a student is responsible for doing and submitting for the course overall addresses the issues of hidden or null curriculum of higher education. Moreover, grading participation activities as credit/no-credit simultaneously pushes back on the standardization of “showing up” in the classroom as it likewise supports an understanding that there are many ways to “complete” a participation task. Because it is the instructor’s responsibility to make apparent the activities and expectations of their specific classroom and modality for all student populations, implementing a participation contract as well as inviting conversation and revision of the contract allows students from many different backgrounds and academic familiarity to know what is expected of them for participation. For example, the reasons a student opts for an asynchronous course in the first place may correlate to an already limited schedule shaped by priorities or commitments beyond school–ranging from busy work and caregiving schedules as well as internet speed or access to technology. Similarly, knowing which tasks a student is responsible for and the frequency of completing those tasks also invites students to make the choice to forgo the tasks for a particularly busy week or two and explicitly understand the impact. Ultimately, allowing students to pick from an assortment of engagement tasks and holding each student accountable to only those they selected, the participation contract and informal engagement approach student engagement in a more inclusive and accessible way than engagement practices which are less explicit or even implicit.

[11] In contrast to the opportunity to better support diverse students, the participation contract and informal engagement pose some challenges related to student support or understanding of the benefits of engagement. I have been reflecting on the tasks I propose and their aims as well as the language I divide participation into (formal versus informal) because each semester I have students who appear to opt out of the informal engagement tasks altogether. Considering the varied levels of familiarity with college and writing as well as professional goals of my students, it’s possible that the value of engagement with peers and extending learning beyond direct course material needs to be made more explicit; it’s possible too that engagement needs to be reevaluated altogether. For example, a student noted in my spring 2025 course evaluation that the course included “busy work” and named informal engagement. Alternatively, I’ve received feedback from students at the end of the course who, similarly, began the course perceiving informal engagement as “busy work” but left the course deeply valuing their learning from informal engagement tasks–one student even wrote “engagement was actually my favorite part of the class.” Though I do not know the specific experiences of these anonymous students inside my classroom or outside of college, the difference in their experiences reminds me of the importance of frequent revision of course materials, instructional design, and assessment of student learning. As such, in my own practice, I would like to formally solicit feedback from my students on the language and tasks within my contract to critically evaluate alignment with course objectives and student learning. Potential steps I am considering–and those interested in implementing a contract for the first time might consider–may be incorporating a brief survey at the conclusion of the course to consider how to revise based on student feedback or a survey at the beginning of the semester to collect task suggestions from the class. Even with its challenges, I value this contract-based participation practice because it enables greater student agency through flexible tasks and even the choice to forgo informal engagement.

5. Implementation

[12] To implement a participation contract in an online classroom, the initial steps will include drafting the contract and incorporating it into grading and evaluation criteria. From there, the contract should be added to the course Learning Management System (LMS) or teaching platforms as appropriate. At the College of DuPage, our LMS Blackboard Ultra allows instructors a fair amount of flexibility and Google integration. I include my Participation Contract as a typical assignment where students make a copy of and complete the Participation Contract via Google Document; their biweekly submissions are included as individual assignments in Blackboard in a weekly module organization. However, the technology used to create and share the contract is flexible so long as students can make a copy and complete their individual contract and the instructor receives a copy to reference over the course of the semester. Once a contract is used for one semester, I advise instructors to reflect on students' selection of the tasks provided and those they proposed themselves. If possible, soliciting feedback from students would likewise support contract revision.

[13] In the contract (see Figure 1), I begin with some general information and expectations. My students have expressed an appreciation for the “overview” section of prompts from my other course assignments; so, I include one in the contract in addition to the overall process and submission criteria. For the biweekly submissions themselves, I decided to divide informal engagement into two types: higher engagement and lower engagement. The higher engagement tasks (see Figure 2) aim for one task that requires more labor than the lower engagement tasks, and the lower engagement tasks (see Figure 3) require less labor. Both task types provide students with choices around the level of engagement they do and don’t have with their peers because I want to ensure that students are able to select tasks that work for them. Ideally, I would require all students to engage with their peers in a significant way through higher engagement, but to attend to the asynchronous modality I also understand that students need participation tasks that fit their needs and lives. For example, most of my students work full-time and/or have family commitments or responsibilities, and someone who works a typical 9-5 or picks up hours at their family business can’t be expected to engage in the same way as the handful of first-time college students with or without a part-time job. In the same way, a first-time student, for example, should not be expected to know what “active student engagement” means, especially in the asynchronous modality.

[14] The higher engagement tasks I include for the first three options center peer-to-peer interactions, whereas the penultimate task is a more reflective "workplace writing in the wild” assignment. The latter is intended for students to locate a workplace writing sample which they find online or through their network to examine how it relates to course materials; often, students will analyze emails or websites and assess what workplace writing practices they do and do not utilize. Lastly, I provide “Other” to invite students to bring their interests into the course as much as possible. Though other assignments in the course already intentionally draw students’ majors and career goals into the course, I find that “Other” enables students to further understand how their personal or professional interests can intersect with workplace writing concepts or practices. Interestingly, students rarely select the “other” option (perhaps 1-2 students per semester).

[15] Turning to lower engagement (see Figure 3), these tasks are much more independent than the higher engagement tasks because I aim to center a student-to-instructor relationship in these tasks more than peer-to-peer–though the third option of replying to peers whose higher engagement task is to start a conversation in GroupMe does invite additional peer-to-peer engagement. The other tasks aim to invite students to think of writing as expansively as possible, draw on their writing outside this course, and reflect on their learning. The reading notes task seeks to reward students who take notes on the course material because notetaking is shown to enhance comprehension. Similar to the higher engagement task of locating workplace writing and analyzing it, the examples of workplace writing task seeks for students to grow their understanding of what “counts” as writing (e.g. inventory, to do lists, etc.), and the reflective update intends for students to share and reflect on their work in the course. Often the lower engagement tasks also create opportunities for the students to share more about themselves, and I always reciprocate in my responses. For example, students will share details about jobs or responsibilities outside of school as well as their cultural backgrounds or languages they communicate in; I’ve enthusiastically connected with a student over shared writing center tutor backgrounds, growing up mixed-race, and having immigrant parent(s). Bringing students’ full selves into the classroom requires me to likewise bring my full self: on engaged pedagogy, hooks (1994) writes, “[student] empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks” (p. 21).

6. Conclusion

[16] Through my discussion of the participation contract, I invite instructors to envision how participation can align and extend student engagement with course materials as well as how it can allow students to pursue the course learning objectives through their interests. Beyond the contract serving as an example of a workplace genre in my course context, the contract and informal engagement tasks are a practice which instructors teaching in any online modality–even in-person or diverse classrooms–might consider utilizing to increase transparency and accountability for the ever expansive “student engagement” element of a course. Moreover, writing instructors who take up a participation contract should revise the contract semester-to-semester to ensure the suggested tasks ask students to engage meaningfully with their peers and instructors for the specific learning modality, course objectives, and student population. If perhaps instituting a contract this semester isn’t feasible, consider other ways you can incorporate the transparency that the contract affords. Small but intentional revisions have big impacts.