1. Introduction

[1] In Fall Term of 2017, Linn-Benton Community College’s Writing Center needed to redesign our system for Online Writing Tutoring (OWT). For the last decade, we had been using a system built, designed, and maintained by Dennis Bennett, the Writing Center Director at Oregon State University (OSU). We called it the Online Writing Lab (OWL), and it operated as the online branch of our Writing Center’s physical location, allowing us to conduct asynchronous sessions with students from a distance [1]. This meant we could reach students who did not come to our Writing Center in person for whatever reason: commute time, work schedule, or simple preference. Students could easily submit their work online, and the administrator received email notifications for new submissions. Once received, each submission could be assigned individually to an appropriate Writing Assistant, who also received a notification in their email. Assistants then had 48 hours to read the OWL submission and write a response, which they copy-pasted into a text box and sent back to the student.

[2] For the last eight or nine years, Bennett had generously hosted our OWL on servers at OSU, but by 2017 it was time for an update. At OSU, they had long since moved their own OWL to a system hosted in Drupal, the university-wide content management system. Bennett offered to continue our partnership with OSU and rebuild our OWL using Drupal but suggested that maybe it was time for us to reach out to our in-house tech people and see what we could do on our own. After all, this might be easier for us to manage without appealing to a third party and meant I would have more control over the administration. It would also give us the chance to incorporate formatting and commenting features that now came standard for most word processors. We were being rightfully weaned, but what next?

2. What We Needed the OWL to Do

[3] As a millennial who never gained more than the most basic tech skills necessary to function in my generation, I tried not to panic. Our school uses TutorTrac to schedule in-person appointments and collect demographics data, so what we needed was relatively simple. Unlike other OWLs that offer a storehouse of resources, our model is solely devoted to what Prince et al. (2018) define as Online Writing Tutoring (OWT), meaning that we conduct sessions online in addition to our regular one-on-one tutorials in person. The OWL that Writing Center staff, students, and faculty had grown accustomed to was an asynchronous OWL to which students could submit entire essays or outlines and in response receive a long-form feedback letter within 24-48 hours. We needed to be able to receive submissions and assignment guidelines, collect data, assign submissions to individual assistants within a time frame, and receive notifications in a timely manner. We wanted to retain the asynchronous nature of the OWL—at least for the near future—because many of our students have varying levels of comfort with technology and we wanted to avoid culture shock for our staff. The only addition we felt completely necessary was contextual comments, but these are standard for any word processor. Simple, right?

[4] I reached out to the WCenter listserv and a few of the other writing center professionals in the local area to see what other people were doing. I wanted something with the lowest barrier to entry possible, which meant we needed to use something every student could access, preferably with limited clicking and no extra account creation. I found that Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Canvas and Moodle were popular. However, after some poking around, I learned that not all students at our school were enrolled in Moodle, and a lot of instructors had recently gone rogue and started using Canvas. Thus, there was no standardized LMS on campus. Our Writing Center was supposed to support students at several satellite campuses and in Adult Basic Skills courses which meant that not all of our students would be batch enrolled into any one system. Other writing centers suggested Writing Center Online, but we already had a scheduling system, and it cost roughly three times our OWL budget of $250. ETutoring Consortium presented itself as a neat option, but I wondered how effective it would be to have tutors who were not part of our campus responding to OWL submissions. The Writing Center had a close relationship with each instructor, and sometimes students had built rapport with a particular assistant and preferred to continue working with them through the OWL.

[5] Long story short, none of the existent options I found were perfect. I started to set up meetings with our in-house tech support. I sat down with our web developer, who referred me to Paul Tannahill, our eLearning Systems Administrator. We brainstormed through a variety of options, and Tannahill suggested Google Docs. Because LBCC had become a Google Suite school a few years ago, this meant that every student that had an ID number also had a gmail account. So, I turned to WCenter again: Who had already used Google Docs for their OWL?

[6] It turned out a few people had (“OWL Recommendations?” 2018), but again, no other OWL was quite like what I wanted. Some schools used a centralized gmail account that all OWL responders had access to and used Form Publisher or another form generator for data collection. Using these programs, staff would collect student data on an Excel spreadsheet that could be exported. But what I wanted was an intake form that could easily be shared with a writing assistant. We wanted to ask questions like, “What kind of feedback would be most helpful to you?” and collect a copy of their assignment guidelines. We wanted to use this information individually for reference during the OWL-response process as much as we wanted to analyze it later for demographics. Doing this with an exported Excel spreadsheet just was not visually accessible.

[7] I started to draw some workflow diagrams of what we needed our asynchronous OWL to do and where we wanted the various pieces of information to end up (fig. 1).

​[8] As we began this design work, our priorities laid out as follows:

1. Accessibility and simplicity for students: It had to be easy to find, easy to access, and quick to submit, for a student body that includes many people with minimal technology skills;
2. Convenience for staff: We needed an intake form to gather the necessary information for each session, an easy way to notify staff of new OWLs, and a response method that allowed for contextual comments in addition to an end-note letter (it should be flexible to our pedagogical needs);
3. Data and archive storage: We had to meet FERPA guidelines for student confidentiality first and foremost, but we also wanted to be able to look at previous student submissions, compare notes about responses, and gather data that would help us tailor our services in the future;
4. Easy to fix: I wanted something that, as an administrator, I could just fix myself if something went wrong.

We started to lean further and further toward an OWL put together using a Team Drive in Google Suite. There were a lot of benefits: students and staff already had Gmail accounts; it would meet privacy expectations; it was easy to use; and Google Docs seemed like the ideal feedback platform. In fact, once I did a little digging in the English Department, it turned out that many students were already using Google Docs for in-class peer reviews. Google Suite is also likely to improve as Google grows as a company, which makes it a reliable choice.

3. How We Did It Using Google Suite

[9] Despite having chosen our platform, there were still a lot of details to work out in developing the structure of our OWL. It broke down into the following elements:

3.1. A Gmail Account

[10] I asked Information Services to give us an official OWL Gmail address, so everything could be routed through the same central account. At our institution, this is an official, privacy-protected account that can be passed on to future administrators.

3.2. A Team Drive

[11] Using this OWL account, I set up an OWL Team Drive (fig. 2) and invited all of my staff members to join. Introduced by Google in 2016, Team Drive is a newer feature of Google Suite. It allows you to build a shared Google Drive, where files can be communally curated, uploaded, and stored by all invited members. All files belong to the Team Drive rather than individual members, so if someone leaves, their documents remain in the Drive (“Get Started”).

[12] We now had a location to keep our OWL submissions and a way for staff to access them. For staff who had already been trained in the previous OWL, I gave them “edit” permissions. For those who had not yet been trained in the OWL, I gave them “view” permissions. Already, I had discovered one benefit of using Team Drive: for training purposes, it was easy to “step up” the permissions settings as staff became comfortable. Team Drive is also easy to organize, flexible to staff preferences for layout, and easy to use from any computer--or smartphone. It works especially well for off-campus OWL emergencies; for example, it’s easy to double-check that you--or another staff member--completed an OWL assignment after getting home and feeling unsure whether or not the “share” button got hit.

[13] This Team Drive also allows us to archive OWL submissions and completed responses. I keep these organized in folders with the submission date and student name, which are then catalogued by respondent name and term. As long as staff are only given “edit” and not “full” access to this Drive, our main OWL account is the only account with permission to move documents or delete files, which keeps organizational chaos to a minimum. Because we have only received 79 submissions during our busiest term so far and individual assistants respond to 16-20 submissions at most per term, it has been manageable to keep our folders tidy. If we had a larger capacity, this archive might be more difficult to navigate, but on our scale it works quite well.

3.3. A Google Form

[14] Next, we needed a way for students to submit their work and a way to gather it into the correct spot. I set up a Google Form to capture all of the necessary data. We could customize each question on the Form and include spots to upload documents. We could also restrict the type of files accepted through the OWL, so we could ensure everything we looked at would transfer to Google Docs (they must be .doc or .docx for this to work properly). Even better—and to the delight of our staff--we could require students to answer questions on the form like, “What are your assignment guidelines?” and “What are the strengths of your draft?” before they would be allowed to upload their OWL submission (fig. 3). In the past, we had struggled to build connections with students in an asynchronous context because we did not have the opportunity to require answers to such questions, so including these helps us tailor our responses more effectively to individual students.

[15] For data collection and archival reasons, I generate a new submission form for each term by simply making a copy of our original form and replacing the URL on our website. This allows us to update the questions on the form if we need to. At the end of each term, I switch the status of our form from “Accepting responses” to “No longer accepting responses.” This closes the form to new submissions and offers a customizable notification should a student still click the link on our website.

[16] We also use Google Forms to generate feedback surveys, so we can offer students the opportunity to tell us what they did or did not like about the OWL. A link to a feedback survey goes out with every completed OWL response, and I also send a capstone survey out at the end of each term. This is valuable for ongoing assessment.

3.4. The Form Publisher Add-on

[17] The one thing that Google Forms does not do well by itself is generate individual response data automatically in a way that is easy to read and distributable. Instead, it generates as an Excel spreadsheet, which makes paragraph-length responses almost impossible to view. We now had a method for gathering the necessary data and documents, and our next step was figuring out how to extract this information in a visually appealing way and direct it once isolated to the appropriate spot. Google Forms automatically gathers all Form responses into a folder in my Google Drive. So we had a spot for the incoming documents to land, but it is not possible to move entire folders into a Team Drive. Our next step, then, became figuring out a way to direct the appropriate information to the appropriate spot.

[18] One of the more valuable features of Google Suite is its embrace of add-ons which are independently developed apps that run inside key Suite features (“Extending G Suite”). If Google Suite doesn’t do it yet, chances are, someone else has built an add-on to make it work. At this point, I had brought all of our Writing Assistants up to speed with my OWL problems, in the hopes that someone might be able to find the missing piece to our workflow puzzle. After some Googling, our Writing Assistant Dani Tellvik discovered an add-on called Form Publisher. Tellvik figured out how to apply Form Publisher to a Form, and we started generating Form Publisher Templates for each incoming OWL submission. As long as the notification settings are correct, each Template will land neatly in a chosen email address. Figure 4 depicts what the add-on looks like within the Google Form, once summoned by clicking the tiny puzzle piece icon at the top of the screen.

[19] Each template used in Form Publisher is totally customizable, though it is not as intuitive as it could be. Figure 5 depicts what our master template looks like in its third iteration which we have tweaked a few times for content and readability.

[20] By tweaking code on this master template, you can control what the final template looks like. Figure 6 shows what the template looks like once auto-generated from a Google Forms response.

[21] As individual Form Publisher templates are generated with each new OWL submission, they land in our main OWL Gmail account. I can then move each template (with all the submission Form answers) into an individual folder in our OWL Team Drive, providing an easy-to-reference guide for each Writing Assistant to consider while composing their response.

3.5. Google Docs

[22] Once we receive an OWL submission through the submission form and a Form Publisher template is generated, we move the submitted documents into a folder in our Team Drive and bring the submission itself into Google Docs in order to respond. Because the student has uploaded a copy of their file to the OWL Submission Form rather than simply “shared” it with us, we are the owner of the document and the student will not be notified in real time as we write comments. This allows our Writing Assistants to revise their feedback before sharing it with a student (this could easily be changed by sharing the document with the student before drafting comments, if you prefer synchronous OWT). Writing Assistants then write a greeting up at the top of the document that summarizes the main focus points of their response. From there, they offer contextual comments to highlight examples and provide localized feedback. Sometimes, Writing Assistants also offer an endnote at the bottom of the document to sign off.

[23] The length of the feedback letter versus bulk of contextual comments varies by assistant style and personality. We follow pedagogy consistent with CCC’s statement on Online Writing Instruction and the Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, which call for future-oriented, evidence-based, constructive feedback. Google Docs offers us all the functionality we need to uphold this pedagogy, including features that enhance accessibility for the visually impaired (fig. 7). For a more comprehensive breakdown of what Google Docs has to offer composition pedagogy, see Allison Morrow’s article in ROLE where she makes a compelling argument for the value of working with live documents in Google Docs.

​[24] As Morrow details in her article, an additional feature of Google Docs is that if a student chooses to continue editing on the same document they originally shared with us, we can keep tabs on whether or not they have used our feedback. We also receive notifications as students “resolve” or respond to our contextual comments. If they want to, it is easy for students to ask us follow-up questions or continue a conversation with the assistant who worked on their submission, adding an extra layer of valuable dialogic connection. If students want to, they can also share their OWL response with their instructor or anyone else with an LBCC email address--provided we enable the “link-sharing” option in the document’s privacy settings.

4. Troubleshooting and "Duct Tape"

[25] We now have:

1. A home for our OWLs;
2. A customizable submission Form;
3. A customizable way to collect the necessary information from the Form into one document, for easy reference, that could be distributed to individual assistants.
4. Methods for assessment and review of student follow-through.

[26] We do not have:

1. A method for assigning OWLs to individual assistants;
2. An easy way to match the uploaded OWL documents with their Form Publisher template. In other words, there is no easy way to get the Google Form answers paired with the OWL submission.

[27] However, we do have working solutions. As an administrator, I am able to “duct tape” an imperfect system together by doing some actions manually. Our OWL “assignment” process evolved organically. Every day the administrator (usually me) goes in to the OWL Gmail account and “harvests” the submitted documents, grouping them with their Form Publisher Template in an “Unassigned OWLs” folder in our Team Drive. This process, if we’ve received three or four OWLs in one day, usually takes me fifteen to twenty minutes. Once new OWLs are situated, I send an email out to our pool of OWL respondents to let them know we have new submissions (note: always be sure to include an owl meme for morale. I’ve been told this is a necessary piece of the OWL notification protocol). Writing Assistants can then go in to the “Unassigned OWLs” folder and “claim” an OWL to respond to by typing their name at the top. It is still time intensive to collect the correct information and put it into the right spot, but it also gives the administrator a chance to glance through the various documents to make sure nothing is amiss. Even though the OWL collecting process is funky, training another staff member to assign OWLs in my absence only took half an hour. In the future, I hope Team Drive will add elements that make it possible to streamline this process, but until then, the issues are workable.

5. Conclusion

[28] Despite metaphorical “duct tape” on the administrative end, the pros still outweigh the cons for us. In fact, on student feedback forms, we have received consistently five-star reviews, and our Writing Assistants have commented that it is both faster and more fun to respond in Google Docs. Not unlike a bicycle built out of salvaged parts, our OWL fits our needs perfectly and can be torn apart and restructured as needed. Without knowing how to code, I can exercise full control over what we have without needing to go through a third party. Additionally, when it comes to demographics information, it is easy for me to adjust what we track via the OWL. For example, when it came up at an English Department meeting that it would be helpful to track which instructors had students using the OWL, I could make this a requirement just by editing the Google Form. Within an hour I made this change and began to capture the requested data.

[29] Due to institutional limitations, it is easy to feel like paying for a third-party service for an OWL is the best option. In some cases, this might be true. However, for our institution, I found that being able to design an OWL bespoke to our needs fit the culture of our Writing Center, the needs of our students and staff, and my personal preferences as an administrator very well. Thanks to the accessibility and functionality of Google Suite, it also required far less tech knowledge than I could have imagined. Once we figured out the direction for our OWL design, the OWL itself only took a few afternoons of Googling and troubleshooting to construct. Done from start to finish, I suspect it would be a matter of less than an hour to set up the framework for an identical Google Suite OWL.

[30] In the future, I anticipate Google making some changes to Team Drive. Allowing users to move folders into Team Drives would let our Google Form responses load automatically in the “Unassigned OWLs” folder, for example, streamlining the “OWL harvest.” Even the ability to change the color of folders in a Team Drive, a simple functionality improvement, would make our OWL work run more smoothly in small ways.

[31] I hope that these changes are on the horizon, but even without them, there is so much potential for growth in this system. Because Google Suite continues to expand, this program provides an optimistic future for free and bespoke OWL administration.

6. References

Example effective practices for OWI principle 14. (2012). Conference on College Composition & Communication. NCTE. Retrieved from cccc.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/owiprinciples/effectivepractices14

Extending G Suite with add ons. (2018). G Suite Developer. Google. Retrieved from https://developers.google.com/gsuite/add-ons/overview

Morrow, Allison. (2017). Commenting on student writing: Using Google Docs to enhance revision in the composing process of first year writers. ROLE/OLOR. Retrieved from http://roleolor.weebly.com/limitations.html

OWL recommendations? (17 Nov. 2018). WCenter Listserv. Retrieved from http://lyris.ttu.edu/read/messages?id=25257522#25257522 

Prince, Sarah; Willard, Rachel; Zamarripa, Ellen, & Sharkey-Smith, Matt. (2018). Peripheral (re)visions: Moving online writing centers from margin to center. WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, 42(5-6), 10.

Ryan, Leigh, and Zimmerelli, Lisa. (2016.) The Bedford guide for writing tutors. Sixth ed., Bedford/St. Martin's.

What can you do with Team Drives? (2018). G Suite Learning Center, Google. Retrieved from https://gsuite.google.com/learning-center/products/drive/get-started-team-drive/#!/