1. Introduction 

[1] Editing instruction is a component of many writing programs in both the US and Australia. In the North American context, Laura Dunbar (2017) notes that many writing programs seeking to prepare students for professional careers offer a class in professional editing. In Australia, professional editing classes are now a standard component of many creative writing and publishing degrees (Institute of Professional Editors 2016). Further, the demand for professional editing classes at universities reflects a significant change in the industry itself: where editors were once trained and mentored in-house, they are now prepared for the job through formal training (Kruger 2007; Johanson 2006). As universities increasingly offer online learning, the shift to teaching editing in a tertiary context has also resulted in the need to consider how to teach editing online, and, in institutions that do not cap class enrolments, how to deliver editing classes that are designed so that they can be scaled up to accommodate a large student cohort. The design and implementation of the class, Editing Skills and Standards, offered in a writing major at a regional university in Australia provides a case study for how editing can be taught as a skills-based, process-oriented, scalable class online.

[2] This case study offers a number of ways that large online classes can be better designed to reflect best practices in writing pedagogy and to take into account local and national contexts that naturally shape student expectations and priorities. Our local conditions—high online enrolment and an emphasis on assessment in tension with the need for authentic learning experiences and regular activities to develop skills—reflect recent global trends in tertiary education and online writing instruction. Increasingly, in the US and Australia, online writing instructors are faced with pressure to teach larger student cohorts and to move courses into online and blended models. In these conditions, how might online writing instructors design writing pedagogy to scale? The development of this editing skills class suggests that purpose-driven design of the learning management system, guided peer interaction online, and managing student expectations of learning writing are key aspects of online writing instruction.

2. National and local imperatives for teaching editing online as part of writing programs 

[3] A key characteristic of teaching writing and editing in the Australian tertiary context is a content-focussed, lecture-style delivery mode, whether online or offline. At the University of New England, as at other Australian universities, writing instruction is delivered via large lectures and smaller tutorials or discussion, with student numbers capped in the latter but unlimited in lectures. UNE’s status as primarily a distance education provider means that writing classes typically enrol less than 15 students in on-campus discussion sections, but might enrol a hundred or more in a single online mega-section. As a result, when a 2018 review of UNE’s writing program called for an “advanced-level, skills-based [class] in editing” (UNE 2016: 12, authors’ emphasis), one of the key design considerations for learning materials, activities, and assessments was scaling: how can we develop and deliver a practical, activity-focussed editing class that can scale up and down in the face of unpredictable, but typically growing, enrolments?

[4] This mode of delivery is essentially a practice of expediency and efficiency: lecture-and-tutorial formats, rather than the workshop or seminar model typical in North American writing programs, allows classes to be delivered to large numbers of students with relatively few teaching staff. Susan Thomas, for example, a US-trained writing program administrator working at the University of Sydney, identified the requirement that she “abide by the lecture/tutorial format, comprised of two, six-hundred person lectures per week and a weekly, one-hour tutorial with twenty-five students per group” as one of the “most significant problems” she faced in developing an existing one-off, grammar-focussed basic writing class in a writing studies program at the University of Sydney (Thomas 2013: 171). This is likely the result of national policy changes and funding cuts that have seen enrolments increase without matching increases in faculty hiring, resulting in a rationalisation of offerings to include fewer, larger classes, as well as higher student-staff ratios overall (White 2007: 594). These policies also mean classes are rarely capped. Therefore, the editing class needed to be designed with an infinite number of possible student enrolments in mind.

[5] The context at UNE reflects Australian tertiary institutions’ increasing investment in distance education, largely as a result of its geography and scattered population (Stacey & Visser 2005; Reiach, Averbeck & Cassidy 2012); this history has translated to online learning environments in some universities, although many institutions are “slow to embrace [online learning], as they do not see it as a viable business model” (Reiach, Averbeck & Cassidy 2012: 250). UNE, perhaps, offers a counterpoint to this trend, having focussed on distance education since its founding in 1938 and establishment as an independent university in 1954, the first university outside a state capital. As technology has changed, so has class delivery: from a correspondence course model with readers sent out at the start of the semester and papers returned at the end, to a predominantly online model. In 2017, UNE enrolled just under 20,000 online students and 4,800 on-campus students (UNE 2018b). The majority of students are domestic, and most reside in rural and regional Australia, with about a quarter of students living in Australian capital cities. The university enrols around 1200 international students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, with about 150 students undertaking their study online from abroad, and the majority required to study on-campus as a condition of their student visas. 76% of UNE students are aged over 25 (UNE 2018a). Online students in some disciplines may attend campus for short residential schools; however, many students—including those in the writing major in which the editing skills class was embedded—complete their degrees entirely online. This was also true for the majority of students undertaking the editing class.

[6] In online teaching environments, high teaching loads further incentivise academics to employ lecture-capture technology and to record on-campus lectures for asynchronous delivery to online students, rather than, for example, using pedagogical practices more likely to foster skills development such as regular writing or editing exercises submitted for formative feedback. Indeed Johanson (2006: 52) argues that university learning environments do not adequately support the teaching of editing because they do not allow for intensive one-on-one supervision and mentoring, which is the traditional mode of training editors. At UNE, in response to these norms and exigences, almost all learning materials in writing classes are delivered remotely and asynchronously: recorded lectures; study guides, which regularly invite students to move through at their own pace; optional participation largely via online discussion boards; and highly-weighted assessment tasks due at key intervals during the trimester. So, when in 2017-18, the class was developed in a collaboration between Van Luyn and Wise, with the assistance of Moodle learning designer, Simone Simpson, and copyright liaison librarian, Berenice Scott, the designers faced a number of pedagogical challenges, the most significant of which was how to design a skills-based editing unit that could be delivered online and to scale.

3. Core principles of online editing instruction

3.1 Editing as a collaborative relationship

[7] A possible—and indeed expedient—solution to these local and national conditions would be to set assignments that required students to identify and correct artificial errors in static texts. However, learning editing in a way that reflects the work of practising editors requires students to engage with living, fluid texts. Indeed, in Australia, creative writing majors often incorporate classes in publishing and editing, which offer pathways to allied employment for writers as well as helping develop skills to further their own writing practice. Thus, the imagined audience for the UNE class was students whose primary goal was either to publish creative writing or to work in the publishing industry as editors. This imagined audience was considered when developing the learning outcomes for the class, which include the ability to appraise a text for publication and to apply industry standards to editing tasks (UNE 2019); the class therefore needed to prepare students for understanding editing as a process that involved an editor working with an author to develop an evolving text. This imagined audience was also reflected in the push for editing skills development. Significantly then, as both Dunbar (2017) and Johanson (2006) observe, working with “dead” texts does not replicate the actual work of editors: work that, while diverse in industry contexts, is often centred around professional relationships. Johanson suggests that “in a sense, it doesn’t matter what the editor does or doesn’t suggest about a manuscript; what matters is the way the editor presents or suggests these changes to authors” (2006: 50). Editing then, is far more about professional relationships than correcting a text. Similarly, Ruth Brend (1986: 81) has argued that during editing, “focusing on the sentence alone is not enough. The author must be included in the process, either directly (via seeking his/her permission before significant changes are made) or indirectly (via consideration of what he/she really wishes to say).” Understanding editing in this way requires the craft to be taught as a collaborative process.

[8] Further, working with dead texts does not adequately train students in how to solve actual editorial problems. Dunbar (2017), for example, has argued that artificial texts in which errors are deliberately embedded do not prepare students for the subtle and more complicated stylistic errors that often emerge naturally in a text. Johanson (2006: 52) has even gone as far to suggest that university teaching, for several reasons, “simply does not lend itself to the teaching of editing.” For one, university assessment often rewards students who put in “extra” work or effort; however, editing itself is popularly conceived as doing “the minimum necessary” in order to clarify the author’s meaning or intent (Sharpe and Gunther 1994). In this regard, Johanson observes that “students who want to demonstrate that they have put in a significant effort are more likely to over-edit, because how else can they demonstrate the significant number of hours that they spent on the task?” (2006: 53). Yet, editors working with authors must tread lightly, taking into account authorial intention. Editing dead texts only compounds these problems, since authors and editors are always involved in a constant process of negotiation and revision.

[9] Therefore, the building of effective communicative strategies, and more specifically, the metacognitive ability to evaluate the communicative efficacy of an interaction, are both central to the development of a meaningful and productive author-editor relationship. However, as Johanson (2006: 47) argues, teaching students how to conduct professional relationships is extremely difficult for several reasons, most notably because “the relationship between author and editor is not an easily defined or widely understood one.” For this reason, foregrounding relationship development through peer interaction is an important tenet of editor training (Dunbar 2017). Peer interaction allows for the simulation of “real world” editorial situations by requiring students to not only practise communicative strategies but undertake “real world” communicative activities, such as conveying a message, negotiating deadlines, arranging meetings, resolving disagreements, and anticipating author and reader responses. For Dunbar (2017: 308), the social and collaborative nature of editing highlights the need for authentic learning experiences that create “as realistically as possible, an actual editorial experience.” Kruger (2007) and Johanson (2006) agree that editor training should replicate professional practices and raise professional standards. It is apparent, then, that students learning editing online need to develop skills in understanding authorial intention and communicating with authors, rather than merely identifying and correcting artificial errors in dead texts. Indeed, in an online setting, Johanson (2006: 54) suggests that the writer and editor can become “estranged” because there is little to no opportunity for face-to-face communication and interaction. Yet, in the contemporary editing industry, most interactions between editors and authors take place via e-mail and through the use of Track Changes in Microsoft Word. So, in actuality, an online learning environment has the potential to better replicate largely online, text-based communications between editor and author than face-to-face classrooms.

3.2 Texts as fluid

[10] The concept of textual fluidity, adapted from John Bryant (2002), offers a useful underpinning principle for teaching editing in a way that foregrounds texts as developed through a process that is collaborative. Bryant (2002: 4) coined the term “fluid text” to describe how texts evolve through the “collaborative forces of individuals and culture.” Understanding texts as fluid gestures to how writing is an ongoing, collaborative process: one that cannot be understood in isolation from the external pressures that act upon it. Indeed, Bryant (2002: 7) asserts that in shifting the focus from individual writers seemingly working in a vacuum to understanding the creative process as including readers—including editors—who materially alter texts, writing can be understood as a process of social negotiation. For Bryant, writers are social beings who cannot operate in isolation, even if they write to reject social norms or distance themselves from social constraints. As Bryant (2002: 54) explains, “writers cannot avoid internalising the problem of their socialised condition; thus, the first ‘communicative’ act in writing occurs not at the moment of editorial production but at the writing desk, and in the writer’s mind.” This complex interplay between individual and social forces is perhaps most evident during the revision stage; however, it is always present, even in the early stages of planning and drafting, because writing is always performed in a social context and with a particular social function in mind. In this sense, Bryant’s concept of textual fluidity is particularly useful for students who are interested in both writing and editing, as is often the case for students undertaking an editing class as part of a writing major in the Australian context; although, as Johanson (2006: 52) warns, when an editing class sits within a writing degree, students may be more likely to identify as writers rather than editors.

[11] However, foregrounding Bryant’s concept of textual fluidity as a mode of teaching editing skills poses another challenge in national and local contexts. The disciplinary history of writing in Australia, and the national and local norm of lecture-style instruction and self-paced study guides, creates a pedagogical culture in which students learn creative writing via analysing already-published texts, chosen for their success, where the process of collaboration are often elided. This means that students often have little exposure to unpublished or draft work, rendering the work of writing invisible. In other words, students do not see the processes of drafting and revision that lead to the formation of a manuscript, nor the collaborative processes of editing and revising which lead to the publication of a work. Editing classes thus need to explicitly foreground the processes of editing beyond the “correction” of grammar and punctuation, discussing editing as a process that first seeks to revise the text’s structure in line with authorial intention, the function of the text, reader engagement and publication context, before moving onto line editing and proofreading.

3.3 Editorial decision-making as a metacognitive skill

[12] Teaching editing in a way that foregrounds the fluid development of texts in a collaborative process also requires the fostering of metacognitive skills to make context-dependent decisions. Kruger (2007: 11) suggests that “editing, like translation, consists of a series of decisions or choices.” Thus, learning editing involves far more than the acquisition of linguistic and grammatical knowledge, but rather requires the development of the necessary skills needed to apply this knowledge in diverse contexts, and to balance authorial intention with reader engagement. Focusing on metacognition in editing shifts the emphasis from “right” or “wrong” answers to the justification of editorial decisions. Since these choices are informed by editors’ values and attitudes, as well as their biases, it follows that editors should be able to reflect thoughtfully and sensitively on the editing process in order to better understand both the conscious and unconscious determinants of the edit. As Kruger (2007: 2) explains, “the process-oriented approach is particularly useful in attuning learners to the (often) covert decision-making processes involved in text editing, thus helping them to become sensitive, reflective editors.” This understanding of editing suggests the focus should be on training editors to reflect on their decisions, rather than on basic knowledge of grammar and punctuation.

[13] This approach also reflects editing strategies that take into account not only sentence-level editing and proofreading but also appraisal and structural editing. Structural editing involves making decisions about organisational issues relating to the text’s function and structure. When approaching a text in this way, an editor must consider the intended purpose of the text, identify qualities in the text that disrupt this purpose, generate possible solutions, and consider the likely impact of those suggestions on the intentions of author and reader engagement. Editing, therefore, is more than identifying sentence-level anomalies in grammar and punctuation; it is a complex process that requires metacognitive knowledge and awareness. Learning to edit means developing this awareness into a repertoire of appropriate editing skills and strategies that can be implemented to complete a given task. This emphasis on metacognition in skills-based learning is crucial given the interpersonal nature of editing and the fact that editorial decision-making is always contextual and always in service of a communicative purpose. These key principles—that editing is a collaborative activity; that texts evolve through a process of interaction between writers, readers, editors, and their culture and context; and that teaching editing requires fostering metacognitive skills rather than rigid notions of right and wrong—informed the online design of the editing class.

4. Class design

​[14] Our class design embodied these principles by replicating the publishing process from structural editing, sentence editing, and proofreading. The designers sought to create learning opportunities for students to work with each other’s writing and communicate with each other as both an editor and an author, as texts were revised and developed. The class also foregrounded the concept of editing as the capacity to justify editorial decisions, fostering metacognitive skills. These intentions were reflected in the learning outcomes, which included learning to edit at both a structural- and sentence-level across a range of genres. Learning outcomes also included the ability to use digital tools to edit texts, which arguably is enhanced by the affordances of online communication in replicating contemporary editor-author relationships. These outcomes were supported in the learning activities in the unit.

1. An appraisal and set of structural recommendations for the class texts.
2. A reflection on set line editing and proofreading activities.
3. A reflection on a genre editing project: in this case, working with another student-author through the process of structural editing, line editing, and proofreading, applying the skills developed in assessment one and two.

5. Teaching and learning experiences in the class

[18] Teacher observations and an end-of trimester survey suggest that the class was effective in achieving its outcomes, but that when designing an editing skills class online and to scale, more attention needs to be paid to the learning management system (LMS) design, increased workload in online environments, and the management of student expectations. During the semester, Van Luyn kept a teaching journal in which she documented her impressions of student responses to the class. At the end of semester, the teaching team designed and disseminated a student survey about learning experiences in the class. It is important to note that only 7 of the 85 students enrolled in the class responded to the survey, so the results cannot be used to draw any conclusive statements about overall student experiences or preparedness for learning. However, the responses provide evidence of individual student experiences and are consistent with the teaching team’s observations of the class.

[19] Van Luyn observed, and the survey supported, that students learned about the industry and the skills involved in various editing tasks. For example, one student wrote: “I learnt both the skills necessary to enable me to enter the editing profession, but also learnt about the profession itself from professional editors.” Further, students also appeared better able to justify editorial decisions; for example, in the survey another student noted that they felt they could think about the reasoning behind editorial decisions and understand editing beyond simply fixing grammar and punctuation:

​Here, consistent with Van Luyn’s observations, students are able to articulate that they can independently make editorial choices in different contexts, a skill useful to them in a changing industry environment.
​
[20] Upon completion of the class, the student respondents achieved an understanding of editing as both a skills-based craft and an essential component of the writing process. These respondents were able to articulate the reasons behind their editorial decisions, while simultaneously thinking about industry standards more broadly. These responses and teacher observations demonstrate that the design imperatives of promoting skills development and strengthening understanding of editing as part of the writing process were achieved. This success was also reflected in student outcomes: students’ final assignments demonstrated their ability to consider and make editorial decisions, as well as implement proofreading changes that reflected authorial intent.

[21] Yet, throughout the trimester, students’ emotional reactions were intense, largely as a result of the requirement for weekly learning activities. Indeed, by the end of Week 1, students had started to express feelings of being overwhelmed. In her teaching journal, Van Luyn noted that student e-mails and discussion board posts expressed concern about the number of incremental steps involved in each assessment task. Students also expressed confusion about what each step actually entailed and why each step was necessary. In response to the survey question, “What do you wish you knew before you started the class?”, students emphasised the relationship between hands-on practice and perceived workload, with one student noting, “I might have dropped another [class] in order to make time for this one,” and another stating:

​While announcements had been sent out at the start of semester, directing students to assessment and stating that weekly participation would be required, online students still reported feeling underprepared for this level of consistent engagement. In this regard, it seemed as though the qualities of the online learning environment were amplifying students’ feelings of being overwhelmed, anxious, and confused. Further, online students seemed unused to the high level of hands-on engagement expected in the class. These reported and observed experiences speak to online students’ expectations, expertise, and priorities in skills-based classes, which can be better addressed in designing skills-based subjects for students online. Our experiences in the editing skills class suggest that there are a series of interrelated problems likely to arise when teaching a skills-based class that, as best practice suggests, requires collaboration and regular, low-stakes learning activities. Below, we propose a number of solutions to address these problems.

5.1 Problem: online skills development takes more time, but online students have less time available to them

[22] Often contrary to student and manager expectations, workloads increase in online writing instruction, both for students and instructors. Crow et al. (2013) note that online students often underestimate the amount of work required to learn online. Michael Gos (2015) observes that non-traditional students are drawn to the promise of online learning as a mode of instruction that can fit around their work and study life. Certainly, online learning presents affordances for non-traditional students, many of whom are first in family, regional, and low socio-economic. In online writing instruction, as Scott Warnock (2009: xi) points out, the sheer volume of writing that students do when they engage with instructors and peers entirely in text promises to advance their skills: “the online format - by its very nature,” Warnock emphasises, “requires students to learn to use writing to interact with others.” Yet, literacy load also increases in skills-based online writing classrooms. In content-heavy courses, students might watch a lecture, read a textbook, and take an exam; in online writing courses, students usually engage in a variety of activities such as writing tasks, discussion posts, readings, peer feedback, and interaction with both peers and faculty via the LMS (Meloncon & Harris 2015: 412).

[23] Indeed, learning to navigate such systems takes time, yet many students reported that they were time poor. While on-campus students also face the problem of managing work and other commitments, the design of online learning assumes that students are fitting study around these other demands on their time. This assumption is evidenced in the marketing discourse that surrounds online learning; online learning is often marketed to students as “24/7 learning” or “learning anywhere and anytime”. At UNE, for example, university marketing promotes the idea that online study is for “busy adults studying anywhere” (UNE Moodle Homepage 2018). This statement is further reflected in the promotional material on the LMS’s website: “Learn online or offline, anywhere, anytime” (Moodle Features 2018). For non-traditional students, a content-focused delivery fits better with their schedules; they can watch lectures and read learning materials in their own time prior to submitting assessment. Such students are used to the notion that they can learn “at their own pace,” and strategically are likely to cram content prior to submitting assessment. Further, these issues around content delivery perhaps reflect the “applied literary studies” approach to creative writing often seen in the Australian context, where students are trained to analyse fixed, already-published texts in which authorial presence is largely absent and the editing process invisible. While there is nothing inherently wrong with asking writers to engage with such texts as exemplars of a genre in which they are learning to write, students used to dealing only with published texts may be underprepared for the process of revision from structural through to line-level editing. Yet, the expectations of “at your own pace” engagement, which often arise in content-based classes, do not position students to be prepared to undertake learning activities that have regular ongoing deadlines, even though these activities might replicate industry experiences, develop skills, and subsequently achieve the learning outcomes.

5.2 Possible solution: manage student expectations of skills-based classes

[24] Part of the work of online writing instructors is to design learning experiences that take advantage of the affordances of the largely text-based online learning environment to promote digital literacies, and to be explicit about the requirements of online learning both to students in classes and in discussions about the administration of writing classes. In the editing skills class, it was apparent that facilitators could better justify the value of weekly activities to time-poor students. Learning activities might better manage student expectations to emphasise that writing classes are fundamentally different from content-based classes. Such writing classes, as is well-established in online writing pedagogy, require students to develop a writing practice based on regular, repeated, and ongoing writing, coupled with revision and reflection activities (OWI Principle 10). However, this principle is complicated by online learning environments and related resourcing where “flexibility” essentially translates to learning activities that focus on pre-written and pre-recorded content-delivery and fewer, high-stakes assessments. This requires a shift in online writing classes to the expectation that learning activities consist mainly of regular writing and editing, rather than watching and reading (although, of course, these activities are not excluded from the online writing classroom). Online students need to practise active learning. In order to facilitate such an emphasis, in an ideal scenario, writing classes should be adequately resourced so that staff-to-online student ratios facilitate fast turnaround times on more frequent, low-stakes learning tasks. It is hardly surprising that a culture of low engagement and high-stakes assessment proliferates where writing programs are too under-resourced to meaningfully interact with students online, or to guide peer interaction in small groups. Part of this expectation management must necessarily highlight that learning skills online takes more time, rather than less. Early discussions with students about study load and timing of units is a vital part of this process.

5.3 Problem: online students engage learning activities and editing relationships asynchronously and unevenly

[25] In the editing skills class, students are also likely to be engaging with learning material outside of the 9 to 5 availability of instructors. Not surprisingly, given UNE’s primary enrolment of non-traditional students, students in the class were often fitting in study around work and caring commitments, as well as the university’s commitment to extending education to those who would otherwise be unable to participate. In fact, one of the reasons students choose to learn online is because of the perception that online learning offers a more flexible learning schedule than the traditional face-to-face approach (Gilchrist-Petty 2018). In addition, students also face the problem of instructor availability. In the class, online students would regularly be engaging with the activities and asking questions at night when the teaching staff were offline. Therefore, the clarification or justification that students required to complete tasks was not always available to them until the next day. This likely resulted in the feelings of frustration Van Luyn observed; the time to complete respective tasks often increased due to the delay.

[26] Peer, as well as instructor availability, was also a source of tension in the class. Van Luyn and Cantrell observed that the timely return of editorial feedback and revised work was a source of anxiety for many students, who expressed concern when deadlines were not met by their editor or author. While negotiating deadlines is part of the work of a practising editor, online student-editors, fitting their studies around work and other commitments, faced additional barriers when working around their peers’ schedules. Initially, the teaching team employed deadlines that assumed students would engage with the Moodle books early in the week and complete the set tasks by Friday, in line with local norms. The teaching team quickly observed, however, that students tended to engage with Moodle books on the weekend, and that some students preferred to work a week in advance, while others were working in the same week or a week behind. This timing caused difficulties not only in meeting deadlines but in arranging group work and for working in pairs. As the class rolled out, a lenient extension policy, combined with a Monday rather than Friday deadline, addressed some of these concerns. In many ways, this flexible scheduling replicated actual industry conditions, where time management and adjusting timelines are standard parts of project management. However, in a culture where students usually expect more strictly-enforced due dates, these timelines caused further stress and emotional affect, particularly when editing other students’ work.

[27] This tension was reinforced by online students underpreparedness for working with other students. In a cognate study of students studying education at UNE, Parkes and Fletcher (2017: 3) found that “in a survey of 130 students enrolled online...a majority of students reported feeling poorly prepared for working with others, regardless of age or gender.” While in face-to-face classrooms, synchronous social interaction and low-stakes engagement with learning activities fosters a community of learners, these casual interactions were missing from the online environment. In addition, student reports of being underprepared for group interaction is significant in the online environment. The asynchronous nature of learning tasks, and an expectation of moving through learning materials “at your own pace”, creates a feeling of an individual learning in isolation. Yet, Bill Hart-Davidson (2014: 215) argues that the potential for near-constant peer learning is the best reason to think about digital technologies in relation to the teaching and learning of writing. However, higher education has not yet taken full advantage of this potential, favouring a model of online learning that Hart-Davidson describes as “one-to-many” rather than “many-to-many” (ibid.). Online writing instructors face a challenge in coordinating large online student cohorts used to interacting in the “one-to-many” model, where students largely engage with an authoritative facilitator and interact with their peers in a minimal and superficial way. Indeed, as the editing class rolled out, it became apparent that the prospect of working with a virtual partner for assessment, coupled with the short learning cycles and their corresponding deadlines, were a source of stress for the online students. Yet, strong evidence suggests that guided peer interaction is an effective way for students to learn writing (Hart-Davidson 2014). Therefore, online learning activities need to both prepare students for peer interaction and address learner anxiety.

5.4 Possible solution: more flexible, self-identified timelines

[28] This editing skills case study suggests that one way to address these concerns is to personalise the online learning experience by changing the way students are paired for assessment (OWI Principle 11). In the major assessment item for the 2018 class offering, students were assigned a partner (that is, put into an author-editor relationship) based on the text they chose to edit. Unlike random allocation, this approach was intended to give students some choice in the process by allowing them to work in a preferred genre. However, as mentioned above, during the editing process itself, some students reported frustration that their partners were generally unreachable and out of communication, usually due to work, caring, or family commitments. In future offerings, the allocation process could be improved by allowing students on similar timelines to work together rather than pairing students based on an editorial preference. In this way, students would not only be working together towards the same goal but also working on a similar timeline. One activity to support this is to have students design a personal timeline that maps their weekly schedule and study program, along with the times they are available to meet online or via e-mail. Students with similar timelines could then work together on editing tasks. This approach could be applied to any online grouping, where students engage in time management planning and then join small groups who are working on similar timelines.

[29] Placing students in smaller groups based on self-identified timelines and designing learning activities that require peers to interact in pairs or small groups earlier in the semester may assist with community building at the same time as catering to non-traditional students. Further, resisting the isolating tendencies of online instruction, the act of creating texts is understood not as the sole province of an individual author but as a collaborative interaction between writer, invested readers (including editors), and the writing context. Such activities may help create a community of inquiry where students are active co-constructors of meaning who are fully engaged in collaborative tasks. As social anxiety and a lack of confidence can prevent students from participating and interacting online as expected, it is important that these early activities are low-stakes, since students are more likely to be anxious when assessment is heavily weighted. Finally, placing students in smaller groups allows online writing instructors to tailor responses depending on the needs of the group. In this way, online writing instructors may be more reactive, responding with different prompts and learning activities to guide peer interaction.

5.5 Possible solution: more online practice giving peer feedback that explicitly highlights the ways this process foregrounds textual fluidity

[30] Online writing instruction requires different ways of engaging with texts than other disciplines. The textual analysis of published texts, which is the main mode of learning in literary studies classes, may certainly be useful for creative writers seeking inspiration and to strengthen their understanding of genre conventions and narrative techniques. The use of these pedagogical approaches is also consistent with creative writing disciplinary history in Australia, where writing emerged largely from literature departments. However, exposing students to living texts in writing classes facilitates a process-focused approach to understanding texts as fluid, and revision and reflection as integral components of the writing process. In the online writing classroom, writing students should encounter works-in-progress alongside published work. Facilitating peer feedback on drafts is an obvious way to achieve this, and further research into how best to prepare students and scaffold peer feedback online is needed. Further investigation is also required into how learning management systems and digital tools can better support this kind of deep engagement with the structural qualities of the text, better facilitate the giving of peer feedback (rather than peer assessment), and allow students to see multiple versions of writers’ work as it develops.

5.6 Problem: the fixed LMS design makes it difficult to see the big picture

[31] The fixed design of the LMS makes it difficult for students to visualise learning activities as steps in a project, as they might in a professional setting, and which emphasises assessment over other learning activities. Consistent with the design in other classes, information about the class and the required learning materials are presented to students as “blocks” on the homepage; clicking on a block either takes students to an assessment portal or a Moodle book. Blocks are usually arranged with the class information and assessment blocks appearing first, and then weekly Moodle books following. In this editing class, Van Luyn made the decision to outline the key steps leading up to assessment in the assessment description in the assessment block but to also provide more contextualising detail in the weekly Moodle book that appeared on the Monday of the week that the activity was to be completed. This allowed students to engage with complex concepts around the legal and ethical dimensions of editing and copyright. However, the culture of assessment-driven engagement with learning materials meant students still focused largely on the assessment description. For example, in discussion boards and feedback, students critiqued the amount of information about assessment in the Moodle books. The design of the LMS further cued students to value assessment over engagement with the study guides: visual prioritising that suits time-poor online students. When applying concepts rather than memorising them, however, this mode of engagement becomes difficult.

[32] One factor contributing to the difficulties students identified with the class was the LMS design. As aforementioned, UNE’s writing program is housed within a large multidisciplinary School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, which employs a single master Moodle template for all online classes within the School, with the goal of establishing a cohesive student experience. The development of this master template was driven by user feedback, which indicated that students found learning a new interface layout for each class frustrating. The master template approach does indeed adhere to several of Nielsen’s (2012) key quality components for usability, most notably efficiency, since once students have learned to use the template for one class in the School, they can employ the same strategies in all other classes. However, the master template approach can sacrifice utility because it does not accommodate the diverse range of pedagogies employed by different instructors across different disciplines.

[33] This concern is a familiar one to online writing instructors, and the tension between institutional demands and teacher flexibility is a recurring thread in OWI scholarship. OWI Principle 5, for example, asserts that “online writing teachers should retain reasonable control over their own content and/or techniques for conveying, teaching, and assessing their students’ writing in their OWCs” (Conference on College Composition and Communication 2013). The accompanying Rationale for OWI Principle 5 notes that institutions may turn to restrictive syllabi and LMS shells to accommodate large numbers of underprepared instructors: “it is well known that institutions turn to uniformity of method and materials in lieu of hiring, training, and retaining expert, full-time writing teachers.” Such “master courses” may, as Rochelle Rodrigo and Cristina Ramírez (2017) have noted, be underpinned by rigorous expert development, subject to quality assurance, and serve as an important step in training novice instructors to teach effectively—concerns as necessary in Australia as in their US context. This is especially the case in “a field that acknowledges multiple frameworks of teaching and learning about writing—for example, current traditional, expressivist, social, postprocess—writing studies scholars know that an instructor’s philosophy, framework, and experience is greatly affected by how a course is structured and taught” (Rodrigo and Ramírez 2017: 318). But these “template” classes are usually designed by writing instructors to accommodate the expected practices of a writing class, which is not the case at UNE.

[34] The master template invites students to develop habits of LMS use, internalising its conventions (Bawarshi 2003: 8) and, as Alison Witte (2018) argues, becoming unable to see how their interactions with the LMS are shaped by their expectations of how both the interface works and their experience using similar interfaces in other classes. Witte found that her students, despite anecdotal evidence suggesting experience with and desire for Moodle, struggled to use the LMS, and attributed these difficulties to inconsistent use and design of Moodle by different instructors across the institution. We experienced these same challenges in our own class. In particular, as Editing Skills and Standards progressed, we saw that the content-focussed design of UNE’s institutional template and students’ experiences with the LMS worked against the design of the class. In particular, by prioritising content delivery and submittable assessment, the template occluded the semester-long processes of manuscript development around which the class was structured.

5.7 Possible solution: use visual syllabi to supplement LMS design

[35] In debriefing the class and in beginning to plan for future iterations, then, a key priority was finding ways to work within but against the grain of the institution’s LMS template to help students understand the way that their labour and learning articulate across modules and weekly activities. Developing visual schedules (or visual syllabi) is one mechanism that instructors can use to highlight connections between topics, learning activities, and assessment that might otherwise be occluded by the LMS interface. The following image (Figure 1) was designed after the class finished in response to this exigence, and can serve as a model for other instructors wishing to help students draw connections across different areas of the LMS.