Nancy W. Coppola

Becoming a virtual professor: pedagogical roles and ALN

This paper presents a qualitative study of role changes that occur when faculty becomes virtual professors. In 20 semi-structured interviews of faculty, coded with pattern analysis software, the authors captured role changes enacted by instructors in asynchronous learning network (ALN) settings-cognitive roles, affective roles, and managerial roles. The cognitive role, which relates to mental processes of learning, learning, information storage, and thinking, shifts to one of deeper cognitive complexity. The affective role, which relates to influencing the relationships between students, the instructor, and the classroom atmosphere, required faculty to find new tools to express emotion, yet they found the relationship with students more intimate. The managerial role, which deals with class and course management, requires greater attention to detail, more structure, and additional student monitoring. Overall, facility reported a change in their teaching persona, towards more precision in their presentation of materials and instructions, combined with a shift to a more Socratic pedagogy, emphasizing multilogues with students.

Corporate software training: is Web-based training as effective as instructor-led training?

Web-based training has been both acclaimed as a self-paced, consistent, stand-alone alternative to traditional instructor-led training and disparaged for its high development costs and dearth of qualified trainers. Critics especially question its effectiveness. This case study tests the effectiveness of a stand-alone Web-based training program and compares the results to that of an identical instructor-led course. The course provides highly task-oriented instruction for a computer software package and was developed using a proven instructional design methodology. The data from this study show that Web-based training is as effective as instructor-led training for stand-alone software application training in a corporation.

Setting the Discourse Community: Tasks and Assessment for the New Technical Communication Service Course.

This article argues for a social perspective of the new technical communication service course, a conclusion supported by several premises: the technical communication profession wants and needs accountability, accountability is demonstrated by evaluation, assessment requires that we define literacy, evaluating technical communication literacy requires portfolio evaluation, portfolio assessment supports the social perspective of learning, and the social construction concepts imply teaching strategies. The argument proceeds from a case study that demonstrates reliability, stability, and validity in its technical communication service course assessment, tasks, and instructor community. This article demonstrates that portfolios can help us both conceptualize and evaluate the new technical communication service course.

Big science or bricolage: an alternative model for research in technical communication

Two research traditions inform contemporary technical communication research. With its physical science orientation and organizational capaciousness, the tradition of Big Science originated in the laboratory of Ernest O. Lawrence. With its humanistic orientation and individualistic singularity, the tradition of bricolage was identified in the fieldwork of Claude Le/spl acute/vi-Strauss. The current celebration of the former in technical communication research serves to reify a power-driven impulse for utility. The two cultures that result from such an impulse-the organizational professional and the academic researcher-have little common ground for research. To interrupt such harmful dynamics, an orientation to research is offered that celebrates successful past work in technological innovation, information design, the communication process, and the ways those processes emerge in specific contexts. To foster the continuation of such research, a community-based model is offered that draws its strength from the tradition of the bricoleur.

What Does the Transactions Publish? What do Transactions' Readers Want to Read?

Research Problem: Investigate the match between content published by the Transactions and content sought by its readers. Research Questions: What content does the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication publish? How does that compare to the content published by other journals in the field? And what content do readers of the Transactions want to read? Literature Review: Researchers in most fields occasionally analyze the entire body of literature within a discipline to assess the current state of the literature, identify leading works, assess the state of the literature, provide a basis for changing the direction of a journal, and assess alignment among parts of the literature. Methodology: To identify what journals published, researchers used the STC Body of Knowledge schema and a list of categories of research methods that classify all peer-reviewed articles published between January 2006 and December 2010 in the Transactions, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly. To identify reader preferences of the Transactions, researchers surveyed members of the IEEE Professional Communication Society about their preferences for content and types of research. Results and Discussion: In terms of the topics covered, the three most widely covered topics in the Transactions were: (1) Deliverables, (2) Information Design and Development, and (3) Academic Programs. Readers prefer (1) About Technical and Professional Communication, (2) Information Design and Development, and (3) Research Theory, and Practice. The three least-covered topics were (1) Business Knowledge, (2) About Technical Communication, and (3) Technical Communication Standards. Of least interest to participants were: (1) Deliverables, (2) Quality Assurance, (3) Management, and (4) Technical Communication Standards. The Transactions primarily publishes experiments, surveys, and tutorials while readers prefer case studies, literature reviews, and tutorials.

Building trust in virtual teams

This paper presents a study of trust development in online courses. It reviews the concept of swift trust and examines changes in faculty roles as professors go online. An exploratory content analysis looks at indicators of the development of swift trust in the highest rated of a large number of online courses studied over a three year period, and contrasts these results with one of the poorest rated online courses. Establishing swift trust at the beginning of an online course appears to be related to subsequent course success. Strategies for trust formation are also suggested.This paper presents a multidisciplinary study of trust development in virtual learning communities for anyone interested in improving virtual-presence interactions. First, qualitative analyses of faculty interviews are presented, showing online faculty role changes in cognitive, affective, and managerial activities. Then, faculty perceptions of online community building are correlated to theories of swift trust with a coding system and pattern analysis software. Finally, strategies for trust formation are suggested.

Is our peer-reviewed literature sustainable?

This paper presents a snapshot of a content-analysis study of five years of issues for the four key technical communication journals. Using coding schemes for topics and types of research used to generate data on which conclusions are based, the authors coded all articles in the last five years of our major journals. This paper reviews the current state of the peer-reviewed literature to determine topics covered and overlooked; research methods; dominant authors (if any); the assessed level of consistency between the editorial focus of each journal as stated in its editorial mission and the peer-reviewed literature that is actually published in the journal; and the similarities and distinctions between and among the journals.

Information technologies and instructional design in technical communication: a redefinition

How can we harness the power of computerized pedagogy without valorising technology for technologys sake? How can we capitalize on computers and the Internet to continue moving distance learning out of the realm of correspondence courses? The answer lies in redefining technical communications relationship to information technologies and instructional design using the social construction model as tool. Our instructional theory should follow a model of effective technical communication embedded in social structures, and our teaching practices should provide for socially constructed learning environments. The paper describes the information transfer and the social construction models and identifies the attributes of social learning perspectives. It then shows how these attributes are demonstrated in various computer mediated settings at one university.

Resonance or misalignment: A study of the academic-practioner border in the body of knowledge for Technical Communication

This paper reports on a content analysis study of the four main journals devoted to technical communication over five years using the Technical Communication Body of Knowledge (TC-BoK) project as the object of our coding system. These findings were compared with a Society for Technical Communication (STC) survey of its membership, mostly practitioners, and their ratings of topics from the same TC-BoK project to gauge concurrence of ideas that inform a body of knowledge for our profession. The findings show both resonance and misalignment between academics and practicing professionals.

Who's Doing What? Three Perspectives in Online Graduate Technical Communication Programs

Distance delivery of technical communication programs has been steadily growing in the past decade. At last count, over 22 U.S. colleges and universities now offer courses and undergraduate/graduate degrees in technical communication via some form of distance delivery [C. Cook et al., 2005]. Each of these colleges and universities has responded to the challenges of delivering online education differently. In this paper, the authors will discuss how three institutions, Mercer University, NJ Institute of Technology, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, have created and sustained successful online graduate technical communication programs using a variety of strategies to meet the needs of their students and the missions of their institutions.