Substandard writing skills pose a significant barrier to many SUNY students in their quest to obtain a college degree. Even students who place into college-level English struggle to understand the specific demands of each disciplinary discourse community. At the same time, many SUNY students find it difficult to afford their textbooks. This grant seeks to develop a partial solution to both problems by creating a SUNY-wide Writing in the Disciplines (WID) training initiative delivered by the openly licensed Excelsior Online Writing Lab (OWL).

This grant aims to empower faculty across the system to incorporate WID instruction and assignments into courses across the curriculum using OER materials. Faculty from Rockland Community College (RCC), Monroe Community College (MCC), Clinton Community College (CCC), and Excelsior College have been working together to address this critical challenge. The WID project aims to:

Build a community of practice across departments and campuses through faculty training and shared best practices. Two collaborative WID webinars at each participating college have taken place in fall 2018 and additional webinars are planned for spring 2019. At each partner college, faculty in multiple disciplines have been recruited to join the project and participate in the training. Prior to the training, participants have been surveyed to identify discipline-specific genres they are interested in teaching Participants have also been asked to share genre-based writing assignments they use, which have been workshopped at the seminars.

Each training session addresses: 1) The benefits of teaching writing in the disciplines; 2) Practical advice for creating a writing assignment, including backward assignment design; and, 3) Grading writing assignments using rubrics. Both webinars have been taped and made available in the OWL, along with all of the training material and PowerPoint slides. We also ask participants to integrate genre-based writing assignments in their courses, assess the impact on student success, and report back to the WID liaison assigned to them. Results will be shared at the 2019 CIT Conference.
Provide on-going faculty support through the Excelsior OWL. The Excelsior OWL (http://owl.excelsior.edu/), an OER, was created in partnership with Broome, Monroe, Onondaga, and Queensborough community colleges. Two pilot studies support the tool’s effectiveness in improving student writing and increasing course grades, and 12 national awards attest to its innovation and excellence.