The potential for one-to-one synchronous writing support in UK higher education : a report from the LondonMet Writing Centre

Llewellyn-Jones, Celine and O'Neill, Peter (2010) The potential for one-to-one synchronous writing support in UK higher education : a report from the LondonMet Writing Centre. Investigations in university teaching and learning, 6 (2). pp. 171-177. ISSN 1740-5106

Abstract

The London Metropolitan University Writing Centre is one initiative of the Write Now Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), a student-focused service founded in 2006. Throughout, the Writing Centre’s main focus is its "writing mentors" scheme, in which students are trained to work with their peers on all aspects of their writing: from understanding assignment questions to offering feedback on drafts. The scheme has been adapted for UK HE purposes (O'Neill, 2008), but retains the longheld principles of collaborative and non-directive writing instruction used in North American universities (Bruffee, 1984; North, 1984). Our aim is to facilitate more engaged learning and more confident student writers. User feedback has been positive and the tutorials have grown in popularity yearly, with approximately 930 one-to-one, one-hour tutorials held in 2008/09. Our experience is that many LondonMet students work during the day and cannot access our Writing Centre tutorials then. Therefore we wished to investigate the possibilities offered by online environments to see if we could open up our services to these students. Moreover, we were keen to see if the online environment might offer something pedagogically unique that would support the University’s Learning and Teaching Strategy, which seeks to develop a fully blended learning environment for its students. This is an account of the Writing Centre’s pilot online writing tutorials in 2008/09, which outlines the rationale for our initiative and the lessons learned.

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