Data collection followed two phases. First, I downloaded the participant records stored
on the
DMAC server space, to which I had access as the Institute's Associate Director and
de facto website manager. These records listed participant names, institutional
affiliations, and email addresses for all DMAC Institutes from 2006 to 2014. Replacing
names with numerical identifiers, I organized the data in two ways: (1) by individual,
recording the year
of attendance and institutional affiliation; and (2) by institution, recording the
number of
participants both in total and each year. For each institution, I drew from
The Carnegie Foundation's data
(collected between 2008 and 2010) to include the control (public, private not-for-profit),
classification (2-year, 4-year, 4-year plus graduate), and student population (in
intervals of
5,000). I have included this data as spreadsheets with links to the files below, and
I analyze it in the Analysis I
section of this article.
For the second phase, I emailed a request to participate in a survey to all addresses on file from DMAC records. To account for out-of-date email addresses, I also emailed the request to several listservs frequented by teachers and scholars in the fields of rhetoric, composition, literacy studies, and digital media studies. I designed the survey to supplement the data from phase one with qualitative feedback from individual participants. DMAC alumni were asked the following questions, all optional, via Google forms :
I wanted to learn how to integrate multimodal elements into my teachingand another read
I'd like to assign a video essay in my upcoming first-year composition courseI would categorize both as
supplement current pedagogy/curricula.Because some survey responses contain identifying information, I have not included the survey spreadsheet below. I do, however, analyze the survey data in the
Analysis IIsection of this article.
Lastly, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 2014 DMAC participants during the second week of the Institute. Using video or audio recorders, two graduate students and an undergraduate research assistant asked volunteer participants a modified list of the email survey questions, as well as questions related to a partner project on community practices to be published in Showcasing The Best of CIWIC/DMAC: Approaches to Teaching and Learning in Digital Environments.