Conclusion and the Future

Connor and Lunsford's (1998) tongue in cheek comparison to Ma and Pa Kettle is clear in the context of that article, even to those readers only vaguely familiar with the comedic duo. The ridiculousness of the situation drives the comedy of the results, like the effect of popping popcorn added to pancakes. But through it all, Ma and Pa Kettle persist and they ultimately do finish those strange and odd pancakes.

As a researcher, I can relate.

Fortunately, I have no doubt that there are numerous projects of this sort underway or in press right now. It is likely only a matter of time before there are large meta-analysis projects of these studies similar to Bernard et al's 2004 article, and I anticipate there will be similar surveys and studies conducted by scholars in composition and rhetoric specifically as well. Indeed, I anticipate the "natural experiment" created by Covid will be a time that many higher education scholars will be studying for some time to come.

My own work will now turn to the next stage of this research, an analysis of the now completed interviews of some survey respondents which I have referenced throughout this webtext. The survey results show general impressions, the so-called "30,000 foot view," while the interviews dig down into the individual experiences and stories, material I am more comfortable working with as a scholar and also work I think that is arguably more relevant in writing studies. The interviews fill in a lot of the details that my simple survey itself could not provide, which is why I've included some of the general findings and impressions I have from these interviews to date. But there is a lot more work to do. I have over 270,000 words of transcript yet to carefully read, code, analyze, and describe. I fully expect it will take quite some time to sift through these many conversations, and I am looking forward to discussing this scholarship in future publications.

The steady rise in online courses and programs offered at most colleges and universities—particularly those institutions that cater to commuter and nontraditional students—began long before Covid, and the once clear boundary between a face to face course and an online one had already begun to fade. As Alex Reid pointed out in 2017, now that all of our courses and scholarship are facilitated electronically through digital libraries, course management tools, online journals, social media, and so forth, "Higher education happens online today, regardless of how the courses are catalogued" (p. 227). Covid has only accelerated this trend.

There will of course be a return to traditional face to face instruction in most colleges and universities, but it is difficult for me to imagine a complete return to the traditional classroom even at those institutions that offered almost no classes online before. Perhaps this will take the form of so-called "hyflex" courses, where the video and audio technology in the classroom itself allow students to attend either in person or via video conference software. Perhaps there will be more "hybrid" courses that balance face to face meetings with synchronous but online sessions, of more "flipped classroom" approaches where some components are shifted to an asynchronous format to allow the synchronous classroom time to be used differently.

These kinds of shifts have been happening in the composition classroom for quite some time. Many of us already incorporate asynchronous work into our traditional face to face courses through online peer review activities, short writing responses to readings, and the delivery of short lecture videos. It seems likely we will continue to use synchronous conferencing tools as well, perhaps not as often to teach fully online courses but as part of previously scheduled hybrid courses but also as an occasional substitute for meeting face to face, and as a tool students can use for collaborative projects. If nothing else, I suspect most of us will continue to use Zoom for meeting with students individually in writing conferences and office hours.

So in that sense, I think the question of why we should teach writing online, synchronously or asynchronously, is already shifting to how can we change the way we teach writing online so that it maximizes the strengths and minimizes the weakness of these two modes? How will this new awareness and possibility of blending online with face to face instruction change our field's assumptions about basic principles such as the writing process and the student-centered classroom? As is always the case with crises, it is an exciting time.