Introducing Wadsworth InSite: For Writing and Research™
Review by Valerie Balester
Texas A&M University
On October 15, 2003, Wadsworth released InSite: For Writing and Research™, a Web-based management tool for writing classes. InSite is designed to ease freshman composition teaching loads and assist in the administration of multi-section courses taught by novice teachers. In my current position as director of a new writing-in-the disciplines program at a Research-1 university, I am above all interested in helping faculty grade efficiently while maintaining quality. I review InSite with this in mind: good software of this kind should effectively promote student learning, enhance a collaborative and student-centered pedagogy, and save instructors and administrators time.
A Community of Learners
The InSite developers attempt to create a cyberspace, a community of learners, a place for sharing texts and responses to texts, a place for all the relevant information to be
available with speed and ease, a place where students can get answers to questions like "How am I doing?"
answered. InSite supports a collaborative process-oriented pedagogy, where peers and writers have authority to contribute to each other’s work. Students draft assignments, get peer reviews, reflect on the comments, and then revise for a grade.
InSite gives instructors the flexibility to set the class up according to various teaching styles or philosophies. So while InSite can support collaborative communities of learners, it can also support a skills-based, teacher-centered pedagogy. Because InSite offers so many ways for
I review InSite with this in mind: good software of this kind should effectively promote student learning, enhance a collaborative and student-centered pedagogy, and save instructors and administrators time. |
Features of InSite
InSite’s initial interface may seem a bit daunting, given the many options it makes available. On the other hand, its business is mitigated by the convenience of having so much potential in front of you, on a single screen.
- Assignments and Syllabi. Although I know few experienced composition instructors who would need the available assignment library, it does seem valuable for novice instructors, especially given that assignments can be tailored and personal libraries can easily be imported or shared. Assignments are supplemented by peer review assignments. Assignments can be built into a syllabus with a very sharp syllabus-building tool.
- Research. Students use tools like InfoTrac (if the institution has subscribed to it) and the Web and the school's library through InSite. This is a benefit, even for those who have libraries that subscribe to InfoTrac, because once within InSite, students need not use a separate login.
- Drafting and Peer Review. Students can upload formatted drafts. (Note: the documents can be formatted, so that they can also be evaluated for formatting. That includes images.) Students read and evaluate each other’s work, using one of three options (or all three) selected by the instructor: the first two options, rubrics or metrics (basically, a question with a 1-5 Likert–style rating) can come from a library keyed to a series of Wadsworth texts, or be designed by the instructor; for the third option students can answered open-ended questions which the instructor writes. Nothing requires that students complete peer reviews or that instructors grade them. Of course, by the way the software is set up, both writing strategies are subtly encouraged. However, the options are infinite. The software presents useful options for flexible administration of programs with shared resources for teaching and assessing learning.
- Self-Reflection. The writing exercise option is one that encourages students to reflect on their writing process and or their draft after peer reviews.
- Commenting and Grading. Both students and instructors can imbed comments in the text to which they are responding, and, when desired, those can be linked to a rubric/metric or a writing text. The associated rubric library (a selectable collection of assessment guides) is particularly attractive to writing-across-the curriculum faculty and new composition instructors. A rubric library is available for each of the following Wadsworth handbooks:
- Glenn, Miller, Webb, Gray: Hodges' Harbrace Handbook, 15/e
- Glenn, Miller, Webb, Gray: The Writer's Harbrace Handbook, 2/e
- Kirszner, Mandell, The Brief Handbook, 4/e
- Kirszner, Mandell, The Pocket Handbook, 2/e
- Peer Editing. Students have access to markup tools for editing or proofreading exercises, just as instructors do.
- Remediation. If an instructor feels remediation can be achieved through reading handbooks and completing quizzes (and there are many who hold that conviction), it’s a simple matter to assign remediation by setting thresholds for particular errors.
- Plagiarism. Once students have submitted final documents, the "originality checker" may be employed. The database against which work is checked includes InfoTrac, the Internet, and student papers submitted to the InSite database. There is
recourse for those of us who prefer to opt out of a plagiarism checker; still, it seems to me that most faculty want this feature. Some of us will be appeased by the fact that students can use the tool to check their own work (depending on how the instructor has developed the parameters for its use). Wadsworth offers material and excercises for students about plagiarism. The students and the instructor must agree that work will be submitted to the database; their profiles require them to make a decision. In other words, students do not have to submit work through the originality checker. The instructor cannot submit a student’s work without student permission. While this may cause many complications, the fact is no user of InSite is forced to use the originality checker. Rather than a "you're caught" mechanisim, the originality checker can be used by both student and teacher as a learning moment tool. - Recordkeeping. The program promises to save instructors time; as it promises on the introductory interface, you'll "discover how InSite can make your job easier." The fact that all management occurs online and that records and assignments are available to individual students online probably will cut down on class management. Unlike some programs (notably, Calibrated Peer Review, now housed at UCLA and still in development), InSite doesn’t claim to do your grading. It does track assignments (due dates, completion dates, dates grades are posted) and it does provide a grade book with a running grade. InSite follows the paper trail at the level of the individual student, for each assignment, and for the whole class. Also, the syllabus builder should help some instructors do a better job of course planning, and the rubrics and assignment libraries could save countless hours.
- Customized Web links. If InSite is lacking something an instructor likes to access frequently, Web links can be customized within InSite. Links to libraries and local e-mail would probably be fairly popular.
I believe it is likely that your students will not have many problems learning InSite. It may look a bit daunting at first, primarily because it can do a lot and is quite flexible, but you can be using it without supplementary documentation fairly quickly. Even so, I'd caution you to take a week before your class begins to explore the site and learn to use it. There are quite a few colors and icons, and no obvious legend for them, which you will want to become familiar with. On-line documentation and help files are currently available and will be upgraded, and email help is available to both students and instructors. Wadsworth is also planning to produce a hard copy documentation manual.
Program Concerns
An attractive feature of InSite is its suitability for writing programs. Not only can a writing program administrator have access to a wide range of information about his/her courses (for example, what sorts of comments are most frequently appearing on papers), but
it also is a powerful tool for communicating with and training new instructors. Syllabi would be easy to consult for those administrators who need to find out what a given instructor has set as policy. A large, multi-section program can create assignments and rubrics as training material and have them easily accessible to instructors. These training advantages could also be applied to writing-across-the-curriculum or writing-in-the disciplines programs. However, InSite would be most efficient in programs with standardized courses and centralized administration or training, since presumably someone would be setting up a syllabus, course policies, and so on. Classroom management issues can be addressed very well from a program perspective, of course, since all grade books would be online and syllabi are easy to prepare.
In other words, a large, multi-section program can create assignments and rubrics as training material and have them easily accessible to instructors. Classroom management issues can be addressed efficiently, of course, since all grade books will be online and syllabi are easy to prepare.
As for technical issues, as any writing program administrator knows, better their server than ours. Wadsworth provides the server and administers the signup process. There are help services available online, and technical support is provided. If your campus uses Blackboard™ or WebCT™, you can probably reproduce some of the same features, although perhaps within limits. On the other hand, InSite is designed by a composition/rhetoric specialist for writing classes, has been field tested, and is ready to use. You won’t, for example, find rubric, metric, or assignment libraries on WebCT, nor will you find a grade book ready to work from. You won’t find commenting functions linked to writing handbooks, and you won’t have immediate access to InfoTrac or an originality checker (assuming your campus even has a site license for one). You also won’t have access to the remediation quizzes.
The grading of peer reviews as it is set up in the InSite grade book seems to me like too much work. If you actually do all the grading InSite allows you to do, you still have too much paperwork, online or not. Thus, InSite might benefit from a feature such as that used by Calibrated Peer Review, designed for writing in chemistry but now being used in many fields, including English. CPR uses students’ reviews of their own work and
each other’s work to come up with a grade. Peer reviewers learn to review by practicing on documents the instructor has provided and reviewed. Their contribution to the grade is weighted according to their level of competence as a reviewer. Instructors don’t have to grade, unless (1) reviewers are deemed incompetent, or (2) some other problem or dispute arises. This is a program that appeals greatly to non-composition faculty; most writing instructors want their own estimate of quality to be included.
For a less centralized writing-across-the-curriculum or writing-in-the-disciplines program, where individual instructors might consider adopting InSite, the amount of writing and editing required would be a factor; for those with quite a lot of revision and finished writing, it would probably be more in demand, while for those with more emphasis on informal writing-to-learn it may be less worth the effort of learning to use. Many instructors from disciplines outside English, Journalism, English Education, or others where the teaching of writing is routine might find the tie-in to Wadsworth texts and the commenting features a most attractive feature; many would also highly approve of the remediation and originality checker features. However, InSite's classroom management and grade book will face stiff competition from a program that promises to grade for you, such as CPR.
Back to a Student-Centered, Collaborative Pedagogy
InSite can actually be used to support any writing pedagogy, but it implicitly supports a process-oriented, student-centered pedagogy. On the other hand, the portfolio feature is a very conservative version of portfolio pedagogy – really just a folder where a student keeps work in various stages of the writing process and final drafts – and the features which support collaboration are somewhat limited. Luckily, those of us who wish the portfolio to be graded only after students select what to revise, and only toward the end of the course, can easily adapt the program to our agendas. And those of us who want more collaboration between students can elect to use groups, increase peer critiques, or use other programs to foster electronic discussion. Still, the program would not intuitively support such use; an instructor would have to have to make InSite conform to his or her vision.
Some of the features I personally would not use (or perhaps use infrequently) include the Originality Checker, the remediation features, the
| Current pricing? There is site licensing available, however, for each user the pricing at the time of this review in case you're wondering is:
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The bottom line is that I would use InSite, especially if I were directing a multi-section composition course. In that case, in fact, I’d require all my first-time instructors to use it, at least once. InSite can support the sort of writing pedagogy I espouse, and better yet it can support other pedagogies as well, and that is a key element in good writing software. InSite probably would save both instructors and administrators time, would keep students well informed about their progress and appeal to their writing habits. I’d say it’s worth any time required in training yourself or instructors in your writing program. If you'd like to learn more, take a look at InSite's tour.