GSOLE Basic OLI Portfolio
About Me
Welcome to my GSOLE Learning e-Portfolio, completed in partial fulfilment of the 2024-2025 Basic Online Literacy Instruction Certificate. My name is Christal Seahorn. I have taught online composition for more than 12 years, in both hybrid and fully online course. I name this as a "learning" portfolio because my last formal OWI was over a decade ago. I used a combination of synchronous and asynchronous approaches until the 2020 pandemic. Following the end of the pandemic, my university mandated that all 100% online classes be asynchronous. So, I taught my first fully asynchronous online course in summer 2024, and I am currently working through the challenges of creating a purposeful instructor presence and providing enough support for students while being aware of the 24/7 potential for Online Writing Instruction (OWI) to be all consuming. Progress toward being an effective, balanced, healthy, and sustainable online writing instructor is what I hope to achieve at the end of this certificate program. A short paragraph that tells us a bit about you with particular emphasis for the teaching and learning values that are important to you in online learning contexts.
Navigating this Portfolio
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My Online Literacy Instruction (OLI) Values
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Collaborative pedagogy--I am committed to including opportunities for student collaboration in my online writing courses. My values here are particularly influenced by Chris Anson's work on the benefits of writing groups to increase engagement and critical thinking and decrease isolation in online courses. Currently, I have students provide peer-feedback in small writing groups; I have also led extensive online group projects in which students co-author an essays and collaborate on a presentation. I recently examined the supplemental reading from our GSOLE Module 1 by Bourgeois and Giaimo on strategies for better designing and assessing of online writing groups, and I am eager to implement some of their recommendations. I am also currently working on a strategy for students to do synchronous poster presentations.
Instructor Presence--Credence Baker on the impact of instructor immediacy and presence in creating a successful online experience for students; Baker found that while the combination of immediacy and presence have a significant positive correlation on student outcomes, immediacy alone does not have a significant affect; however, demonstrations of instructor presence do have a statistically significant positive influence on student learning outcomes. I work to integrate these in my online courses with instructor-led videos, consistent and substantive interactions in my feedback and participation in discussion posts, providing direct instruction and clarification when needed, and required synchronous student-teacher conferences even in asynchronous courses.
Commitment to Accessible and Inclusive Pedagogy--as described in Principle 1 of the GSOLE "Online Literacy Instruction Principles and Tenets."
Assessment & managing grading and helping students to understand my grading approach.
OWI demands on physical health and time boundaries that F2F and hybrid courses have not proved to.