Building Community Online with Collaborative Writing

After a summer concocting various formulas for opening our university campuses so that some semblance of the campus experience might be preserved and then a bumpy opening, many of us have settled back into more comfortable versions of the online teaching venues that were the default modality when we quickly devised ways to teach our classes as the pandemic emerged in February and March. A Chronicle of Higher Education survey in June reported what faculty had already suggested by anecdote and complaint, that online teaching—even if adorned with the bells and whistles of Zoom—could not hold a candle to teaching in a brick-and-mortar classroom. Faculty hoped for training courses over the summer so they could offer better courses in the fall.  But in our discussions with each other then and over the summer and into the fall, and in many articles and op-ed pieces in the education press, we have mainly focused on what was wrong with online teaching — everything from problems with student engagement to the dangers of co-option of teaching models by university administrations and the continued erosion of the status of teaching faculty.