Instructional technology and faculty development: How iWRITE challenges course design and teaching methods

Use of the web-enabled software iWRITE in courses across the disciplines at several Canadian universities demonstrates that implementing instructional technology can lead faculty members to reconsider and reformulate their teaching methods. iWRITE operates in course-specific sites. It supports the integration of writing into disciplinary courses by displaying examples of past student work alongside grading criteria and instructor comments. Instructors unfamiliar with learning theory that validates the use of models may initially fear student copying or distrust the adequacy of student samples as guides, but many have rethought their assignments and strengthened other methods of instruction to take advantage of this method. In co-taught courses, selecting benchmark papers and formulating grading criteria requires examination of disciplinary values and frank discussion of standards. The effort of writing clear comments on the student samples also requires explicit formulation of disciplinary assumptions about the nature of knowledge and the relationship between writing and thinking.