First Paragraphs
The UCF University Writing Center (UWC) is a “full-service” writing center where graduate and undergraduate students come for help with all types of writing, both personal and academic, from all disciplines. During the fall 2005 semester, we began a pilot program—KnightOWL (named for our school’s mascot, the Knight)—for online consultations. Graduate consultants worked with a variety of graduate students from a variety of disciplines on their theses and dissertations via the online environment throughout the fall semester. In piloting KnightOWL, our goal was for consultants to continue to focus on “global” issues during the online chats, although we knew that many other successful OWLs use asynchronous methods for reviewing papers and that the online environment would pose unique challenges for writing consultants.
As the fall semester progressed, we were able to collect data that would help us draw conclusions about training consultants to work online via KnightOWL. Although KnightOWL is in its infancy, we have successfully expanded our online services to all of UCF’s 47,000 students, including those on regional and specialty campuses. Like KnightOWL itself, this study is in its infancy; however, we plan to use the figures presented here to provide direction as we help writing consultants embrace synchronous online consultations.
Citation Information
Type of Publication: Newsletter Article
Author: Rusty Carpenter
Year of Publication: 2007
Title: “Using ROCs to Inform New Training Methods for a ‘Growing’ OWL”
Publication: Writing Lab Newsletter, Volume 32, Issue 3
Page Range: 10-14