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As some of you know, we are planning an online seminar in
help file development this Winter.
However, I would like you to consider something more
expansive. Presently, our masters program is directed
specifically at working professionals who want to bump their
credentials, improve their understanding of using rhetoric,
learn Multimedia, etc. (This includes TWs who don't have
English degrees.) But I have begun looking for funding to
build an experimental program as follows. Please, as
working professionals, let me know how you think this would
work, and how you might change it. We may have the
opportunity here to build the ideal program for working
professional writers.
I want to put all of our seminars and all other classes that
don't require F2F interaction on line. However, there are
some classes that demand one-on-one. To deal with these, we
would do two things. have extensive one-week summer
workshops for credit (during vacation time) and have
graduate students attend here for a single semester. To
help cover their expenses, these students would teach some
of the lower level technical communication classes.
Online classes could include Help File Design, Copy Editing,
Research Techniques, History of English, Audience Analysis,
etc.
Face to face classes might include Multimedia, Document
management, Visual Design for Major Publications, etc.
My questions are as follows:
Could you attend such a program?
Would you consider attending such a program?
Do you think your companies would help you with tuition and
expenses? Could you get a semester off from your company to
attend the program?
If you had to do the F2F in one week segments would that be
ok even if it took a year or two more to do the
program?
What would you change that would make the program more
workable (remembering that our biggest problem is
having enough faculty)?
Please respond off the list. I am embarrassed by the
bandwidth I take up now.
fahailey -at- wpo -dot- hass -dot- usu -dot- edu
David Hailey
Assistant Professor
Professional Writing/Hypermedia
Department of English
Utah State University
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