I knew as soon as my students turned in their first papers this semester that I would need to come up with a new style of feedback for them. The juniors and seniors in RHE 309: The Rhetoric of Tourism write very differently from the freshmen and sophomores I worked with in RHE 306. I've spent very little of this Fall semester working on MLA format, grammar, and organization, and lots of time being impressed with how insightful, critical, and articulate these older college students are about the complex issues that come up in discussions about travel and tourism.

*The final unit of my RHE 309K: Rhetoric of Animal Rights course features an oral presentation based around a multimedia advocacy project that each student must design. As the major part of the evaluation, I create and use online polls (using tools such as SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics) that the students complete in real time after every presentation. Each poll asks four trait-centered questions, followed by a holistic evaluation, allowing for a variety of data combinations to see how students respond to each other’s work.

It's the end of the semester, and across the nation an all-too-familiar sight is littering the hallways of English departments: the box of student essays.  Sometimes it's an envelope, sometimes it's a stack of papers half-shoved into a mailbox or under a door.  But the sight of these final papers abandoned by their students and/or professors reinforces my conviction that it's time for us to move to digital submission.

This semester I wanted to develop the Mass Effect lesson I devised in the fall.