————— also please make sure W r i t i n g

Please adjust the paper to take into account these comments:

There is no executive summary, which was requested as part of the assignment. You should also consider separating analysis/findings from recommendations so that the various elements of your report are more clearly identifiable, as suggested by the assignment document.

This is the prompt (please keep in mind the paper is completed so not much has to be changed, just the comments stated above):

For the second major assignment, we will continue the exploration of remote teaching, based on what you’ve learned through your own experience, through your analysis of journals, through your reading of other people’s key theme documents in peer review, and through your discussion with classmates. The first document you wrote was a discussion of themes that you found in your analysis of the journal materials. The second document, for this assignment, is a report to the university on the experience of remote teaching, with a set of recommendations for both technological and policy solutions that you think the university should implement to smooth remote teaching in the future. As throughout this class, you should imagine that you have been recruited as an organizational IT consultant, using your knowledge of organizational practice, gleaned from the lessons of this class, to provide a service to your client, UC Irvine.

As with Assignment 1, we’ll do this in stages — first, a drafting stage; then a peer review stage; and then a revision stage. Weeks 7 and 8 will be the drafting stage; peer review will happen during week 9; and you’ll have week 10 to revise based on feedback. (These reports are longer, so you’ll have just one other report to review in the peer review stage.)

The analysis that you provided in the prior assignment forms the basis for this one. It is fine to reuse and restate that analysis, although you should revise it in light of the shift of audience (from me, to the university administration). Your document should comprise the following elements:

1. Executive summary (a one-page summary of your findings and recommendations).
2. Statement of the context and an explanation of the data sources that you are using.
3. Analysis of the data.
4. Specific recommendations for the university to implement.

Items (3) and (4) should be the bulk of the report. It should be written in a formal tone. The projected document length is 3500-4500 words.

For this part of the assignment, 2.1, you should generate a first draft of this document for peer review. That is due on Sunday May 24th. As with the first writing assignment, that’s a strict deadline, since the peer review process will begin automatically once the due date passes. Also like the first writing assignment, this draft won’t be graded.

More guidance about the paper:

The paper is already completed so these are just so you understand the specific layout of the assignment

First, I had noted that you didn’t need to bother explaining to me in the first assignment that we were engaged in remote teaching and what I’d asked you to write about. (Some of you did anyway, which is fine.) This time, though, since you are writing for a different audience, you will need to explain a little more about the context in which you’re writing (ie, that you’ve been asked to make recommendations for learning and teaching in the face of remote operations) and what material you’re drawing on (journals, your own experiences, other things, as applicable).

Second, the recommendations that you offer are going to drive things. Your report is building towards a series of recommendations you make about how to address the organizational challenges of remote teaching and learning. So when I’m asking you to discuss your data and analysis, it would be sensible to focus these on things that lead towards or justify the specific recommendations that you are going to offer.

Third, although I was asking you to focus on discourse models in the first assignment, that’s not a consideration here. I’m going to guess that the Vice Chancellor isn’t terribly interested in those. So you do not have to present your recommendations in terms of discourse analysis. (Maybe the discourse analysis you’ve done offers particular insight that you want to share; that’s fine, of course. But it’s not required.) I’m guessing that this will make this assignment easier; you’re not being graded on the specific mode of analysis that you adopted.

Fourth, the tone should be formal, communicative, and practical.

Although I’m asking you to imagine that the report would be forwarded to the Vice Chancellor, you should couch your recommendations and comments in the third person (ie, say “the university should…” rather than “you should…”).

In the first assignment, because you were doing a discourse analysis, I asked you to work specifically with the journal entries that were assigned. You can certainly use those again, although you can also draw on other data sources, including your own experience. We all know much more about remote teaching than we did at the start of the course — and you guys know more about it than I do because you’ve been experiencing even more of it than I have! So feel free to draw on those experiences too, and on what you’ve heard from your colleagues. In particular, you have been in multiple classes and so I imagine that you can compare experiences of classes taught in different ways, classes with different kinds of content, and so on. You can certainly make use of that.

It’s fine to reuse ideas from the first assignment. You don’t need a whole new set of ideas (although your own thinking might have evolved). But even if you are going to explore some of the same themes, you probably can’t just cut-and-paste from the old document, because the frame, the tone, and the focus will be different now.

I’m asking you to write an executive summary. It’s fine that it repeats material from elsewhere in the document; in fact, I’d expect it to. (It’s a summary, after all. Although it goes at the start of the document, I recommend that you write it last. When I say it should be a page, I mean, no more than a page.

I don’t have strong preferences about format. If you’re looking for guidance, I’m expecting probably a single-spaced document with ~1 inch margins and ~11pt text. I’ve given you a word count range rather than a page range so that it’s format-independent.

——–I HAVE ATTACHED THE COMPLETED ASSIGNMENT TO THIS POST, PLEASE JUST ADJUST IT TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE COMMENTS I PROVIDED IN THE “Please adjust the paper to take into account these comments:” SECTION ABOVE—————

ALSO PLEASE MAKE SURE THE DOCUMENT IS NOT ABOVE THE 4500 WORD COUNT LENGTH AFTER THE CHANGES