Devising Online Writing Services: An Exploration of an Academic Writing Class

Abstract

As a part of a longitudinal study on the development of a web-based integrated writing service (WISSE), this article explores the most needed technological services in assisting students in their academic writing. This is a response to the widely available yet unintegrated online applications that have the potential to assist students’ writing. This study involved four students, four teachers, and two stakeholders of academic writing classes at a prominent university in Indonesia. The Nominal Group Technique (NGT) was applied to explore beneficial features that could be embedded in the WISSE by taking into account the problems, solutions, and roles of online applications in academic writing. The collected field notes from the NGT were then analyzed using thematic analysis. The results revealed that the most needed online applications to feature in the WISSE are those that assist students during the outlining process, check for grammatical accuracy, and communicate ideas through face-to-face conferences with teachers. The demand for these features stem from the necessity of teacher feedback, especially in ensuring the coherence and validity of their ideas which is especially crucial for students since the online applications are considered lacking in providing such feedback. These findings suggest improvements in how and at which stage(s) feedback is provided throughout the WISSE learning process. The results of this study focally emphasize the importance of teachers’ presence to provide human-based feedback to cater to students’ critical thinking through the use of online writing assistants.