Description

Inscribe: A journal ojundergraduate student writing (http://inscribe.elc.polyu.edu.hk/) is a refereed online journal which publishes writing by HK PolyU undergraduate students: it was developed as an Objective of the English Language Centre's English Reading and Writing Requirement implemented during the four year curriculum, and supports the Hong Kong Polytechnic University's emphasis on cultivating a community of undergraduate writers internally, locally and abroad.

Evaluation 

Evaluations in the form of statistical information which can be gathered continuously over time and typically representative of "real world" data (Sanders & Hom, 1998) are potentially useful in extracting results which are objective, fair, and unbiased:

• Piwik statistics (Evaluation period: Aug - Oct 2014)

Piwik is an open source plugin added to the journal 's Wordpress system editor, and used to track statistical visitor information (such as visitor location, frequency and duration of visit, and website areas visited).

On the other hand, the "intangible, perishable, and heterogeneous" nature of educational services (Gruber, Thorsten, et ai, 2010) sometimes requires more subjective methods of measuring impact on student learning:

• Student surveys (Evaluation period: pre-project - Oct 2013; post-project - Oct 2014)

Both surveys were accessed via Blackboard and consisted ofclose-ended and open-ended questions: open-ended questions - or statements - mainly served to elicit elaborations for responses selected from multiple choice and multiple answer questions. The pre-project survey consisted of 12 primary questions and 7 follow up questions; and the post-project survey consisted of 6 primary questions and 6 follow up question s, with one of the multiple answer primary questions being a synthesis of student expectations drawn from the initial survey and used to ascertain student expectations met.

• Informal focus group meeting: tea reception (Evaluation period: 29 Aug 2014) 

The tea reception was an unintended focus group session which began as my show of appreciation to those individuals who were involved in the pilot project (RW staff, RW tutors, CAR teachers, 1nscribe staff, and authors) by inviting them to the Staff Club restaurant for an afternoon tea reception, lasting approximately an hour and a half. Several invaluable comments and suggestions were offered during the reception.
 

Findings

Site visitor's log (for the period 27 August - 31 October 2014)

• Site visited 1,370 times 
• Page viewed 2,344 times

Pre- and post-project surveys were conducted. 4 of the 12 student authors completed the pre-project survey. All said they were comfortable with a community of readers view and respond to their work and all felt that "well-developed arguments" was an important element in academic/ scholarly writing. They also found the initial tutoring consultation either helpful or every helpful. For the post-project survey, 2 out of 12 student authors responded. They agreed that their experience with Inscribe  has helped them with lifelong learning and one of them had submitted work to IEEE journals.

Focus group interviews were also conducted with 7 people, including English Language Centre Tutors, R&W teaching staff, CAR teachers and student authors, to collect feedback about the experience of the pilot issue of the journal and to collect ideas and suggestions about the future development of the journal.  

Impact on Student Learning

While student-authors initially had concerns regarding an online journal, due mainly to a having a preference for the more familiar, tangible, printed journal , this preference was no longer an issue: studentauthors felt every stage of the publication process was helpful, especially the writing consultations, which not only was a preliminary step each author was required to undertake prior to receiving the standard editors' and blind reviewers' feedback offered by journals, but is also a formative service offered by the English Language Centre to its financially supported students. It is quite probable that both writing consultations and the jo urnal publishing process serve as writing and reading services for students, and that the latter helps place the former into context, allowing our undergraduate students to experience their writing as more than a classroom product with a grade attached to it; to applying the skills learned from the publishing process to other areas of university life; and to envision future possibilities for their writing.

Additionally, even though the response turnout for the post-project survey was small, the project leader feels that given in a consequence-free environment, the feedback might not have been influenced by potential external factors and is representative of the journal's potential effectiveness.