ABSTRACT
This chapter describes content/course management systems (CMS) as a type of information communication technology (ICT) (see Grabill, 2003; Grabill & Hicks, 2005 for a discussion on the convention of this term) and how they have been used in delivering online courses in a professional and technical communication graduate program. Early discussions about the online teaching of writing courses often focused on the practical use of technology and how online learning compared and contrasted with face-to-face teaching and learning (as examples, see Mehlenbacher, Miller, Covington, & Larsen, 2000; Miller, 2001). The proliferation of online teaching and learning within colleges, universities, and organizations during the last decade is well documented in the journals of our field (see Blakelock & Smith, 2006). Discussing the use of Internet communication technologies to deliver these online courses as well as the implications and applications of this digital delivery in learning contexts are also certainly beginning to take place. For example, Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers, edited by Kelly Cargile Cook and Keith Grant-Davie (2005), focuses on important questions for scholar-teachers and presents best online education practices within technical writing programs. They write, "online education in the early 21st century is at a theory-building stage, a stage at which we need not only to take stock of what we are doing with the new technologies, and what we might do with them, but to also examine and discuss our rationales for those practices" (p. 2) (see also Hewitt & Ehmann, 2004). Within this context,
I have created several online courses informed by rhetorical theory and delivered using CMS.
