Thesis Writer

Digitalisation of writing instruction and practice

Christian Rapp & Jakob Ott, ZHAW

A key artifact of all academic effort is text, and students have to be introduced to the art of academic writing in order to produce such text. Bachelor's and Master's dissertations, as well as Doctoral theses, are the most challenging genres in this area. Thesis supervision is not only a challenge for students, but also for their supervisors and institutions given the resource constraints governing the higher education sector. As a reacting to this situation, we developed Thesis Writer (TW), a bilingual web-based learning environment to support academic writing instruction. TW supports the writing of a proposal through to the actual thesis in four areas.

Within a current EU-funded project, we are considerably expanding the functionality of TW. Furthermore, given that TW runs as a Software-as-a-Service, TW allows for a fine granular study of writing processes and user system interaction using logfile data. Apart from research purposes, we provide dashboard data to users of TW in order to support their learning process.

In this demonstration, we will briefly discuss the rationale underlying TW's construction and the respective requirements prior to the demonstration We will also present and discuss our first-hand experiences and research of the newly-implemented functionality. As a final step, we will highlight some of the effects that digitalisation has on writing processes, its instruction and consider the research opportunities provided by TW in the area of learning and writing analytics.