Community, context, and distance education

This paper makes recommendations about teaching online professional courses to students lacking relevant professional experience. The course was on ethics and professional writing. Students substituted personal ethics for professional ethics and relied on the skills they had in textual explication and narrative development to defend personal judgments. Instead of putting greater emphasis on theory and formal analysis, the author recommends simulating the experience of professional writing by relying on case study methods, peer critiques, and Internet resources, such as discussion boards where professional writers gossip, complain, and argue about their professional experience.