University faculty created the Llano Estacado Writers' Alliance (LEWA) in response to improving the quality and rigor of online doctoral programs. The goal for LEWA was to promote meaningful academic writing and transform doctoral students' identities as agentic academic writers. After LEWA's inception, the authors incorporated the perspectives of their alumni and advanced doctoral students to help address students' needs. This chapter documents the four-year journey of forming LEWA and developing new approaches to mentoring online doctoral students. Specifically, the authors recount the evolution from the faculty-led, week-long summer intensives that addressed students' anxieties and uncertainties about the doctoral program to the writing intensives that were more student centered, responsive, and primarily focused on the mores of academic writing. Results demonstrated the benefits of professor-led and peer-led networks in developing students' sense of belonging, sense of accountability to their peers, and a sense of self-worth as capable academic writers.
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Online doctoral programs have become increasingly popular over the last decade. Interest in these programs has grown because they are flexible, convenient, and appeal to working professionals. These programs are not only attractive to traditional full-time students seeking positions in higher education, but also non-traditional students interested in earning a degree to further their current career (Ewing et al., 2012; Radda & Mandernach, 2012). This new student profile has flooded the enrollment stream of doctoral programs and will likely continue to do so, requiring university faculty to reconsider the purpose, value, and nature of online doctoral education (Thompson, Ballanger, & Templeton, 2018). As a result, university educators need to re-examine how online doctoral students are mentored in ways that accommodate their needs for distance education and their more pragmatic approaches to research while maintaining rigorous standards and expectations commensurate with traditional norms of academia.
A doctoral program is a lengthy, self-directed pursuit that requires students to possess dispositions of independence, curiosity, and purpose (Gardner, et al., 2007; Nettle & Millett, 2006). It is common for students to initially approach doctoral education as if it were a continuation of their previous educational experiences (Kirkpatrick 2019; Radda & Mandernach, 2012). Beginning coursework in a doctoral program tends to reflect this stance as well through foundational, introductory courses. Throughout all coursework, students complete assignments in a fixed timeframe dictated by course structures and due dates. This traditional structure of foundational coursework as well as the timing and scaffolding of course assignments imparts a gradual release of responsibility leading to an expectation of doctoral students becoming independent scholars. Despite such a plan, when students begin to write a dissertation, they are often at a loss of how to purposefully chart a course for their own learning and writing (Ewing et al., 2012; Radda & Mandernach, 2012). Because of their multiple occupational, social, and family obligations as well as their physical distance from the university campus, this phenomenon is compounded for online students who receive fewer opportunities than their face-to-face counterparts to participate in informal mentoring over academic writing (Fedynich & Bain, 2011; Kirkpatrick, 2019). For example, online doctoral students receive fewer opportunities to collaborate with peers and faculty on research projects and subsequent manuscript development (Fedynich & Bain, 2011). Similarly, they have fewer opportunities to observe how research is carried out from inception of an idea to publishing findings, and receive infrequent opportunities for feedback on their writing outside of coursework (Barry, 2007; Kirkpatrick, 2019).