An online writing support initiative for first year Information Technology students

A perennial difficulty for first year students – one often viewed by them as an unimportant annoyance – is the need to handle sources and cite correctly. Any serious institutional attempt to address this issue in an interesting way is an enterprise concerned with motivation, as well as curriculum innovation. This paper reports on a collaboration between language and learning staff and a Computer Science subject leader to develop a web-based tutorial which provides tools for students to use to develop, inter alia, skills in using sources. The tutorial seeks to provide online learning support for interpreting an IT assignment topic, extracting information from sources, and integrating the material into a report with the support of online lexical tools. The project’s origins lie in the evidence from previous years ’ experience that first-year students find this a particularly challenging task