Why Your Words Matter: Making Lloyd Bitzer's Rhetorical Situation Work for Real-World Problems

Whether you're trying to convince city council members to fund homeless shelters or persuade investors to back your geothermal startup, you're entering what Lloyd Bitzer called a "rhetorical situation." Understanding this concept isn't just academic exercise—it's the difference between crafting messages that create change and ones that fall flat.

Bitzer argued that all meaningful communication emerges from specific situations that demand response. Think of it like this: somewhere out there, a problem exists that words can actually help solve. Your job is to figure out the precise combination of message, audience, and timing that will make things happen.

The Heart of It: Exigence

Exigence is the urgent problem demanding attention—the thing that makes communication necessary in the first place. It's not just any problem, but one that can be modified through discourse. When you see hundreds of people sleeping rough during a polar vortex, that's exigence. When a community sits on massive geothermal potential while still burning coal for electricity, that's exigence too.

The key is recognizing that not every problem creates productive exigence. Complaining about the weather won't change it, but demonstrating how extreme weather kills vulnerable populations can mobilize resources for emergency shelters.

Your People: Audience

Your audience consists of the specific people who can actually do something about your exigence. Notice we said "can"—not "should" or "might want to." For homelessness, your audience might include city planners with budget authority, not just compassionate citizens who lack decision-making power. For energy projects, you're targeting institutional investors with capital allocation authority, not environmental activists who already agree with you but can't write checks.

This audience analysis gets tricky because effective audiences often span different groups. Your geothermal pitch might need to convince both risk-averse pension fund managers and optimistic clean-tech venture capitalists. Each group brings different priorities, languages, and concerns to the same basic decision.

What's Holding You Back: Constraints

Constraints are the forces that both limit and shape your rhetorical choices. Some constraints restrict you—like budget limitations for homeless services or regulatory hurdles for energy projects. Others empower you—like existing infrastructure, sympathetic media coverage, or recent policy changes that create opportunity.

Smart communicators work with constraints rather than against them. If voters just rejected a tax increase, maybe your homeless shelter proposal emphasizes private partnerships and cost savings instead of additional funding. If oil prices just spiked, your geothermal project suddenly looks more economically attractive to risk-averse investors.

You in the Mix: The Rhetor

As the rhetor, you bring credibility, expertise, and relationships to the situation. A formerly homeless person advocating for services carries different authority than a academic researcher—both valuable, but in different ways. An engineer with drilling experience speaks differently about geothermal potential than a recent MBA, and audiences respond accordingly.

Your identity shapes what you can say effectively and what audiences will take seriously. Sometimes this means acknowledging your limitations and building coalitions with voices that complement yours.

Making It Real: Discourse

Finally, discourse is your actual message—the speech, report, proposal, or presentation that responds to the exigence. Effective discourse feels inevitable given the situation, audience, and constraints you're working within. It doesn't feel forced or generic.

A successful homeless services proposal might combine compelling personal stories (responding to the human exigence) with detailed budget analysis (addressing fiscal constraints) while speaking the language of municipal efficiency (connecting with city manager audiences). Similarly, a geothermal investment pitch weaves together environmental urgency, regulatory advantages, and projected returns in ways that make the opportunity feel obvious rather than hopeful.

The magic happens when all five elements align. Your urgent problem meets the right audience through carefully crafted discourse that works within real constraints while leveraging your authentic voice. That's when words actually change the world.

How to Effectively Design Good Generative AI-Using Student Assignments: Steps, Strategy, and an Example

If it were not bad enough to combat essays purchased from Course Hero, GradeSaver, or one of the other paper mills that purchase student essays, now one has to worry about papers generated by large language models such as ChatGPT, Scribe, Google Gemini, CoPilot or others.  Generative AI tools are being developed for specific topics or domains, and the assumption is, at least from a student’s perspective, that the product will be well written and accurate, or at least well written and accurate enough to merit a passing grade. 

As an instructor who develops, teaches, and grades courses and coursework for online courses hosted on Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, or even Google Classroom, this is a challenge you can’t afford to ignore, and an opportunity that can transform your entire teaching philosophy. 

https://www.amazon.com/Moodle-Learning-Course-Development-instructional/dp/180107903X 

WHAT INFORMATION IS USED TO TRAIN THE AI LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL?

What data sets are used to train the generative AI algorithms?  Let’s take the case of American literature. I would automatically assume that the first repositories to be ingested would be open access repositories such as Project Gutenberg and Archive.com.  Those would be primary texts for the most part. Then, secondary texts would be incorporated, which would consist of journal articles. Tertiary texts would also be used, which would include encyclopedias. While there may be some question about intellectual property and the right to use the materials, there would be few questions about the integrity of such materials, gleaned as it were, from peer-reviewed and quality assured primary sources, peer-reviewed journals and monographs, and peer-reviewed encyclopedias. 

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to materials about American literature that one can access through the Internet. There are blog posts, online magazines, repositories of articles from study guide providers such as Study.com, Sophia Learning, Shmoop.com, and many more. These resources may be a bit repetitive and not particularly original, but perhaps harmless in the overall scheme of things.  If anything, they may skew the results to bland and formulaic papers. 

LOTS OF BAD APPLES

What happens, however, when these AI bots ingest the massive repositories of essays which have been compiled by companies such as Course Hero, Grade Saver, and others?  Is there any quality control at all? Some of the sites encourage students to sell their term papers for $5 each. Is there any quality control?  Would the evaluator or screener check for accuracy, bias, originality, and innovative thinking? Would the screener be able to differentiate between a tired, flat, biased, inaccurate paper and a fresh, innovative, and accurate one? 

It is quite possible that the sheer volume of low-quality term papers, biased or error-riddled blog posts, student-shared material, unrefereed conference proceedings and “gray” literature could exceed the high-quality, peer-reviewed material by many orders of magnitude. 

REQUIRING STUDENTS TO USE CHAT GPT, KNOWING THE RESULTS COULD BE ROTTEN? 

Learning how to use generative AI as a helpful tool and understanding its limitations and pitfalls is probably a more pragmatic and useful approach than trying to ban it altogether. Further, if students learn how to use AI tools in their coursework where they receive feedback and guidance, it is likely that they will be able to more effectively use the tool in their professional lives. 

Instructional designers and instructors who understand how results are likely to be generated can design assignments that require students to incorporate their own unique vantage points, prior knowledge, experience, and insights rather than simply producing a bland summary or compendium of the blandest, least thought-provoking or original material that responds to the prompt. 

FERRETING OUT THE FLAWS WHILE ASKING, “WHAT’S GOOD IN HERE?”

Instructors can develop assignments that actually require students to use a generative AI tool, and then they can ask them to critique the response.  

Here’s a sample assignment: 

Please write an essay that identifies the possible themes in Emerson’s essay, “Circles,” and explains how they relate to American Transcendentalism. 

When I fed the prompt to ChatGPT, it churned out a six-paragraph essay in about 3 seconds. It sported a nice, clear thesis statement, a clear definition of American Transcendentalism, and then proposed several themes, and provided evidence, including quotes. On first glance, it seemed to be a very serviceable essay. 

However, upon closer examination, it was clear that the essay was pretty facile, and felt very derivative. It did not provide citations for the quotes, and the explanations around each of the quotes and the themes did not go into any depth and tended to repeat each other. There was no deeper probing of American Transcendentalism, nor was there any historical context. 

One could argue that the prompt should have asked for historical context, and could even be interesting and ask for connections to a darker, more ominous underbelly of what seemed, on the face of it, to be an expansive, all-encompassing dream of harmony and unity. However, there is no investigation of the philosophical or ideological underpinnings, nor any sense of how American Transcendentalism was popular because it uniquely reinforced and even expanded the authority of those who already possessed it.  

The students could be asked to identify the weaknesses of the Chat GPT essay, and to explain when and how the responses were cliché, facile, or derivative of what one would expect to see in an encyclopedia or generic study guide, and they do not encourage critical thinking or a look at “Circles” through a new and innovative vantage point. 

It would be very nice for students to work on the critique in a collaborative workspace – for example, in a shared document, where each could highlight and comment on the ChatGPT-generated essay. 

AN INSTRUCTOR CHALLENGE: ASSIGNMENTS THAT DEVELOP CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS AND CREATIVITY

It is possible to write assignments and paper prompts that encourage students to incorporate their unique views, experiences, and prior knowledge.  While some may think that this subjectivity would make it difficult to assess the work, in reality, just the opposite is the case. 

For example, for an essay on American literature, a rubric would require the student to accurately describe what the text is about and also the main themes and characters as required by the prompt.  The prompt should also, however, require the student to think critically and ask questions that would relate to their own experiences and perceptions. They could also be asked to apply the concepts to a current situation. The students would be evaluated on their creativity and problem-solving skills as well as critical thinking. 

To apply this to the case of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Circles,” a prompt could look something like this: 

Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Emerson’s ideas about agency as expressed in his essay, “Circles,” and describe how you’ve seen examples of the thinking expressed in your own life or the world at large.  Describe mid 19th-century American Transcendentalism and how it must have sounded to different groups of Americans: wealthy land owners, men wanting to move West for wealth and adventure, women in America, Native Americans, African-American slaves and freedmen, Irish indentured servants, Mexicans living in parts of Texas that were a part of Mexico before the War of 1848, and children. 

Granted, the new prompt is much, much more complex, but you probably get the picture, and can see how writing prompts to outwit the  AI bot is fun and engaging, while also encouraging collaborative activities and deeper learning. 

THE ROAD AHEAD

Colleges and universities are grappling with ChatGPT, Scribe, Google Gemini, CoPilot, and other generative AI platforms and tools.  While there is the chance of rampant violations of academic integrity, we are in the early stages of development and now is the time to envision new and productive pedagogical approaches that are ideal for adult learners and can help develop creativity, critical thinking skills and confidence.  

When To Use Visuals in Your Report, Presentation, or Informational Social Media

What’s the quickest way to “Death By PowerPoint”?  Put together a presentation that consists only of bullet points.  Conversely, a presentation or report that consists only of visuals may seem superficial and confusing.  So, when should you use visuals? How should they be placed for maximum impact and effectiveness?

Lime or Bird? You decide.... Mexico City 2019 (photo credit: Susan Nash)

 What Is a Visual?

Generally speaking, a visual is anything that is pictoral, graphic, or semiotic.  A visual can be composed of text (a sign, etc.).  Generally speaking, visuals are graphics that may include diagrams, drawings, photographs, charts, graphs, figures, and more.

According to Patrick Cavenaugh, visual elements within a report or presentation are highly effective because they both capture the viewer’s attention and then direct or guide it. The visual architecture creates a process that then continues to arouse interest and direct attention from visual stimulus to visual stimulus (Cavanaugh, 2011).

 Video on using visuals:

When to Use a Visual

Think of your overall goal or objective in writing your report or creating your presentation.  Then, consider your audience.  What will they relate to? What will they expect?  What will resonate with their values and beliefs?

Keep in mind the following purposes of visuals:

* Instruct or persuade
* Draw attention to something immediately important
* Provide information quickly
* Engage the audience
* Keep the audience focused
* Provide accurate information concisely

Then, as you organize the content, think of the sequencing and space out the visual elements in order to maintain an optimized pace and to keep attention focused.

Roses before the storm in Mexico City. Photo credit: Susan Nash

 Audience Perspective

As you prepare your visuals, and determine where to place them, it is useful to keep in mind the following questions that your audience will have as they approach the material.

*Why is the visual here?
*What does it tell me?
* Which aspect of the visual is most important?
* Where, exactly, should I focus?
* What do these numbers or statistics mean?
* What should I be thinking or doing?
* Where does the graphic begin? Where does the information end?

How Visuals Work

Make the abstract concrete.  Your audience can more easily relate the content to their own experience.

Analyze relationships.  If the visuals appear on the same page, or next to each other, it is fairly easy to discuss how they relate to each other.  The relationships can be grasped at a glance with skillful use of design, color, pattern, and placement.

Facilitate comparisons. With visuals, it is easy to discuss to things, particularly when you locate them side by side.

Emphasize key points.  You can make key points clear using visuals.

Transcend language barriers.  It is possible to create visuals that can be communicated across language and cultural differences.

A memorial for a man who drowned in the Arkansas River, Tulsa, Oklahoma (photo credit: Susan Nash)

 What Types of Visuals to Consider

Tables.  Tables display data (as number or words) in rows and columns for comparison. 

Photographs.  Photographs can help document a place, person, or thing, and they can help emphasize the application of a concept in real life. Be sure to give proper attribution to the graphics you use, and to obtain permission.  If you use graphics that have a Creative Commons license, be sure to give it the correct attribution.

Graphs.  Graphs translate numbers into shapes, shades, and patterns by plotting two or more data sets on a coordinate system.

Maps.  Maps or grids are very helpful when discussing locations, demographics, and even the results of data mining (for example, for marketing).

Charts.  Charts depict relationships without the use of a coordinate system by using circles, rectangles, arrows, connecting lines, and other design elements.

Graphs.  Graphic illustrations are pictorial devices for helping readers visualize what something looks like, how it's done, how it happens, or where it's located. 

Maintaining Effectiveness With Visuals
After you’ve analyzed your goals and objectives, and have determined where and when to use visuals, be sure to let another person take a look at your presentation or report.  Peer review can be quite helpful – they can help you gain insight into how diverse learning styles and preferences can be accommodated by using visuals. You can also get an idea if your visuals are of the appropriate complexity.

Reference

Cavanaugh, P. (2011) Visual cognition. Vision Research. 51 (13): 1538-51. 

Interview with Shaunak Roy, Yellowdig - Innovators in E-Learning Series

People learn from each other and in online courses, the quality of interactions between students in their collaborative activities and with instructors is very important. Welcome to an interview with Shaunak Roy, founder and CEO of Yellowdig, a social learning platform that has been developed with the goal of enhancing the learning experience.

1.     What is your name and your relation to e-learning?
My name is Shaunak Roy, and I am Founder and CEO of Yellowdig, a social learning platform for education. I started Yellowdig with the fundamental believe that there is something magical about peer learning. Casual conversations, exchange of ideas, or occasional debates help form meaningful bonds with other learners, which make learning more fun, and real. As I look back into my own MIT and IIT days, I realize that I have learned as much from my peers as I have from my favorite professors. Some of those bonds have lasted well beyond those formative years and have morphed into lifelong friendships.

Shaunok on the video program, LifeEdge

2.     What is Yellowdig and what does it do? 
Yellowdig is a social learning platform that merges and combines the power of group learning and rapidly expanding real-time content from the internet into a seamless and easy to use learning platform. Yellowdig is Software as a Service (SaaS) that integrates into all Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and Portals to offer 1-click socially intuitive groups for a variety of use inside and outside of courses. For example, Yellowdig can be added in an individual course within minutes to offer a FERPA compliant, private and moderated collaboration forum for your course.

3.     How is it different than other collaboration apps?
The advantages of Yellowdig over other popular collaboration APPs such as Facebook Groups, Slack, and Yammer are the following :

·       1-Click Signup : Learners join the platform by clicking on a “Yellowdig” button in the Learning Management System (LMS), no separate registration required

·       Automatic grading and gradebook sync : Instructors can set up a points system to encourage learner participation, that is fully customizable from course to course.

·       Privacy and moderation : All the content remain private to a course and can be moderated by the Instructors and admins encouraging deeper and authentic participation.

·       Customization : There are many out-of-the-box and  custom configuration options available to support a variety of use cases and learning needs

4.     How are universities using the app? 
Yellowdig is bring used by over 40+ institutions and 140,000 learners across online, blended and residential courses and MOOCs.

5.     Many collaboration applications are not used in courses because they require so much extra time from the instructor.  How does Yellowdig approach that problem? 
We recognize that engaging students through prompt driven discussion and manual grading of discussion posts is a major time sync for instructors. In fact, this type of discussions tend to lower the quality of engagement as it feels less like organic sharing of ideas and more like assignments for the learner. Yellowdig, though peer driven discussion and automatic grading, substantially reduces instructor time commitment while improving both quality and quantity of engagement.

You can refer to our blog for many stories from instructors on how Yellowdig has helped them improve their instruction without increasing workload.

6.  What are your plans for the future?
We plan to continue to build our vision of making learning more engaging and real-world. We plan to add more features and data capabilities to help instructors and students get more from their learning experiences, from anywhere, at anytime and from any device. Our competitive advantage is our focus on working closely with our instructor community to co-curate the future of eLearning.

Check out Shaunak Roy on LifeEdge! https://youtu.be/SI-Y-bsHylg 

Strategies for Repurposing Content to Build High-Value Online Educational Offerings

One of the best methods for building revenue and sales for technical products and services is to provide education and training. However, it’s not always easy to organize the training, or to know what to offer. There are advantages and disadvantages for each form of education. They can be standalone, and they can also be bundled to create online units that can be place in sequences to help master a topic, or to provide review for those that require complementary skills or content.

Assuring the Best Granularity / Building Block approach
--Training and professional development content
--Identify purposes
--White Papers
--Podcasts / Audio
--Webinars
--Training manuals
--Stand-alone assessments (test your knowledge, etc.)
--Stages and sequences – tie to individual’s career development
--Types of content and how to match to products

sketch by susan smith nash

Steps for Selecting the Best Speakers/Instructors and Subject Matter Experts for Your Program

·    --Identify what you want to accomplish

·      --Is this a one-off or part of a series?

·      --How advanced are your learners?

·         --How technical is your instructor?

·               -- Match-making: your instructor, the style, the assessment, the materials
          _Use a Guru! 

·               -- How will your SME perform?  How will the “face” deliver the content?

·               -- It is a lot more than content: sequence, style, clarity, charisma, chunking, scaffolding, assessment, mastery learning, and more

     How do you plan to market your course? The best of the best?

·         --Guide on the side? Self-Directed? Independent “Discovery” learning?

·         --Fail-safe your experts: Backup texts and assessments

How to Select the Best LMS or VLE for your Organization  

·        --Learning Management System? Or, Virtual Learning Environment?

·        -- What’s the difference between an LMS and a VLE?

·         --What are you using your e-learning for? What are your goals and overall purpose?

·        -- How many people will be using the training?  Students?

·        --How much input will the internal administrators, SMEs, etc. have?

·        -- What do you have to show credentialing or regulatory bodies in order to achieve compliance?

 
Concluding Thoughts 
Course and curriculum needs change. Careers, jobs, and skills paths change. The person who was learning to program Ruby on Rails and Java yesterday for a shopping cart application could be cryptocurrency mining for Bitcoin tomorrow. Make sure that your approach is flexible.

Quality Checklist for Training and Professional Development Courses for Associations

The members of associations and professional societies share common goals and interests; the most important of these tends to be professional advancement, enhanced knowledge, and networking.

At the center of achieving professional development is often formal training taught by experts, with credits officially awarded at the end, and records maintained by the organization.

Because the organizations represent the profession, they are under an ethical as well as a practical obligation to maintain high quality. However, it’s not always easy to develop a course template or set of criteria.

For convenience, here is a quick checklist of content and quality attributes to be sure to include in your courses.  Keep in mind that this is simply a quick checklist. If you would like a more detailed description, and an explanation of how to build the course itself for online, on-site, or hybrid delivery, there are a number of in-depth guides which I refer to at the end of this post.

Checklist of Content and Quality Attributes
Here are the essential elements that you need to include in your courses.  You may wish to formalize the list, format, fonts, etc in what is commonly referred to as a Course Design Document (CDD), which also includes instructional design guidelines. 
At the same time, you may wish to create a template.

•    Title of the course and the reason for its relevance
•    Learning objectives:  What will the measurable outcomes be?  What should the learner be able to do or demonstrate at the end of the course? What are the criteria for success?
•    Overview / brief description of the course
•    Bullet point of topics covered
•    Course materials:  Map them to the learning objectives

        * Main content
        * Engagers
        * Check your knowledge / interactive activities

•    Collaborative and individual activities:  Map them to the learning objectives
•    Assessment strategy:

•     Activities in course – do they count?  How much? Why?
•     Class participation and collaborations – How do they count?
•     Final projects or exams

• Rubric
• Minimum passing score
• Practice for multiple choice

Checklist of Instructor Qualifications 
In order to satisfy quality standards, it is important that your instructor and main subject matter expert(s) and that they have pertinent experience.
•    Relevant Experience
•    Educational qualifications
•    Experience in instruction

Checklist for Utilizing Learning Analytics and Effective Evaluations to Ensure High Quality Training:
As you review your course and the way you anticipate that the students will interact and engage with it, take a moment to develop a profile of your learners, their attributes, and learning goals. What are their needs?  Understanding the audience will help shape the following:

• Learning Outcomes
• Course outcomes
• Course Design Document to tie LOs to content and assessment
• Types of analytics that are available
• Mastery learning
• Time on task
• Collaborations
• Discussion
• Formative evaluations
• Engaging analytics (Did You Know?)
• Summative evaluations
• Assessments tying to learning outcomes

As you plan the courses, be sure to make sure that they are up to date, relevant, and they address current and emerging needs and trends.

References (please contact Susan for a free pdf of each).

Nash, Susan S. (2009) E-Learner Survival Guide. Norman, OK: Texture Press.

PDF (free)
http://zenzebra.net/elearner-survival-guide.pdf

Nash, Susan S. (2013) E-Learning Success: From Courses to Careers. Norman, OK: Texture Press.
https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Success-Courses-Careers/dp/0985008105