Strategies for successful multilingual online learning: Multimodal project design, peer feedback, and formative assessment

Principles of Rhetoric and Writing, a sophomore rhetoric course, is used to show how multimodal project design and formative learning and assessment strategies provided the much-needed motivation to make changes to the initial course design in order to ensure the inclusion of social justice education in an online course for Chinese native students. Multimodal projects encourage teachers to de-emphasize decontextualized standards and skills acquisition and support continuous revisions to an established curriculum and to established learning activities. In addition, formative assessment opportunities included in Principles of Rhetoric and Writing highlight the importance of incorporating text-based and multimodal composing to account for and include the national, social, cultural, racial, gendered, and educational backgrounds of students as well as the teacher.