All my teaching materials are available for adaptation & reuse.
If you do use them, let me know at lauren.cagle@uky.edu!

UG Digital Studies Course: Writing Markup

This course explores the history, theory, and application of markup languages, which provide the semantic structure governing our digital world. Understanding markup languages’ affordances and constraints enables understanding of rhetorical choices available across digital platforms and compositional contexts. For the major assignment, students code their own digital portfolio.

Communicating the Value of Sustainability

This course draws on research in rhetoric, environmental communication, & policy studies to provide 1) an understanding of the challenges & opportunities for communicating about sustainability; 2) a theoretical framework for analyzing communication challenges; & 3) practice at applying that knowledge to the production of written documents & digital artifacts.

Expository Writing: Writing for the Web

This fully online writing-intensive course teaches the fundamentals of writing in various digital spaces, including medium.com, Twitter, and Amazon book reviews. Using rhetorical concepts like kairos, ethos, and topoi, students investigate genres and discourse communities in these spaces. Students read, write, and review each other's work.

Advanced Tech Comm: Digital Accessibility for Disabled Users

In this service-learning course with the Kentucky Division for Air Quality, students learned about accessibility standards and how to ensure texts, videos, and other materials meet and exceed those legal standards. For the final project, students co-wrote user guides for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet on remediating PowerPoints, PDFs, and data visualizations to be accessible.

Visual Rhetoric for Technical Communication

This course is about studying the persuasive aspects of visual texts; "text" is broadly construed to include documents, letterforms, films, buildings, video games, photographs, and more. Course assignments involve reading theory and making things in order to produce and complicate ideas about how visuals are meaningful, affective, and persuasive.
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Technical Communication for Health Sciences

This course exposes students to a variety of communicative means for expressing technical and semi-technical information in service of effective, efficient, and patient-focused health and healthcare systems. Assignments include patient communications, elevator pitches, and white papers on health concepts and technologies.

Writing in
the Social Sciences

This course focuses on the culturally and historically conditioned ways in which social scientific genres and arguments play out and construct knowledge in actual practice. The basis for the course is a theoretical understanding of genres and subgenres (in the social sciences and elsewhere) as typified responses to recurring situations shaped by field-specific norms and expectations.

New Media for Technical Communication

 This course uses service-learning projects to teach contexts, research methods, and genres of technical communication in software development contexts. Iterations of the course have focused on 1) system requirements, use cases, and test cases; 2) agile project management; and 3) UX testing and design. Assignments include written and oral presentations.

Communication for Engineers​ 

  This course focuses on the communication concerns of engineers, including the content, organization, format, and style of specific types of engineering documents and oral presentation skills. Course assignments address ABET learning outcomes focused on communication, ethics, and multidisciplinary work.

lauren.cagle@uky.edu | 859.257.1115