Classes that participate in the IEDP usually emphasize one or more of these goals.

In the IEDP, students join email lists or web-based discussion forums where they raise and debate issues of concern to them. With each posting they face many rhetorical challenges as they explore ideas with others and try to turn the attention of readers to their issue and to their stance on an issue. They try to understand what kinds of appeals and evidence gain attention, have credibility, and are persuasive. They learn how each message creates its own ethos--intentionally or unintentionally. Also, they may come face to face with the temptation to be rude, insulting, or destructive of responses with which they disagree, and they must decide the most appropriate responses to such writing. In the process, students put into action the study of rhetorical principles, along with theories of argumentation and discourse.

In the IEDP, students find that the boundaries of their single classrooms are extended by the multi-class network. They write to a wide diversity of students from different institutions and geographic areas--students with a range of characteristics in terms of race and ethnicity, class, gender, age, and sexual orientation. As the exchanges continue, students may explore their own expectations and prejudices about "others," and they may explore the unexamined sources of their own identity formation and culture.

In the IEDP, students’ posts receive immediate responses from an audience. As they continue in an extended exchange, students have the opportunity to use their readers’ responses as creative input as they draft, revise, and "publish" their posts. They can study what a particular set of readers care about, what they already know about the topic, what they do not know, and towards what end they, as authors, would like to move or affect this audience. In order to achieve this end, they can grow sensitive to the issues and ideas that gain the attention of this audience, to the evidence and values that matter to this audience, and to the language and tone of voice which gain their respect. At the same time, students discover their own gaps in knowledge and learn to "listen" and to account for the audience’s views and values and thus, they have an opportunity to adjust and revise their goals and their views. In the process, students learn about the kinds and stages of public writing that keep the discourse moving forward and the kinds that are merely repetitious, uninformative, rude, or destructive. Ultimately, they learn to judge the success of their writing by the kind and quality of response they get from their audience.

Students learn to discuss selected topics of public concern and to develop a critical perspective on these issues.

In the IEDP, students raise and debate an array of issues, both familiar and surprising, as they connect the public sphere to their own education, their future, their world views, and their day-to-day lives. As they continue their exchanges, they learn what are the stock issues related to a current public controversy, what are the typical stances, and what are the prospects for consensus or action. Also, they develop tools of critical analysis that will help them understand the politics and discourse of any particular issue. They may identify paralyzing binaries and envision alternatives. In addition, they may confront the slippery boundary between the public and private, and they struggle to decide what makes a particular situation a public issue or a personal problem.

Students learn about the nature of dialogic communication via the Internet as they participate in an essential activity of democracy: public deliberation.

In the IEDP, students share their concerns about political and social problems that affect them as citizens, personally and politically. In their posts, students explain why they are concerned about a problem that affects them, their peers, their region, their country, etc. They explain what they would like to do or have others do about the problem. As their readers agree or disagree, student-citizens are challenged to analyze the problem further, explain the causes and effects, share personal stories, pose hypothetical examples, and argue for a particular policy or solution. They also learn how hard and carefully citizens must argue for their points of view, how tempting and easy it is--especially on the Internet--to repeat standard phrases, clichés, and simplistic lines of thought or to be insulting to those who disagree. They learn how hard it is to affect change or move a community towards action, and how important it is to include all voices and views if consensus and democracy are to be achieved. By engaging in these exchanges and listening to each other, students gain a new kind of dialogic literacy. By analyzing the exchanges, students may also examine the effect of the technology and new media upon their deliberative discourse. They may examine whether or not the forms of communication made possible by computer technology will be a means of achieving new, more inclusive and participatory forms of democracy.

Students have the opportunity to work collaboratively with students from other colleges and universities on research, writing, and oral presentations.

In the IEDP, students have the opportunity to "meet" the participants at other institutions. Those classes in regional proximity may meet face-to-face at a common workshop or conference. Those at far distances from each other may meet via teleconferencing or some other form of telecommunication. This meeting is the opportunity to extend or conclude a number of IEDP themes and skills. For classes studying public writing, argumentation, and writing for real audiences, students have the opportunity to identify and meet like-minded students at other institutions; in the process they may work collaboratively on a project that they present to others at their conference. This extends IEDP skills to include collaboration, research, and oral communication. For classes studying communication across borders of culture and identity, students have the opportunity to meet and communicate in another venue, which may further complicate and unsettle students’ assumptions about others and themselves.

In the IEDP, faculty can teach students to connect their IEDP exchanges to public action. In order to make this connection, students engage in a learning cycle that differentiates agonistic argument from deliberation, that locates areas of common ground among all members of the deliberative group, and that uses this commitment-in-common as a prompt to seek opportunities for effective real-world action or advocacy. Students engaged in related service learning projects or in politically-oriented groups may bring their experiences to their IEDP deliberations. As part of their public action, students may have the opportunity to contribute to a student-authored Internet resource list of sites and organizations dedicated to taking action on public issues and problems (and hosted by the IEDP web site).

Faculty gain teaching and research advantages (and challenges) by participating in the IEDP.

By participating in the IEDP, faculty have the opportunity to teach writing, rhetoric, and civic engagement by using interactive, student-generated texts. In addition, the IEDP supports a special faculty e-mail discussion list, and it convenes a variety of face-to-face faculty meetings. In these venues, faculty participate in cross-institutional, cross-disciplinary conversations about the project with other instructors. They share and exchange teaching strategies, assignments, syllabi, and other instructional material. They discuss theory and practice that derive from shared experiences in the classroom and on-line. They collaborate on scholarship and research. They can research a large body of student-generated discourse (with permissions from student participants). Interested faculty are always welcome to participate in the IEDP discussion list and faculty meetings even if they are not teaching a class in the IEDP.