Contents and Approaches to Technology in Digital Writing Instruction: Evidence from Universities of Two Canadian Provinces

•We analyze a corpus of 119 digital writing courses in Canadian universities.•Mixt contents (comprising both theory and practice) dominate.•Instrumental approach to technology is over-represented.•Ontario universities are more likely to offer mixt contents than Quebec universities.

The purpose of this article is first to describe the main trends in digital writing (DW) instruction in Ontario and Quebec universities, and second, to study differences regarding the types of contents, or regarding the approaches to technology, according to the province, to the grade, or to the discipline. A corpus of 119 digital writing courses was created and statistical analyses were carried out. Our findings suggest that mixt courses (comprising both theory and practice) and courses with an instrumental approach to technology dominate in Ontario and Quebec universities. With regards to province, grade and discipline, we found three significant relations: 1) Ontario universities are more likely to offer mixt contents than Quebec universities (p = 0.016); 2) communications programs have the highest proportion of mixt contents, and journalism programs have the lowest (p = 0.049); 3) graduate programs are more balanced than undergraduate programs (p = 0.012), but the instrumental approach to technology is still over-represented. In addition to providing insightful information about DW instruction in Canadian universities, our research has the merit to tell us that DW instruction can be influenced by many factors.