He is the co-creator of The Online Writing Instruction Community. ​He has publications on social media, multimodal composition, and mobile technologies that all focus on the dynamics of student writing in digital spaces. McArdle hosts workshops at MSU on peer-to-peer online collaboration and has presented numerous times at the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Computers & Writing Conference. His research interests are instructional design, online writing instruction, user experience, writing program administration, and web development.