XplanaZine

When I first started teaching online four years ago, email was one of the most important technologies we were using. The College of Liberal Studies here at the University of Oklahoma offered an entire series of courses in which the students did their reading and research on the web, and then engaged in regular email communication with the instructor, sharing their informal ideas and formal writing assignments, all via email. At the time, it was a great experience - the email functioned as a kind of substitute classroom, where I visited with my students every day. My inbox was a place of fun and learning. Alas, alack, that was the email paradise of days of yore! I cannot pinpoint at exactly what point my email experience became so entirely degraded, but at this point - four years later - it seems like a different world entirely. From a babbling brook in an idyllic pastoral landscape, the email flow has now become a putrid sluggish industrial river, filled with poisonous wastes. I don’t like email very much anymore. And neither do my students.

Of course, there are all kinds of things I have done to help get this under control, such as using elaborate rules and filters to manage the spam, even if I cannot make the problem disappear entirely. What I always have to keep in mind, though, is that my students do not necessarily have these same tools available to them as I do, and they are certainly not operating under the same professional imperative to find a way to manage their email. For example, the web-based email program that we offer our students and which we encourage them to use does not offer any filtering or rules. In order to do filtering and rules, students have to use a client-based email program - yet we know that students are often computer nomads, moving from machine to machine. Of course they often need to use web-based email, and as long as they are using the web-based email program provided by my university, they are not able to set up rules and filters to manage their email. My students are flooded with spam, and this conditions their reaction to each and every piece of mail that they get in their inboxes. Their default action with email is: DELETE. They have to throw away most of the email that they receive. As a result, it is not surprising that they could throw away by accident important course-related email they receive from me. Heck, they can throw away email on purpose… and plausibly claim it was an accident. Email is just not a very respectable or reliable mode of communication anymore. At least, not like it used to be.

Well, the digital world is always quick to evolve new solutions, and there are lots of great strategies available to online instructors in order to get information out to students. In fact, I guess I should consider myself lucky, since the spam problem provoked me to rethink communication issues in the virtual classroom and to find solutions that are better than email ever was. Superior communication: thanks to spam. I guess it’s the silver lining of the spam cloud.

One preliminary note and disclaimer: the solutions listed here involve the use of Blackboard, which is the campus-wide course management system used at the University of Oklahoma. I like Blackboard just about as much as I like spam. I’m not recommending these Blackboard solutions because of any fondness for Blackboard, but because it is the tool made available to me and to my students by my school. I certainly hope we will get better tools in the future. These suggestions should be easily adaptable to whatever course management system you have access to.

1. Make email into Blackboard Announcements. While I have not yet given up on email entirely, I consolidate in a single email each day the answers to any and all questions I’ve received from students during that day, along with reminders about due dates, general encouragement, and so on. Because this email comes every day and is labeled as such, I think it is more likely that students will pay attention to it - but I don’t count on that by any means. After sending the email, I diligently cut-and-paste the contents of the “Daily Email” into the Blackboard Announcements area. So if a student, for whatever reason, does not receive the “Daily Email” (we also have our share of email slowdowns and outages on campus), they know they can find the exact same information in the Blackboard Announcements area.

2. Use Blackboard Discussion Board for general communication. The Discussion Board is not just a place to discuss the content of the class - it can be a place to discuss the class itself! For example, think about what happens if you post assignments and instructions in the Discussion Board. Since Discussion Boards are more interactive than email, students can easily use the “reply” feature to request clarification, ask questions, and so on - while the rest of the class looks on! These replies and comments are then available to all students in the class, just like when students ask questions about assignments in the classroom, and everyone gets to hear the answer. Even better than the classroom: these comments about the assignments are available to the students at 2 a.m. when they actually get around to doing the assignment (and long after anything said in the classroom might have faded from memory).

3. Use Blackboard Discussion Board as “student message center.” I continue to hope, of course, that students read email that comes from the instructor - but what about email from other students? That is even more precarious, since it would not necessarily be recognizable as course-related email. To solve this problem, I’ve turned part of the Discussion Board into a “student message center.” Within the Blackboard Discussion Board, I create a Forum for each student with their name on it, and this is where other students in the class leave messages for that student: peer review feedback of their writing assignments, sharing ideas and resources for common projects, etc. This “student message center” has been a great way to promote student-to-student communication in class, while avoiding email entirely.

4. Bring blog content into Blackboard. One of the joys of email was its sheer speed and convenience: with just a few keyboard strokes, I could spontaneously send information to my students, letting them know about a cool website, an interesting article I’d read in the NYTimes, and so on. I still want to be able to do that, and the technology that makes it possible is blogging. Thanks to the guys at Blogger.com, I can easily create a blog for free (”Cool Stuff For Class”), together with a syndication feed for the content. Then, thanks to the guys at Maricopa Community College, I can easily create a javascript that will allow me to “suck” that content into Blackboard - it can go in the Announcements area, or in the Content areas of Blackboard, anywhere that HTML is supported. Amazing! Here’s a link to the Maricopa FEED2JS website where you can find out more about this great new technology: http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/

5. Use Blackboard quizzes to communicate. Blackboard offers a survey tool for communicating with students anonymously, but I cannot use the survey tool to communicate with individual students - instead, I use Blackboard quizzes to do that! Here’s how it works. When students need to let me know that they have completed a simple class assignment, they take a quiz, where there is a simple True-False question (e.g., “I have posted four replies at the Discussion Board this week”). This records the points in the gradebook automatically, and lets me know that the student completed the assignment. Very effective! In the past, I used to have students send me email telling me that they had completed these kinds of assignments, and I would spend a significant time each week recording those declarations in the gradebook. Using the “quiz” as a communication tool cuts right to the chase, and makes things easier both for students and for me, with less email for all of us.

More ideas? Please add your comments below!