Planning for Teaching With the Web
Develop Guidelines for Instructor–Student Communication
It is easy to underestimate how much access campus students have to instructors. Those few minutes before and after class or during break are opportunities for on-campus students to get clarification, quick answers to questions or feedback. Your distance students do not share this access to you.
Define Email Hours as You Would Office Hours
Just as you would establish your campus office hours (or appointment availability), you should also determine what your email policy or "hours" will be. Making your email hours explicit will help reduce unrealistic expectations on the part of students regarding response time to their emails as well as help you structure the time you use to manage the online portion of the course.
Not establishing email hours can be confusing to students who may get prompt responses from some times and other times wait days to hear from you – perhaps feeling they must repeatedly resend their original mail. Furthermore, scrambling to answer emails as time allows is not very efficient use of your time or energy.
Use the questions and tips below to guide your policy.
- Making the Most of Your Time
- Define and Communicate Course Requirements
- Develop Guidelines for Instructor–Student Communication
- Foster Positive Work Relationships With Your Students
Email hours
- How quickly will you reply? (within 24 hrs? 3 days? etc.)
TIP: Sometimes you may not be able to reply adequately in the time you have set forth. When this happens send a quick reply to confirm that you have received the email and will respond as soon as possible. - When will you NOT read or reply to email (weekends, Wednesdays, after 6pm, etc.)?
Uses of email
- Are there questions you will not address, such as administrative or technical questions that should directed to others?
- Should distance learners inform you ahead of time when they will attend class on campus?
- Will you have different email policies for your on-campus students? (anything you prefer to address during office hours?
Manage your inbox
An inbox teeming with email from your students as well as anyone else – including listservs – is difficult to manage. Email get "lost" or forgotten or you may spend too much time trying to find something you know is in there.
- Create a folder for your distance students (or all students from that course). This will keep them out of your inbox.
- Use email rules to manage your email. Rules can automate the process of transferring email from your inbox to the appropriate folder. Often rules also allow you automate other outcomes such as changing the color of the email subject line. For example. Create a folder for all students in the course. Then create a rule that moves emails from these individuals into that folder automatically and that also changes the color of the email from distance learners. This will make them easier to distinguish from the campus students.
TIP: If you don’t already know how to create email rules, ask a colleague or your tech staff. Learning this procedure will ultimately save time and simplify your work.
"What is helpful is [the professor’s] instant replies to questions. Most professors at the UW have been wonderful about quick replies this is an additional plus for this class."
Use the Phone
Talking to someone over the phone is often more time efficient than emailing since clarifications are immediate and speaking requires less effort than writing.
- Schedule at least one phone call with your distance learners. The effort you put into setting up this phone call will most likely pay off in the long run.
- When something is urgent or you sense that you and a student are not communicating well, use the phone.
"I think the instructors want us to succeed and I do feel that they are available and checking for problems frequently."
"Email can be slow in that if I ask a question, and the instructor doesn’t give me the information I need, I may have to ask again, and the process can take hours or even days, when if I had just had a conversation with the instructor, it would have taken 2 minutes."
