What place does email have in teaching? Morton (1995) describes email as a one-to one technique suitable for "learning contracts, apprenticeships, internships, and correspondence studies". Most often it is used for communication between student and lecturer or student and tutor, with certain advantages:
Email has the advantage for the student that the educator (or rather [their] email) appears always available to the student, whether the educator is present or not. For the academic it has the advantage that questions can be answered at times convenient ... and can be addressed more succinctly than personal visits... (Bunt, DeWinter and Ly, 1998)
Email has the potential to reduce the emotional distance between student and student as well as student and instructor. It is 'visual conversation' allowing for a more reflective response:
Seminars, tutoring, and casual conversations also can be carried on among faculty members and students at a thoughtful pace using electronic means. The results can be astonishing. At virtually every institution I visit, faculty members tell me excitedly that students are expressing themselves more and better when using email. Students who say little in a classroom sometimes become rich contributors via email, perhaps because they feel protected from the stares of others. And students have more time in electronic conversations to digest what has been said and to compose what they'd like to say in response. (Ehrmann, 1995)
What should you consider when using email in your teaching?
- Do all your students have email access?
- Do they know how to use email?
- How will you collect email addresses to make them available for use within your class?
How can you bring 'netiquette' to the use of email in teaching and learning? Like establishing ground rules for behaviour at the beginning of a class session, the use of email by students needs clarification. Such guidelines might include:
- suggesting that students contact a fellow student or tutor before contacting you
- requiring email that can be read in a single screen; suggest that messages that require scrolling will get less attention from you
- including an identifying tag (like the course number) in the subject field to aid filtering like messages into a common folder
- telling students when you read your mail and how often you will reply to shape their expectations about the immediacy of your response.
Does email supplement or replace face-to-face contact teaching? Email was a tool for academics long before it was readily available to the public. Its use allows collaboration based on interest rather than proximity. Providing opportunities for students to use email in authentic ways during their university experience helps to further assimilate them into a community of scholars.
How else could you use email in your teaching?
- Bunt, S., DeWinter, W. and Ly, N. (1998). Experimental use of electronic information transfer to enhance communication between the student and the educator. Available at <http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/asu/pubs/tlf/tlf98/bunt.html>.
- Ehrmann, S (1995) Moving Beyond Campus-Bound Education. Available at <http://www.learner.org/edtech/distlearn/chronicle.html>.
- Morton, P. (1995) The Online Report on Pedagogical Techniques for Computer-Mediated Communication. Available at <http://home.nettskolen.nki.no/~morten/cmcped/litrev.html>.
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