Use of E-mail to Communicate with Students

E-mail can be a convenient method to communicate with your students outside of class. However, there are drawbacks:
(i) Written communication can take a long time, so it is generally more efficient to hold lengthy discussions face-to-face.
(ii) E-mail messages are "on the record," so be careful not to have an unintended "tone" to your message or to write something that you may regret later!

On the other hand, responding to a question by e-mailing the entire class with a restatement of the question and your answer, can be a very efficient way to clarify matters to all your students. A number of instructors use other on-line devices such as virtual office hours. You can learn about some of these at the CET website www.bu.edu/cet under menu item Using Technology > Online Course Management.

An instructor can send e-mail to the entire class or to a subset of the class through the Faculty Link. Select Class Lists under Instructor's Tools, then select the class with which you wish to communicate. (If you wish to send a message to more than one class, you should first combine the class lists - there is an option to do thus under Instructor's Tools.) Click on Email. If you want to send the message to a subset of the class, attach files, or perform some other variation that is not in the basic e-mail function, click on Advanced options. The rest of the procedures should be self-evident. Information on how to access the Faculty Link

You can also create mailing lists to make it easy to send messages to a group of students from your computer's mailer. A mailing list (also known as a listserv) has several benefits:

• List creators determine who is on the mailing list. Therefore instructors can create a list for students in multiple sections, for course discussion topics, or for course TFs.

• "To:" fields often limit the number of recipients, but mailing lists circumvent this problem because the recipient is just the list name. The list is expanded out to all recipients by the list manager software.

• No address book is required for the participants in the mailing list. Messages written to the mailing list from any list member go to all of the list members facilitating asynchronous class discussions.

Mailing list management [e.g. subscribing and unsubscribing mailing list members] is accomplished by sending specially formatted commands, via e-mail, to the list manager software, called "Majordomo." View information regarding setting up and using a mailing list.

If you will be checking your e-mail from several different computers (for example at work and at home), it is recommended that you set up your email as IMAP. This setting leaves your email on the mail server so that you can access it from any computer. However, because the inbox has limited space, you may need to move messages to other folders after you view them. If you have any questions regarding e-mail, including how to access your BU account, see the PCSC (Personal Computing Support Center) information about e-mail.

• Use of the Web in a Course
• Use of E-mail in a Course
• Powerpoint, etc. in Class
• Student Response Systems
• Online Learning/Distance Education
• Online Learning Communities
• Software and Hardware Support
• BU Grants for Teaching Technology

August 31, 2006