Manage Communications

Most online courses, unless they are synchronous video-conferencing classrooms, generate a large number of communications. Most of this is text-based, including discussion forums, messages, and chats. It takes longer to read and to type than to speak and to listen. It also often takes longer to arrive at the point—one telephone call can get something accomplished that might take 3, 4, or more asynchronous messages.

And speaking of telephone calls, just because you're teaching an online course, don't hesitate to use the phone. When a student becomes frustrated attempting to understand an assignment or concept, hearing your voice while you walk the student through the situation can often be the difference between success and failure.

General Strategies

If you fall behind with communication, it is very hard to come up again for air. Set aside a specific time each day to deal with course communication; you will be more effective and efficient than if you keep a window open and try to deal with each course posting as it arrives.

Add any generic inquiry from a student and your response in a Q&A file. When you next revise your course, review the Q&A file. When you see patterns emerge, it may be likely that you need to tweak your content to make information clearer. If it’s not something that you need to change in your content, at the least, each time that question comes up, all you need to do is copy the response from your Q&A file and paste it into a response, making any personalization or specific changes that are required before responding to the inquiry.

Make it a policy to tell students to check the course FAQ before they write to you. If, after reading through the FAQ, they don’t find the answer they are looking for or need further clarification, have them post to a “Questions” threaded discussion.

Let students know that all of you are learners, each with specific skills and abilities and prior knowledge. Encourage students to answer questions that they know the answers to. This helps build a community of learners and takes some of the burden off of you for routine matters.

Specific Strategies

Keeping up with the communication load can be hard for faculty to manage effectively without the implementation of good organizational strategies. Some specific strategies for you to consider are listed below.

• Email

  Email, and its CMS equivalent commonly called messages, are one of the staples of web-based communication. Email management in CMSs generally include comparable features such as message archives, folders, and searches as well as the routine deleting, reply, forward, and new message functionality.

  • Archive messages that you no longer need to work on but wish to preserve.
  • Organize messages by students, question-content relationship, or project in folders.
  • Search for messages from a particular student or containing a specific key word.

  Although most CMSs have these functions, their implementation may vary. When learning about the search capability, understand whether searches will look across folders or restrict searching within a folder. The answer to that question may help you decide whether it is beneficial to create folders for each student—if the search does not cross over folder boundaries, then searching for a particular keyword when you can't remember the student who asked the question will be difficult.

  Tips for Managing Communications

  • Skim message contents. This helps you to understand the gist of the communication. If you see multiple inquires from students on the same topic, your time is better spent in addressing the issue with the class rather than several individual messages.
  • Keep a clean inbox. If you have adequately dealt with a message and it requires no further action on your part, file or delete it. This will keep your inbox for messages that you still need to work on.
  • Move any message that does not require you to do something to the appropriate folder.

• Discussion Forums

  Discussion forums are often the most extensive communication tool used in an online classroom. I have seen courses where a single forum can have have over a 1,000 postings. Some of these postings are deeply reflective and extend the conversation to rich depths and breadths. Others are numerous "me, too!" posts.

  Establish clear expectations for your students about what constitutes a significant post. This minimizes the latter and encourages the former. One way to do that is to ensure that you use a sound grading rubric.

  A quick online search for discussion board rubrics will result in a wide variety of resources, but here are links to several rubrics that might form the foundation for a rubric for your course. Remember that you should ask for permission to use these.

  • University of Delaware
  • University of Central Florida

  Other Strategies

  Don't feel like you need to read and respond to every discussion posting by every student as soon as it is made. Often when the "voice of authority" speaks, student discourse turns off. Let the students discuss topics; guide them if they get off track.

  Let students provide conversation summaries; it isn't necessary that you always be the one to do so. Summarization and synthesis are good skills for students to learn.

  Learn to skim postings for key elements.

A key component of managing communication is so important it deserves its own discussion. Let's talk netiquette.