Earlier this week I answered an e-mail question from an online student who had asked about the way I present the course assignments and due dates in our class. My e-mail response reiterated where assignments were posted and I indicated that I had consciously chosen not to post assignment descriptions and due dates on the course calendar ~ based on my experience teaching online.  My student replied back that, “my years of online teaching had obviously not taught me anything since I was failing to take different student learning styles into account.” Needless to say, I was quite upset with this reply.

I worked out this situation with my student by trading a few more e-mails and things are good between us now. But, this was a crisis in communication that was, I think, caused in great part by e-mail.  My initial reply to my student was rather impersonal and while I was right, I failed to read between the lines to see her honest struggle with my course.  Her reply to me was, I believe, nothing she would have ever said to my face!  Had we had this conversation in person after an in-class course, we would have made much better progress toward a resolution we could both be happy with.

In my 3-year role as an online lead instructor, problems with e-mail communication (and to a lesser extent, posts on discussion topics) were at the heart of many of the conflicts between students and instructors.

1. Students complaining that instructors did not respond to e-mails.
2. Students complaining that instructors were rude, dismissive or insulting in their e-mail communication.
3. Instructors complaining that students were rude, insulting or unprofessional in their e-mail communication.
4. Short e-mails answering student questions that fail to fully address the issue(s) or in other ways leave the student wanting more.

It is my firm belief, based on more than 10-years of online teaching , that nearly all disputes between instructors and students can be resolved if there is good, open and honest communication. Often e-mail works well, but not always. How can we improve?

A mantra I use regularly in my online classes is, “Send me e-mail with any questions or concerns.” I try to encourage early and ongoing communication with my students. I endeavor to give my students the benefit of the doubt when their e-mails use a tone I don’t like (though I do point this out to my students). I try to not to say  things in e-mails that I would not say if the student were sitting in my office.

I would love to know how you deal with these issues? What specific tactics do you use to foster good e-mail communication with your students?  Where have you went wrong and what did you learn?

I hope you will take the time to leave a comment to this post. You will need to register with my Weblog the first time you comment. I hope you will.

In Good Spirit,

Eric

Roger appears remarkably unconcerned by his condition. He hardly ever
complains and, in general, shows little worry for anything in life.
Both of his parents and his sister fervently claim that “Roger is
always happy,” an observation that is consistent with our own
impression. Moreover, based on his family’s report, Roger is
paradoxically happier now than he was before his brain damage. … His
premorbid disposition of being somewhat reserved and introverted has
shifted to being outgoing and extroverted…

It’s one thing to take responsibility for your own ill-conceived discussion plans, but what do you do when students are the problem? There are (at least) seven flavors of problem students:

• The brownnoser
• The polymath
• The pulseless
• The diverter
• The pariah
• The defiant
• The unprepared

The reason these people were the happiest, the duo theorize, is that happiness doesn’t come only from having deep, heart-to-heart talks. It also comes from having daily exposure to many small moments of contagious happiness. When you frequently see other people smile — at home, in the street, at your local bar — your spirits are repeatedly affected by your mirroring of their emotional state. Of course, the danger of being highly connected to lots of people is that you’re at risk of encountering many people when they are in bad moods. But Christakis and Fowler say their findings show that the gamble of increased sociability pays off, for a surprising reason: Happiness is more contagious than unhappiness.

A human being experiences a rose as a lovely, familiar shape, a bright, beautiful color and a sublime scent. That is the very definition of a rose. But to a dog? Beauty has nothing to do with it; the color is irrelevant, barely visible, the flowery scent ignored. Only when it is adorned with some other important perfume — a recent spray of urine, perhaps — does the rose come alive for a dog.

How about a more practical object? Say, a hammer? “To a dog,” Horowitz points out, “a hammer doesn’t exist. A dog doesn’t act with or on a hammer, and so it has no significance to a dog. At least, not unless it overlaps with some other, meaningful object: it is wielded by a loved person; it is urinated on by the cute dog down the street; its dense wooden handle can be chewed like a stick.” Dogs, it seems, are Aristotelians, but with their own doggy teleology. Their goals are not only radically different from ours; they are often invisible to us. To get a better view, Horowitz proposes that we humans get down intellectually on all fours and start sniffing.

Plato thought the characters presented should be exemplary, and that boys should model themselves on “men of courage, self-control, independence, and religious principle.” And because first impressions are important, he believed that dramatic impersonations of rogues and scoundrels could be dangerous for both actors and audiences.

Schoolchildren “must no more act a mean part than do a mean action or any other kind of wrong. For we soon reap the fruits of literature in life, and prolonged indulgence in any form of literature leaves its mark on the moral nature of a man, affecting not only the mind but physical poise and intonation.” (Book Three, 395, H.D.P. Lee translation)

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove
hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in
February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution….

“The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere
else in the world but in the US, and it’s because of what the film is about.
People have been saying this is the best film they’ve seen all year, yet
nobody in the US has picked it up.

We commissioned Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to respond independently to the question “Where does evolution leave God?” Neither knew what the other would say. Here are the results.