In the NewsOn Campus
Email? Enough! Effective?
Could a ban on students sending queries to their teachers’ inbox work? The experiences of one academic provide food for thought.
By Andrew Bracey
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Definitely a problem many of us can relate to.
My response has been to enforce that all questions go on the LMS discussion forum, and only confidential matters come to me. This also requires disciplining myself in the first few weeks to reply to all generic questions by email with a standard response “Please direct this question to the LMS. Thank you.” Sure, this might frustrate students at first when I could just as quickly have answered their question as redirect them, but it does change their habits.
Once they are used to posting questions on the LMS, I find it is mostly other students that answer those questions – especially those questions with answers like “The assessment breakdown is in the guidebook.” As long as the group is sufficiently large (and chances are it is if you’re suffering this problem) then other students are likely to answer superficial questions more quickly than I would have anyway. As the semester goes on, I check the LMS forum daily and praise or thank those students who have gone out of their way to give helpful or thoughtful answers to each other – this not only encourages the behaviour I want to see but it also reminds students that I am there for them, but just not 24/7.
It seems to work for groups of 150 – 300 students.