Better communication

Sitting in your office at stated hours talking to students, while other students sit on the floor in the hall or perhaps drift away disappointed, is at best an imperfect tool for communication; loitering after lecture to cope with a crowd of questions is similarly frustrating. There are several ways you can enhance your communication with students:

• 1. Make your e-mail address known to them, encourage them to use it, and be sure to respond in a manner timely enough for them to get used to. The question that the student thought wasn't quite important enough to ask gets asked and answered. Will they badger you to death with chit-chat?
• 2. Get their e-mail addresses from them and send them messages, either individually or as a group. If you want to do this regularly to the group, you can set up a e-mail "list" on mail.sas, and so if you teach Palaeobotany 203, you could have it set so that every time you send mail to palbot203@mail.sas, a copy of that message would go to every student whose address is on the list. How to start a "list" for your course.
• 3. The logical way to use such a list is in fact to let the students communicate with you and with each other that way. Encourage posting of questions to that list; post important information to it yourself (advice on how to study for mid-term, updates on reading assignments).
• 4. It's perfectly acceptable to require the students to have e-mail and to use it, as long as you announce this at the outset of the course. You will find that a very high percentage already have accounts. For another year or so, there will be complaints, but in fact they manage to cope quite well in dozens of courses around campus and are usually grateful for the encouragement to use these new tools.

  Go on for even better communication with students or go back to the start of this guide to new tools for teaching.