Email and Social Media
It is helpful to discuss email here alongside the range of digital means of interacting with your students. Trying to decide which is the best way to communite with students can be tricky. In general, if your communication is to be:
- one-to-many (broadcast out to the whole group): use an announcement, notification or forum message within the VLE to reach as many students as possible for a single purpose that includes all or most of them.
- many-to-many (group discussion): use the discussion forum within the VLE or other social media tool (covered later in the course).
- one-to-one (a private conversation): use the private messaging tool within the VLE or email.
Email is still the old workhorse of online communication, and is especially useful for business and professional communication as it's easy to access and organise messages into folders. Email provides a valuable record of professional communications (as in "get that in writing!") and the ability to go back to look at old messages, conversations and attachments, which are date-stamped. Most email systems allow you to save copies of messages both on the server (in the cloud) and also download locally to your own computer, which you can archive and backup for years. You can find excellent advice about using your email efficiently in 10 email tips to increase productivity and control your inbox.
So yes, email is perfect for interaction with your institution, department, colleagues and contacts around the world. However, it is useful for interacting with students only in particular situations, such as:
- one-to-one teaching, such as postgraduate supervisions
- keeping in touch with students to make sure they're on track
- private communication, including pastoral matters
- issues pertaining to the student's matriculation
- disciplinary matters
Try to avoid getting into the habit of using email with groups of students for day-to-day teaching and learning. This can waste a lot of time, clog up your already clogged Inbox, and you may find yourself repeating instructions in individual emails that would be better going out to the whole group in a VLE announcement.
You may also find students don't really know how to use email to best advantage. This advice below is amusing, but it is clearly drawn from painful experience:
Social Media Communications
In addition to the tools within the VLE, conference calls and email, you may find yourself turning to other forms of communication found in social media, such as Twitter, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Facebook and Facebook Messenger.
The main considerations when using social media communications to interact with students are:
- Setting up and maintaining a separation between your professional persona and your personal privacy: Blurring the boundaries can lead to problems for you and your students.
- Always being aware of everyone who might have access to every post or message you send to a student: Twitter messages sent out to @username will alert the recipient, but they will be public. On Facebook, posts may be seen by all of both parties' "friends". For private messages, be sure to use Direct Messaging on Twitter and Facebook Messenger.
- GDPR, traceability, evidence and transparency: One danger of using social media for communications with students is difficulty maintaining data privacy, transparency, and evidence tracing if something goes wrong.
This guides give more information:
Your insitution will have its own policies around communicating with students [Add institutional link]