Communicating with students online

Online courses offer many tools to use to communicate with your students. Among them, the most popular tools seem to be email, discussion boards, chat rooms, and announcements. Regardless of the tools, it is critical that you communicate regularly and effectively with students.

Here are some tips that will, hopefully, help:

• Be friendly and invitational. The tone you set might become the tone your students use in their communications. Perhaps begin emails with the word "Hi" followed by the student's name.
  
  
• Don't be curt. Of course, there might be times when you'll need to critique students. Be careful not to sound insulting. Because of the absence of body language in textual communications, students can misconstrue what you are trying to say.
  
  
• Respond to students in a timely manner. Early in the semester, let students know what your response policy is, particularly for emails. It could be 24 hours or even 48 hours. The more timely the response, the better. If you are not planning to respond to emails on the weekends, tell this to the class.
  
  
• Reply to student introductions. At the beginning of the semester, you and your students should introduce yourselves in the discussion board. Try to reply to each student post. This not only lets students know early on that you will be involved in class discussions, but it also helps to establish a personal connection with each student. For subsequent class discussions, it won't be necessary to reply to each post; just try to do it for the introductions.
  
  
• Proofread before you send or post. Everything you write should mirror your high standards. That means spelling and grammar errors should be very rare. If you are challenged in these areas, you might want to write your communications in Microsoft Word first, where you can use the spell- and grammar-checking tools, then copy and paste into an email or into your course using the Paste from Word feature.
  
  
• Break up your text. If you have a lot to write, use short, multiple paragraphs. White space is a good thing; a long blob of text is not.
  
  
• Establish your rules about Netiquette. Decide if you and your students can use acronyms, emoticons (those little symbols that make smiley faces, etc.), all lower-cased letters, etc. Let students know if these are appropriate.