You can use almost any of these communication modes to post announcements to the class. It's important that students know where to look for updated information, so be sure to let them know where you will be posting your announcements.

E-mail

You can use e-mail to communicate to individual students or to the whole class. E-mail is convenient because you and your students can send messages at any time. However, students may expect prompt and personal answers to each e-mail, so it's best to establish clear parameters from the beginning—and stick to them.

Here are some guidelines to communicate:

• the time frame in which you'll respond to an e-mail—within 24 hours? two days?
• the types of questions you'll answer:
  • you will respond to questions about the course and to personal issues related to the course
  • you won't answer administrative questions (how to schedule exams, for example) since the information is in the online Student Handbook,
  • you won't assist students with technical problems—direct them to the Help Desk (dltechsupp@extn.washington.edu) instead

Communicating e-mail guidelines from the start will significantly help to reduce your workload.

How To

Your students' e-mail addresses are on the electronic class list. You can copy and paste these addresses into the "To" field of your e-mail, or you can create a distribution list for your class by following the instructions in your e-mail program.

Best Practices

You can help establish a respectful tone in students' communications with each other by stressing the importance of the Netiquette guidelines.

Syllabus Header

You can post messages to the class that appear at the top of syllabus for students to see whenever they log onto the course syllabus. You can edit this area as many times as you wish—adding, subtracting, and changing messages.

How To

Here are instructions for posting messages on the syllabus header.

Discussion Forums

You can use discussion forums for a wide variety of purposes: as a place for students to tell something about themselves, as a group discussion that substitutes for a written assignment, as a way to encourage students to answer each other's questions or critique each other's ideas, as a venue for a guest speaker, or as a student lounge.

If you are teaching a group start course, the course developer and instructional designer will have determined the number and types of discussion forums for your course. Before the course starts, someone from the Distance Learning Design team will have contacted you to help you set up the forums. Once you know how to set up forums, you can add them to your course at any time by sending your instructional designer the URL for the forum.

How To

Set up a discussion forum

Facilitate online discussions

Best Practices

Discussion forums are almost always part of group start courses and are commonly set up for individual start courses, too. Here is one instructor's message to his students in a group start course in which he encourages them to rely on discussion forums rather than on e-mail to pose questions.

Resources

• Beaudin, Bart. "Keeping Online Asynchronous Discussions on Topic'" Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1999). Available: http://www.aln.org/alnweb/kjournal/Vol3_issue2/beaudin.htm
  
• Chism, Nancy. Handbook for Instructors on the Use of Electronic Class Discussion. Available: http://www.osu.edu/education/ftad/Publications/elecdisc/pages/home.htm
  
• Muilenburg, L. & Berge, Z. (2000) A Framework for Designing Questions for Online Learning. DEOSNEWS 10 (2). Available: http://www.emoderators.com/moderators/muilenburg.html

Instructor's Web Page (SimpleSite)

If you wish, you can publish your own Web page to disseminate up-to-date information of interest to the class. If you use the Catalyst tool SimpleSite, you don't need to know any HTML to create your Web page.

You can ask your instructional designer to put a link to your Web page on syllabus, or you can send your students the URL.

Teleconferences

Before you plan a teleconference, consider if your students, who may be in different time zones, can meet for a "real time" conversation. If not, you may want to offer the teleconference at more than one time to accommodate all of your students.

You can set up teleconferences with your students at any time during the course. A description of the system is available at http://www.washington.edu/cac/care/opsvc/teleconf.html.

How To

Please see the Teleconference Bridge Instructions for information about how to set up a teleconference.

Technical help is available evenings and weekends.

You can also ask your AD to schedule your teleconference.

Guidelines for a Successful Teleconference.