E-mail bonding with your students

Technology can make (or break) student?professor relations, psychology departments discover.

By Bridget Murray
Monitor staff

Arthur Woodward, PhD, has discovered that e-mail is a useful way of emboldening shy students. Those who are too bashful to utter a word in class often muster the nerve to send Woodward an e-mail asking him about their course readings or papers. If the question warrants discussion, they set up a meeting.

?E-mail often works as a welcome mat to my office hours,? says Woodward, chair of the psychology department at the University of California?Los Angeles. ?It?s a safe, convenient, nonthreatening channel for getting to know students.?

Like Woodward, university faculty increasingly use e-mail and course web pages to connect with students outside of class. Many of them applaud the web?s ability to cement their relations with students, but they also caution that the new technology can sometimes be wrongly used to replace student?faculty contact. E-mail is the perfect way to prepare for meetings with students, but it isn?t meant to supplant those meetings, says Woodward.

Computers can?t match professors? ability to tap students? interest in learning and spark intellectual interchange, says Sherry Turkle, PhD, a clinical psychologist and professor of the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Even instructors of distance-learning courses have learned that a course will go a lot better if they kick it off with a series of meetings in the flesh, says Turkle, author of ?Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet? (Simon & Schuster, 1995). E-mail and web pages can?t make a course, it seems, but they can certainly enhance one, a rising number of psychology departments find. It?s a matter of using the technology effectively, they say.

?As ingrained as the phone?

Of all the new technologies, e-mail use has risen fastest on college campuses. More than 30 percent of professors now use it in their classes, according to ?Campus Computing 1997,? Claremont Graduate University?s survey of 605 universities nationwide.

Many institutions consider it the official means of communication, says Virginia Andreoli Mathie, PhD, a psychology professor at James Madison University (JMU) and past president of APA?s Div. 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology). JMU students dash off e-mail notes to professors, friends and classmates from dorm rooms, classrooms and the library, she says.

?It?s become as ingrained as the phone or the word processor,? says Mathie.

E-mail is ideal for sending classes updated instructions for an assignment or reminders about meetings, says Robert Kleck, PhD, chair of the psychology department at Dartmouth College. However, it can also tempt people to dodge direct discussion of unpleasant issues, he says. For example, some faculty and students try settling disputes over a test or course grade by discussing the matter electronically, instead of in person. Or, rather than using the telephone to tell a professor that they?re too sick to take an exam, some students e-mail the news five minutes before the test starts.

Too much e-mail can also be a problem. Psychology professor Charles Brewer, PhD, says some of his colleagues at Furman University try keeping up with their e-mail by staying up late and coming to campus on Sundays.

To cut down the overload, Kleck suggests that faculty only send students group e-mails about issues that concern the whole class. Another option is asking students to focus their e-mails on important issues and and questions.

Still another way to curtail the e-mail load is a course web page that offers students information between classes. At least 15 percent of faculty now use web pages to post syllabi, assignments and other course resources, according to the Campus Computing survey.

A few institutions?such as UCLA?require every undergraduate course to have its own web page. Each UCLA psychology course page (http://www.college.ucla.edu) features a class syllabus, listings of campus computer labs, an online textbook-ordering service and a bulletin board. Each page also includes a spot for ?virtual office hours.? Here, a student and professor can set a time to ?chat? online?to go over a paper, for example, or to review for a test.

Some professors also post lecture transparencies, study guides and students? test grades. Students visit web pages the most when professors make them an integral part of class?posting assignments and listing extra-credit opportunities, says Woodward.

Joseph Lowman, PhD, who teaches introductory psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, attracts students to his course web page by requiring them to participate in an online discussion. Lowman poses questions such as ?Was Freud really a misogynist?? and watches the discussion mushroom?even among students who get shouted down by louder voices in class.

?The web is an egalitarian animal in a lot of ways,? he says.

Laptops for all

Making e-mail and web access a class requirement is not egalitarian, however, when all students don?t have computer access. That?s why some colleges require that all students own laptops. Among them are Floyd College in Georgia, Mayville State University in North Dakota and Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

Under a deal forged by Wake Forest and IBM, the university gives each student a new laptop every two years. Each computer comes with a printer and accompanying word processing and networking software. Students? tuition payments cover the costs.

Now students can download statistics programs and other software from the campus network any time, any place, says Deborah Best, PhD, chair of Wake Forest?s psychology department.

For example, freshman Michael Wiltz picked up class test grades and study guides from home last Thanksgiving. Not all Wake Forest?s students have laptops yet, but classroom use is beginning in first-year seminars. Students will increasingly tote them to class for demonstrations and assignments.

Dartmouth College also requires students to purchase laptops (Power Mac 7300s) to access course web pages, PsycLIT and other online databases, says Roger Kleck.

But Kleck emphasizes that Dartmouth students? increased access to e-mail and web pages doesn?t supplant the phone call or the knock on a professor?s door; rather, they create more communication options. Woodward echoes that sentiment.

?Sometimes a phone call or face-to-face meeting is the best way to resolve a question or issue,? he says. ?You learn to pick the best tool for the job.?