INSTRUCTIONAL

Online Communications: Which Will Work Best for Your Class?

by Jeffrey Lane

[Ed: Links to web pages and/or e-mail addresses which have become inactive since the publication of this article have been enclosed in curly brackets { }. Replacement links have been provided where possible.]

E-mail communications between faculty and students can be an effective means to facilitate discussion, to handle course administrative issues, or to share other "outside" electronic communications. One may directly send e-mail to many people at once by placing a list of recipient addresses in the "To:" field of an e-mail message. But there are easier ways to store larger lists of e-mail addresses, such as those for a class or a group of colleagues, using the "addressbook" feature of Pine (the mail system used on the NYU-Internet accounts), or by using the "Nicknames" feature of Eudora (the mail client software that accompanies NYU-Net and DIAL/PPP software installation). A "listserv" (e-mail discussion list) one of the older Internet communications technologies, uses e-mail to distribute messages to a list of "subscribers" stored on a central computer system.

In a newsgroup, all communications are posted in a central location and can be viewed by anyone, either in the local community or on the Internet at large. (Newsgroups created here at NYU may be limited to the NYU community.)

There are several considerations for faculty members who may be interested in using e-mail or newsgroups as part of their course assigments: Is the instructor experienced enough with these communications tools to seamlessly integrate them into the syllabus? Will online communications be facilitated if the members of the class know that their messages will only be received as e-mail and by a set number of participants? Will the purposes of class discussion be better served by the bulletin-board atmosphere of a newsgroup, where items with the same subject can be grouped or "threaded"?

For help in evaluating these and other resources, please come to the ACF Innovation Center, or send e-mail to {ic@nyu.edu} Replacement address: its.ftc@nyu.edu. [ C ]

Jeffrey Lane worked at the ACF Innovation Center at the time of this article's publication, focusing on technologies to aid education.
jeffrey.lane@nyu.edu

Posted 22 February 1996. Revised 24 May 2004.