Communications

In 1987, Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson published their now-oft-quoted paper "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education." Several of the key principles therein are related to communication and its importance in building a good learning environment: faculty-student, student-faculty, student-student communication. Chickering and Erhmann later updated the original work, with a paper focusing on how technology can help implement the seven principles. Given the myriad of communication tools options available now, the choices can seem overwhelming.

The right communication tool or approach for a given situation can be based on the goals of the activity, as well as the needs and values of the communicators involved.  Some options are listed below; CIT can help faculty learn more about these and weigh their merits for any given teaching need.

One-to-one communication options:

• Face to face meetings such as office hours are still an option, of course. Many students are happy to meet personally with their instructors. For those who aren't comfortable with this (or who can't fit it into their schedules) there are technology options as well, instant messaging (IM) being perhaps the easiest of these.
• Email is an effective communication technique, but be sure to check with your students about your plans to use it (many students these days, particularly younger ones, don't use email much but rely instead on text messages and Facebook posts).
• As mentioned, some faculty and students like IM as a real-time communication option. There are ways to separate your class-related IMs from your personal ones, by using more than one ID and an IM collection application such as Adium or Pidgin.
• Text messaging is an option students may appreciate, if faculty are willing. 

One-to-many communication options (broadcasts from faculty to students, typically):

• In the face-to-face venue, this might be a lecture or presentation, either live or recorded.
  
• Email to the class group (Blackboard makes this easy by automatically enrolling all students in the Bb course site).
• Twitter micro-blogging tool would let one class member communicate with all other members quickly. Members would need to use a consistent "tag" to identify their tweets as being related to the course, and then other class members, by "following" that tag, will see any posts in their Twitter feed. Alternatively, a separate account could be set up for the class and individuals could post using that account; class members could then "follow" that account from their personal Twitter account.
• Announcements can be posted on the Blackboard course homepage and, starting with Blackboard 8, can be automatically emailed to all course members.
• Blackboard also includes a suite of audio communication tools called "Wimba Voice," several of which allow instructors to record and post audio communications to students (try Wimba Voice Announcements, Voice Recordings, Voice Presentations, or Voice Podcaster).
• Personal blog: if one member of the course is maintaining a blog, others could read it (and comment on it). Alternatively, the entire class could be allowed to post to the blog (see below).

Many-to-many communications

•  In cases where faculty and students would like to communicate in groups face-to-face (where all can see and respond), discussions and group work are clearly options.
• Online discussion boards are a means for extending the discussion outside the classroom time. Some effective uses of discussion boards are to ask students to respond to a reading before class, to have students comment on each others' work (drafts of papers, for example), to use a discussion board as a means for a group to complete an assignment online, or as an assignment unto itself.
• Wimba Voice, built into Blackboard, includes a tool for voice discussion called a "Voice Board" which functions similarly to text discussion boards.
• Blogs which are accessible by the entire class are another means of providing for online group discussion, although not necessarily in as "threaded" a way as discussion boards. Students or faculty can make a blog post, and others can comment on it.
• Online group chat is useful for rapid Q&A and short meetings. OIT will soon create Jabber IM "chat rooms" for each Duke class, making setting up a course chat simple (Blackboard also has a built-in text chat tool, as well as a "virtual classroom" which is a rudimentary web conference-type tool).
  
• Wimba Voice "Direct" tool is an audio chat tool built into Blackboard, which works best for small groups.
  
• Web conferencing is a method for online real-time communications from a distance. Tools such as Skype, Adobe Connect or GoToMeeting are available to allow easy sharing of voice, applications and even video. 
  

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