5 survival tips for managing the communication in your online course (part 3 of 3)

This is the third, and last part of my blog entry on managing the communication in your online course. Instructors, be they online or in-class, are more often than not left to themselves to gather whatever resources they can to manage their classes. For the online instructor, the scarcest resource is the time needed to learn unfamiliar technology (hardware and software) to the point where they are able to use it to save them time in their tasks. What a paradox! 

But why stress over finding inexistent time to invest in new technologies if you are able to make use of tools that you are already familiar with to do the job? The goal of this last tip is to help you find ways to make effective use of what you have at your disposal first, prior to investing in learning new tools to optimize your communication techniques.

5. Use the communication tools at your disposal

Available resources differ for everyone. Some will have access to technical assistance and advanced communication tools, whereas others are left to fend for themselves with little or no assistance. Finding the right tool to communicate with your students may come down to what you have at your disposal rather than what you would like to have. The good news is that there are plenty of tools out there; the bad news is that installing, learning, and mastering them can sometimes require quite a chunk of your time. That being said, perhaps a small investment of your time will make your life easier in the long run, in terms of managing communication.

Most online courses are hosted on some sort of LMS (Learning Management System), so chances are you have an option to send a mass message to the class. If a LMS is indeed being used to host your course, you hopefully have access to some sort of discussion board as well. Perhaps you will also have a news forum where you can make announcements, a calendar feature to post upcoming assessments, and a chat room where you can host live office hours. You might even have access to a blog which could be used as an effective one-to-many platform to communicate with your students. More sophisticated LMSs might also have a push messaging system that will automatically send email or cell phone text messages (SMS) to students at a particular day and time, a virtual space that can be used for live tutoring, or perhaps a desktop videoconferencing system.

But I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that if you are reading this blog, you likely do not have your own personal Geek Squad at your beck and call. If you are new to online teaching and/or are not too comfortable with learning new technologies, then keep things simple. Stick to email, the discussion board, and the good ol’ reliable telephone (if you have one provided for work, not your personal one). If you have the opportunity to use a conferencing system (your institution might have the service to conduct meetings), this could be a very viable option to host live sessions. Email is likely the most common tool that an online instructor will have access to, and chances are that you will have the students’ email addresses in your class list. Failing that, post an announcement to the class to send their info to you as part of an initial ice-breaker activity.

Those of you who are a little more adventurous, and who have a good idea what kind of questions you normally get and when you get them, might want to try recording your own podcast using free audio recording software such as Audacity (for tips on how to record good quality audio, read the following blog entry by one of my colleagues at KnowledgeOne). You could also consider using CamStudio, Windows Movie Maker, or the software that came with your built-in laptop camera to create just-in-time video explanations (e.g., how to do an assignment, how to access the online quiz, etc…). It might save you the time you would otherwise need to type it all out, include screen shots, etc…

That being said, if you are going to go through all of this trouble make sure that you have an easy way to upload these files so that they are accessible for your students. Be mindful of the upload file size limitations that are prevalent in most LMSs (media files are large). Failing that, you could also consider uploading your videos to YouTube (if you don’t mind it being accessible to the public) or using a free cloud-based storage service such as Dropbox, SkyDrive, or Google Drive (by sharing the public link with your class). But since these services lie outside the secure firewall of the LMS, be mindful of what content you are uploading given that it could be accessed by non-students if the URL is shared (aka: know your copyright restrictions!).  

Of course, another way of communicating with your students is via platforms that most of them are already using, namely social media. If you opt for this route, be mindful of your institution’s policy on the use of social media. If you are introducing a feature whereby your learners must sign up to participate, you might be violating privacy policies since this requires participants to share personal information to create their accounts, and their contributions are no longer behind the confines of the LMSs firewall.

Also keep in mind that despite the fact that everyone seems to be on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, or Twitter, it doesn’t necessarily mean they want to use their social media accounts for your class. That being said, I received a fairly positive response from my students this semester when I polled them on using Twitter to get my announcements, so perhaps I will give that a try one day. But if I do create a Twitter handle dedicated to my online course, I will make sure to communicate to the students that this is an optional alternative to the course website where the same information can be found. Blogger and Wordpress are other popular options to create your own blog; Skype could be used for live conferencing (and group calls with up to 25 people), and Windows Live Messenger can host a chat room. The blogs do not require any student to sign-up, but the others do.

In summary, although there are many potential tools for communicating with your students, the trick is to select the ones that you are most likely to use on a regular basis as opposed to the ones that you think would be “cool” for the students. If there is a steep learning curve needed to make use of that tool (e.g., recording, editing, and publishing your own videos) and you do not have the time and/or technical support to help you with it, chances are that this is not the best option for a regular communication tool.

The tools you are most likely to lean on are the ones you already have at your disposal and know how to use. In other words, if you are comfortable sending out email, making discussion board posts, talking on the telephone, and hosting the occasional live virtual class, then stick to these tools first and foremost. Once you have had the chance to assess the communication needs in your course (i.e., you have identified the hot spots) and have tried a few interventions, you can consider increasing the complexity by experimenting with other tools.

This concludes this three-part series on survival tips to manage the communications in your online course. If this was of interest for you (or of any use), stay tuned for the next series of entries where I will go more in depth on the effective use of the “common” communication tools used in online courses: email, the discussion board, the telephone, and the virtual classroom. 

I hope that some of these tips prove to be useful for your situation. Please feel free to share your own “war stories” and suggestions for ways to manage communication in your online course by using the comments field below or email me at patdevey@gmail.com.