One thing I’ve been meaning to do is to add a bit about myself to the introduction to my courses. The same kind of stuff that I would expect from students in a self-introduction post. I feel like this will help students feel more comfortable contacting me, which is a huge issue with independent study courses. I currently send out a personal welcome email but no matter how you write it, it’s still official business. Plus, this is sent to their students email accounts, which many students seem to never seems to check.

On the email front, I don’t expect students to use their student email accounts when contacting me. If they do that’s great, if they don’t, that’s fine too. While it’s great to expect Faculty to send out emails only to official student accounts, we shouldn’t hold students to the same standard. We can request it, but if they choose not to, that is their choice. Besides, it only serves to push students away when we fail to respond to a legitimate concern or questions simply because it didn’t come from the “right email”.

An activity that is part of two of my three self-paced courses is a self-introduction. This is a great way to create a community and for students to feel like they are not alone in the course. For one of my courses I read these introductions as soon as they come in and provide a private response with a welcome that explains how their other posts will be evaluated. I could have a general post that does this, but I feel like doing it this way makes it a more personal – even if the content is mostly the same for everyone. This is a great model I’d like to see in my other courses. While this is an easy add to the course that doesn’t have it already, I have one course where this is built into their first assignment (i.e., they post it online then copy it into their assignment). Because of this, I’d like to find a way to welcome welcome them to the course sooner and in a less formal environment. However, given the different course set-up, it will take some thought to figure out the best way to do this.