Tone of voice and immediacy still hold sway
I'm all for multiple delivery methods when it comes to engaging students and helping them along.
However, every time I pick up the phone and actually talk to a student I get a much better sense of the issue at hand and am able to further solidify a positive relationship with that person. My experience is also true when it comes to communication at work. Lately, the trend at my college is to discuss complex issues via email. A person will announce that they are soliciting feedback on a given question or issue and then we are supposed to "weigh in." I find this disconcerning becuase of the static nature of written response, the tendency to then be able to take what has been written out of context or the wrong way, and the ease at which we seem to be forsaking the give and take of face to face communcication.
All this to say, phone to phone (face to face) may be the best route, but if workplace trends are moving towards email based topic exploration and decision making then I think we as online educators may do our students a large service by holding our students accountable for their online communcication, since they will surely be held accountable in the workplace.
I have to agree with you. Tone of voice has a lot to do with the message at hand. As online instructors we do not get that face to face time with our students but there are some things that we can do to help with the communication at hand. In chats, I always allow my students to both see and hear me. I do this on purpose because I feel that a lot of miscommunication happens when you lose the body language. Tone of voice can help set the correct message as well. Chats are great tools because this is the only opportunity we have in which we can allow our students to be heard and seen as well. We can change their status in the chat for this to happen. This is a great tool for tutoring or conferencing.
Afrodite Tsiakopoulos
David,
I agree that phone or face to face is best, however I find it very difficult to contact students by any means when they are off campus. Most students are texting or posting on social media sites and rarely even check e-mail any more. I emphasize the importance of staying in contact with instructors and students give all of their contact information (cell phone, e-mail, home phone). I spend so much time trying to contact students when they are off campus I pull my hair out! And when they return and I ask why they didn't return my call, the common answer is "I didn't get a call".
