One of the concerns of many teachers introducing online into their teaching is that they will get overwhelmed by emails and assessable work flowing 24 hours a day, seven days a week. To take the example of email, won’t students be sending you emails at all hours, and expecting a response by the next morning? Won’t you get floods of emails in busy periods?

The answer to both questions is that it can happen if you let it:

‘At one point, I found that I was getting a horrendous amount of emails, maybe 50 new ones in a day! I couldn’t manage and keep the module going as well.’
‘Emails are a huge, time-consuming exercise for us. Particularly at the beginning of the year, email is extremely busy’.

There are a number of ways to avoid getting overwhelmed by emails. Firstly, establish clear guidelines about turnaround times when you set up the course. Ideally, these guidelines will be included in written notes that you provide at the orientation session. A realistic turnaround time for emails might be 48 hours, which means that part-time teachers would be expected to check for emails from students three times a week.

Secondly, try to have a part of the online module you’re using devoted to ‘frequently asked questions’ (or FAQs). After all, many questions are repeated by a number of students, so why not provide a thorough answer that everyone has access to?

A variation on this theme is to post your answers to important queries onto the course forum. Not only does that mean everyone can read your answer, but they can respond and elaborate as well.

Thirdly, as advocated in Exemplar 4, you can divide your class into groups, and nominate a group leader to co-ordinate email queries:

‘The leader was made responsible for collating information, and for directing composite answers and queries back to me. I also buddied people up, so they worked on tasks in pairs. These two changes provided a buffer. As soon as I made the changes, the number of emails dropped dramatically.’

Fourthly, as suggested in Exemplar 19, it helps to give students very specific guidelines about what is included in the ‘subject’ section of the email. If they are required to include the name of their subject, and the essence of their query, this means that the teacher can sort emails into subject- or query-specific folders without having to open them. If a number of emails arrive with the same query, the teacher can quickly issue a broadcast email to clarify things for everyone.

Regarding assessable work, you face the same kinds of challenges-how do you manage student expectations and avoid getting overwhelmed by bits of work coming at you from all directions?

Certainly, it helps to have clear guidelines. They should spell out what has to be presented by when, and your likely turnaround time.

The nature of the assessment tasks is also important. In some modules, assessment exercises are very bitsy, with lots of little assessment tasks. From the point of view of running the module without getting overwhelmed with marking, it is much better to have a few carefully designed projects that cover all areas. So, if you have scope to do so, find ways of simplifying assessments.

Where assessable work is submitted via an online forum, it may be wise to identify at the start which tasks you will comment on. For the rest, only provide feedback if it is asked for by students. Whether this advice is appropriate will depend on the subject and student expectations. In some cases, it may be important to keep in close contact with students and respond to all work, as occurs in Exemplar 22.

And finally, remember that fears about 24-7 demands by students work the other way around as well. Students themselves may be feeling anxious about your unrealistic expectations for quick response. The moral here is to establish realistic assessment and work requirements early in the course, stick to them, and resist the temptation to issue additional demands at short notice.