Colleges struggle to communicate with students
By Courtney Rubin, New York Times
As a professor who favors pop quizzes, Cedrick May is used to grimaces from students caught unprepared. But a couple of years ago, in his class on early American literature at the University of Texas at Arlington, he said he noticed “horrible, pained looks” from the whole class when they saw the questions.
He soon learned that the students did not know he had changed the reading assignment because they did not check their e-mail regularly, if at all. To the students, e-mail was as antiquated as the spellings “chuse” and “musick” in the works by Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards that they read on their electronic books.
“Some of them didn’t even seem to know they had a college email account,” May said. Nor were these wide-eyed freshmen. “This is considered a junior-level class, so they’d been around,” he said.
That is when he added to his course syllabuses: “Students must check email daily.” May said the university now recommends similar wording.
So students prefer social media. So far, so 2005. But some professors do not want to “friend” students on Facebook (“I don’t want to learn things about them I can’t unlearn,” said Thomas Tierney, an associate professor of sociology at the College of Wooster in Ohio) or do not think it is their job to explore every possible medium a student might prefer to use at 2am to find out about a test later that day.
So silly, this professor just refuses to embrace change. It probably took him years to learn how to use e-mail. Why not simply text the students when we all know that is the most affective mode of communication with them? Is he interested in teaching students or forcing them to use outdated technology?
these students are just lazy, they all have smart phones, they can setup their phones to automatically recieve emails to their phones. When they join the work force you can bet their employers will not be changing the way they communicate because it is easier for the employees, no they will make deciesions based upon what is best for the company.
I’m probably going to get some bad feed back on my opinion, but I’m gonna state my opinion anyway. I think the college professor was wrong, wrong, wrong. The professor decided to change his mind about an assignment. From his position the professor couldn’t have known if his students had done the first assignment before checking their email. Nor could he have known if he had ruined plans of students that had allocated time according to the first assignment. Then read the change in assignment, and didn’t have time to adapt to the change. I once had a college instructor pull this on me. I had completed an assignment, then the instructor changed the assignment. I was justifiably p o ed. I had done very well on what was first assigned and expected good credit. I was penalized for the instructor’s screw up. A professor should never change an assignment after dismissing the class.
well there are two issues here – the assignment change, in which as a student, I shouldn’t feel obligated to have to check my email after leaving a class.
As to who gets to call the shots on where to look for messages, I would say that is the messengers call, not the recipient. Likewise I dont want to have to deal with Facebook or Twitter to communicate with people – I could care less what they are eating for dinner. FB is not an efficient business communication tool, it’s a tool to appeal to the “me generation” and sell product. In anticipation of someone’s comment: dont use free email for work related issues, use a proprietary application that isnt mining your data!