TCC Presentations

1999 Paper Presentations

INBOX: MANAGING EMAIL WITH ADVANCED SUBJECT ORGANIZERS
AND FOLDERS

Jacquelyn Abromitis, Middlesex County College, University of Northern Iowa <abro@nac.net>

http://www.users.nac.net/abro
http://www.middlesex.cc.nj.us
http://www.uni.edu/profdev/english

ABSTRACT
This paper chronicles managing email for an online class. Like most faculty new to teaching online, I had been overwhelmed by the volume of email generated by my classes. Over three semesters, I have gradually developed a method to make email management intuitive and simple for both me and my students. By devising a multi-leveled folder system coupled with advanced organizer subject headings, the inbox has emptied, and email need no longer be dreaded. In this paper, I give detail how I arrived at this system, and I explain how to implement it. This method is easily adaptable to any course, regardless of content.

INTRODUCTION
I teach an online course for the University of Northern Iowa: Teaching English with the Internet, a three credit graduate course for English teachers (junior high through two year college level) which focuses on incorporating the Internet into the English classroom. This is one of several teacher development courses offered through UNI Professional Development (http://www.uni.edu/profdev). As I now approach teaching this course for the third time, I have re-organized my email system to make it as stream-lined as possible for both me and class participants. Students complete surveys at the end of each unit and the end of the course answering a number of questions, including "What can be improved?" The most prevalent response is that the class participants feel overwhelmed with the amount of email that the class generates. I have sent suggestions to students to create folders or boxes in addition to their inboxes. Some students benefit from simply organizing the email by topic. I have even sent suggestions that, after skimming postings from peers pertaining to discussion that were not relevant to them, they could delete mail.

It is not possible to restrict the amount of email in the course. It is the source of Information Acquisition: teachers research, read, interview and share information gathering and then synthesize what they have learned in their listserv postings and react to others' ideas. The listserv and email are also the source of Learning Application--teachers are guided as they develop Web-based lessons and provide peer feedback to each other and share their final module projects. We also use email for Self-Reflection--teachers assess their projects, new learning, ie: what they learned in the module and share that information via email with their instructor.

Because the focus of the class places so much emphasis on the benefits of group discussion/dialogue via the listserv, the list's message volume can be overwhelming. What seems to me a "light load of messages" sometimes is overwhelming to those who do not read their email daily. On the other hand, the email communication between participants and instructor and learner to learner has been highly rated in our end-of-course evaluations. Participants appear to rely on the group discussion list as the primary communication vehicle.

The syllabus for Teaching English with the Internet, http://www.uni.edu/profdev/english, is broken into an introduction and four modules: Teaching with Email and Videoconferencing, Efficiently Searching for Lessons, Designing an Online Lesson, and Creating Your Curriculum Web Page. Each module has a project/assignment for class participants to complete. When I taught this course for the first time, I had no particular method of organizing how I presented my instructional email to my students. I had the postings organized for myself in folders labeled by module. As I posted each mailing to our class listserv, I listed in the subject line a very brief description of the contents of the post. I did require my class to use a dollar sign ($) before each subject line, as did I, to help easily distinguish class email from all the other email each of us received every day. In retrospect, I should have expected the class participants to be overwhelmed. We had generated, with a class of ten students, approximately 500 email messages in the five weeks that the course ran.

The second time I ran the course, I made one small change: I sequentially numbered my postings. While this helped when we needed to reference a posting, it did not address the larger organizational issues.

ORGANIZATION FROM THE FACULTY PERSPECTIVE
With Joan Vandervelde, author of Teaching with the Internet courses ((http://www.uni.edu/profdev/teachnet/), we have devised an advanced organizational method for both filing and posting all the email that we send to our classes.

First, I have organized all my mail into a folder system in my word processor, Microsoft Word. I have intentionally done this in my word processing program because it allows me the flexibility to manipulate the text more easily than my email program, Eudora. Also, if I choose to change email programs, I will not have to forward my 100+ files.

Once in Word, I set up a directory structure:

Postings

Introduction to course/ Administrivia
Module 1 (2, 3, 4)
Administrivia
Discussion

Tips and Links

I copied each of my postings into a Word document. I made certain that the subject line for email was the first line of the document and that it reflected the hierarchical structure of the folders and a detailed subject heading (example: Mod 1 Q& A: What about auditory learners)? When I saved the file, I saved it by the subject heading only in the Module 1, Q&A folder (example: What about auditory learners).

Essentially, the Word documents will act as the email "masters." I can customize them when I post them to each section I teach, but my original document will stay intact.

In the two prior sections of my class, the students clearly demonstrated that they "mastered" the material, in spite of an undeveloped email system. If that is the case, why make the changes I have outlined above? Most students, even if they aren't overwhelmed by 500+ email messages in a class, will benefit from the advanced organizers in the subject heading.

The Advanced Subject Organizer functions similarly to a Concept Map, which "allows one to gain an overview of a domain of knowledge. Because the nodes contain only a keyword or a short sentence, more interpretation is required of the reader, but this may be positive" (Plotnick). The reader, while being "clued" to the content of the email posting, must also interact with the keyword subject line to interpret the keyword and relate it to a topic or concept. Therefore, the reader has a more active role in determining not only the content of the posting, but the importance of it as well.

The Graphical Organizer Homepage outlines critical questions one must address when striving to make material organized:

What is the central word, concept, research question or problem around which to build the map (or in this case--the subject line)?
What are the concepts, items, descriptive words or telling questions that you can associate with the concept, topic, research question or problem?

The chief suggestion on The Graphical Organizer Homepage is to "Use a top down approach, working from general to specific or use a free association approach by brainstorming nodes and then develop links and relationships."

This is precisely the structure that I have outlined above.

The class email list has the potential to facilitate the organization of activities for the online classroom structure as a whole. Advanced organizers in the subject line of postings can assist students in:

Locating and remembering key facts and ideas

Introducing new information

Summarizing dialogue/discussions

Viewing information as a meaningful whole

Facilitating inter-relationships among ideas

Functioning as a mini study guide

Using advanced organizer subject lines clearly establishes a consistent classroom routine. Students know from module to module that there will be certain categories of information (Administrivia, Q&A, Discussion, Tips and Links). Once the pattern is established within Module 1, the students can anticipate the organizational structure simply by reading the subject line. When they read "Mod 2 Discussion . . ." they will immediately prepare to participate, in this example, in discussion regarding the contents of the posting. In short, advanced subject organizers announce to the students the work required of them. In turn, this helps them fulfill the action or activity we are requesting of them.

ORGANIZATION FROM THE STUDENT PERSPECTIVE
One of the first postings I will send to my class will be instructions on setting up folders that mirror my folder structure. Then, once they start receiving my postings and postings from classmates, they will easily be able to file them into the corresponding folders, which they have already established. We will all have to add a folder to the introduction and each of the modules. Under introduction, we should add a folder called "class introductions." These will be introductions posted to our list from the class participants in the first week of the class. This is why it is not necessary to include it in my "teacher's folder hierarchy"--it will be student generated. The additional folder to be added to each module will also contain student generated material: their required postings about their online readings. This folder should be labeled "Reading Reactions."

MANAGING EMAIL
This leads me to the next consideration of how to deal with the scores of mail in my inbox. What do I do with all the email generated during a class? First, within my email program, I create a folder for the class. In the past, my next step has been to create a folder for each student and one for the class mailing list, making that the archive of every posting that has transpired. I felt a need to keep track of every posting each student made (the individual student folders) and a personal archive of all the class postings in the event any student appealed his/her grade. At the end of the class, I'd have burgeoning folders containing every piece of email that each student had sent during the semester. The reality was that almost none of those postings had value beyond the end of the class. What mattered were their projects and my grades on those projects. I would then, weeks after the class ended, methodically go through each folder, deleting everything non-essential. This was tedious, so I have devised another method for the spring.

When using Advanced Subject Organizers, I will still create student folders, but I will also create a separate set of folders in Word. These folders will be under the directory "Archives," and the folders will be labeled by the Module numbers and subject line, for example "Module 1 Project". As a student progresses through each module, I will continue to keep the most important email in the folder bearing their name in my email program. I find this step necessary because many times, projects are revised. The email "conversation" between us is the documentation of suggestions of changes and the discussions that ensue. When the project has been handed in, I can then delete the discussion from the student's folder. At the end of each module, I will copy and paste their projects into a document and save that document in my "archives." I will then have copies of all students' work for the class. I can then use the folder as the clearing house for the next module, clearing it again when I archive the next project. At the end of the class, I can delete all student folders and even the directory for the class. Note: I keep all vital student information, such as final grade, email address, etc., in a permanent Word document.

I will still maintain a folder with every posting that I make to the list while the class is in session. This will help me keep track of which postings I have already sent to the list and the date I sent it. When the class is over, I can delete the folder.

This method may seem cumbersome and specific only to Teaching English with the Internet. I'd like to address both issues. First, while the initial establishment of the folders may take a few hours, the rewards of presenting clearly organized information to my students far outweighs a few hours' work. Student frustration and confusion makes for an unhealthy learning environment. Organization and clearly articulated expectations, both achieved through Advanced Subject Organizers, eliminates both frustration and confusion. Secondly, This method could easily be applied to any class that is divided into sections. For example, I have written an online composition class (http://www.users.nac.net/abro/121.htm) for Middlesex County College (http://www.middlesex.cc.nj.us) which is based on five essay assignments and readings. Using the method I've outlined above, I will easily be able to organize a directory/folder structure in word processing that will allow me to organize my postings to the class in a logical method. At the end of the class, I've archived all student projects, retained student information such as name, student identification number, email address, etc., and I've also been able to delete past classes from my email program.

I look forward to implementing these techniques with my spring classes because one of the greatest lessons I have learned is that an overflowing inbox creates great anxieties for students and instructor alike.

WORKS CITED
The Graphic Organizer Homepage: Concept Map. February 18, 1999. http://www.graphic.org/concept.html

Plotnick, Eric. "Concept Mapping: A Graphical System for Understanding the Relationship Between Concepts." ERIC Digest. June 1997. http://ericir.syr.edu/ithome/digests/mapping.html

TCC Online Conferences
Kapi`olani Community College
University of Hawai`i
Honolulu, HI




Welcome About 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007	1999 Paper Presentations INBOX: MANAGING EMAIL WITH ADVANCED SUBJECT ORGANIZERS AND FOLDERS Jacquelyn Abromitis, Middlesex County College, University of Northern Iowa <abro@nac.net> http://www.users.nac.net/abro http://www.middlesex.cc.nj.us http://www.uni.edu/profdev/english ABSTRACT This paper chronicles managing email for an online class. Like most faculty new to teaching online, I had been overwhelmed by the volume of email generated by my classes. Over three semesters, I have gradually developed a method to make email management intuitive and simple for both me and my students. By devising a multi-leveled folder system coupled with advanced organizer subject headings, the inbox has emptied, and email need no longer be dreaded. In this paper, I give detail how I arrived at this system, and I explain how to implement it. This method is easily adaptable to any course, regardless of content. INTRODUCTION I teach an online course for the University of Northern Iowa: Teaching English with the Internet, a three credit graduate course for English teachers (junior high through two year college level) which focuses on incorporating the Internet into the English classroom. This is one of several teacher development courses offered through UNI Professional Development (http://www.uni.edu/profdev). As I now approach teaching this course for the third time, I have re-organized my email system to make it as stream-lined as possible for both me and class participants. Students complete surveys at the end of each unit and the end of the course answering a number of questions, including "What can be improved?" The most prevalent response is that the class participants feel overwhelmed with the amount of email that the class generates. I have sent suggestions to students to create folders or boxes in addition to their inboxes. Some students benefit from simply organizing the email by topic. I have even sent suggestions that, after skimming postings from peers pertaining to discussion that were not relevant to them, they could delete mail. It is not possible to restrict the amount of email in the course. It is the source of Information Acquisition: teachers research, read, interview and share information gathering and then synthesize what they have learned in their listserv postings and react to others' ideas. The listserv and email are also the source of Learning Application--teachers are guided as they develop Web-based lessons and provide peer feedback to each other and share their final module projects. We also use email for Self-Reflection--teachers assess their projects, new learning, ie: what they learned in the module and share that information via email with their instructor. Because the focus of the class places so much emphasis on the benefits of group discussion/dialogue via the listserv, the list's message volume can be overwhelming. What seems to me a "light load of messages" sometimes is overwhelming to those who do not read their email daily. On the other hand, the email communication between participants and instructor and learner to learner has been highly rated in our end-of-course evaluations. Participants appear to rely on the group discussion list as the primary communication vehicle. The syllabus for Teaching English with the Internet, http://www.uni.edu/profdev/english, is broken into an introduction and four modules: Teaching with Email and Videoconferencing, Efficiently Searching for Lessons, Designing an Online Lesson, and Creating Your Curriculum Web Page. Each module has a project/assignment for class participants to complete. When I taught this course for the first time, I had no particular method of organizing how I presented my instructional email to my students. I had the postings organized for myself in folders labeled by module. As I posted each mailing to our class listserv, I listed in the subject line a very brief description of the contents of the post. I did require my class to use a dollar sign ($) before each subject line, as did I, to help easily distinguish class email from all the other email each of us received every day. In retrospect, I should have expected the class participants to be overwhelmed. We had generated, with a class of ten students, approximately 500 email messages in the five weeks that the course ran. The second time I ran the course, I made one small change: I sequentially numbered my postings. While this helped when we needed to reference a posting, it did not address the larger organizational issues. ORGANIZATION FROM THE FACULTY PERSPECTIVE With Joan Vandervelde, author of Teaching with the Internet courses ((http://www.uni.edu/profdev/teachnet/), we have devised an advanced organizational method for both filing and posting all the email that we send to our classes. First, I have organized all my mail into a folder system in my word processor, Microsoft Word. I have intentionally done this in my word processing program because it allows me the flexibility to manipulate the text more easily than my email program, Eudora. Also, if I choose to change email programs, I will not have to forward my 100+ files. Once in Word, I set up a directory structure: Postings Introduction to course/ Administrivia Module 1 (2, 3, 4) Administrivia Discussion Tips and Links I copied each of my postings into a Word document. I made certain that the subject line for email was the first line of the document and that it reflected the hierarchical structure of the folders and a detailed subject heading (example: Mod 1 Q& A: What about auditory learners)? When I saved the file, I saved it by the subject heading only in the Module 1, Q&A folder (example: What about auditory learners). Essentially, the Word documents will act as the email "masters." I can customize them when I post them to each section I teach, but my original document will stay intact. In the two prior sections of my class, the students clearly demonstrated that they "mastered" the material, in spite of an undeveloped email system. If that is the case, why make the changes I have outlined above? Most students, even if they aren't overwhelmed by 500+ email messages in a class, will benefit from the advanced organizers in the subject heading. The Advanced Subject Organizer functions similarly to a Concept Map, which "allows one to gain an overview of a domain of knowledge. Because the nodes contain only a keyword or a short sentence, more interpretation is required of the reader, but this may be positive" (Plotnick). The reader, while being "clued" to the content of the email posting, must also interact with the keyword subject line to interpret the keyword and relate it to a topic or concept. Therefore, the reader has a more active role in determining not only the content of the posting, but the importance of it as well. The Graphical Organizer Homepage outlines critical questions one must address when striving to make material organized: What is the central word, concept, research question or problem around which to build the map (or in this case--the subject line)? What are the concepts, items, descriptive words or telling questions that you can associate with the concept, topic, research question or problem? The chief suggestion on The Graphical Organizer Homepage is to "Use a top down approach, working from general to specific or use a free association approach by brainstorming nodes and then develop links and relationships." This is precisely the structure that I have outlined above. The class email list has the potential to facilitate the organization of activities for the online classroom structure as a whole. Advanced organizers in the subject line of postings can assist students in: Locating and remembering key facts and ideas Introducing new information Summarizing dialogue/discussions Viewing information as a meaningful whole Facilitating inter-relationships among ideas Functioning as a mini study guide Using advanced organizer subject lines clearly establishes a consistent classroom routine. Students know from module to module that there will be certain categories of information (Administrivia, Q&A, Discussion, Tips and Links). Once the pattern is established within Module 1, the students can anticipate the organizational structure simply by reading the subject line. When they read "Mod 2 Discussion . . ." they will immediately prepare to participate, in this example, in discussion regarding the contents of the posting. In short, advanced subject organizers announce to the students the work required of them. In turn, this helps them fulfill the action or activity we are requesting of them. ORGANIZATION FROM THE STUDENT PERSPECTIVE One of the first postings I will send to my class will be instructions on setting up folders that mirror my folder structure. Then, once they start receiving my postings and postings from classmates, they will easily be able to file them into the corresponding folders, which they have already established. We will all have to add a folder to the introduction and each of the modules. Under introduction, we should add a folder called "class introductions." These will be introductions posted to our list from the class participants in the first week of the class. This is why it is not necessary to include it in my "teacher's folder hierarchy"--it will be student generated. The additional folder to be added to each module will also contain student generated material: their required postings about their online readings. This folder should be labeled "Reading Reactions." MANAGING EMAIL This leads me to the next consideration of how to deal with the scores of mail in my inbox. What do I do with all the email generated during a class? First, within my email program, I create a folder for the class. In the past, my next step has been to create a folder for each student and one for the class mailing list, making that the archive of every posting that has transpired. I felt a need to keep track of every posting each student made (the individual student folders) and a personal archive of all the class postings in the event any student appealed his/her grade. At the end of the class, I'd have burgeoning folders containing every piece of email that each student had sent during the semester. The reality was that almost none of those postings had value beyond the end of the class. What mattered were their projects and my grades on those projects. I would then, weeks after the class ended, methodically go through each folder, deleting everything non-essential. This was tedious, so I have devised another method for the spring. When using Advanced Subject Organizers, I will still create student folders, but I will also create a separate set of folders in Word. These folders will be under the directory "Archives," and the folders will be labeled by the Module numbers and subject line, for example "Module 1 Project". As a student progresses through each module, I will continue to keep the most important email in the folder bearing their name in my email program. I find this step necessary because many times, projects are revised. The email "conversation" between us is the documentation of suggestions of changes and the discussions that ensue. When the project has been handed in, I can then delete the discussion from the student's folder. At the end of each module, I will copy and paste their projects into a document and save that document in my "archives." I will then have copies of all students' work for the class. I can then use the folder as the clearing house for the next module, clearing it again when I archive the next project. At the end of the class, I can delete all student folders and even the directory for the class. Note: I keep all vital student information, such as final grade, email address, etc., in a permanent Word document. I will still maintain a folder with every posting that I make to the list while the class is in session. This will help me keep track of which postings I have already sent to the list and the date I sent it. When the class is over, I can delete the folder. This method may seem cumbersome and specific only to Teaching English with the Internet. I'd like to address both issues. First, while the initial establishment of the folders may take a few hours, the rewards of presenting clearly organized information to my students far outweighs a few hours' work. Student frustration and confusion makes for an unhealthy learning environment. Organization and clearly articulated expectations, both achieved through Advanced Subject Organizers, eliminates both frustration and confusion. Secondly, This method could easily be applied to any class that is divided into sections. For example, I have written an online composition class (http://www.users.nac.net/abro/121.htm) for Middlesex County College (http://www.middlesex.cc.nj.us) which is based on five essay assignments and readings. Using the method I've outlined above, I will easily be able to organize a directory/folder structure in word processing that will allow me to organize my postings to the class in a logical method. At the end of the class, I've archived all student projects, retained student information such as name, student identification number, email address, etc., and I've also been able to delete past classes from my email program. I look forward to implementing these techniques with my spring classes because one of the greatest lessons I have learned is that an overflowing inbox creates great anxieties for students and instructor alike. WORKS CITED The Graphic Organizer Homepage: Concept Map. February 18, 1999. http://www.graphic.org/concept.html Plotnick, Eric. "Concept Mapping: A Graphical System for Understanding the Relationship Between Concepts." ERIC Digest. June 1997. http://ericir.syr.edu/ithome/digests/mapping.html TCC Online Conferences Kapi`olani Community College University of Hawai`i Honolulu, HI