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Session 1520

WEB PAGE AND LIST SERVE UTILIZATION TO APPROACH 24/7 STUDENT-FACULTY COMMUNICATION

William K. Szaroletta Purdue University

ABSTRACT As a general trend, 24/7 is becoming an industry standard for information availability. Students are no different in demanding 100% “up time” of communication with the professor and demanding quicker feedback to their non-lecture-time questions, quizzes, exams, homework, and lab reports. In a nutshell, students desire office hours on a 24/7 basis. This paper details the establishment and testing of a part-public, part-private course web page and a course email list serve including all registered students. This technology implementation has been tested for a sophomore-level strength of materials class for the purpose of improving the communications loop times between the students and professor and improving student satisfaction.

The public portion of the web page includes a course outline, lecture and laboratory syllabi, daily homework assignments, examination schedules, and email access to the professor. The private portion of the web page (available to only registered students with valid computer accounts) includes homework problem solutions, examination solutions, common laboratory data, and other potentially copyrightable course material. Hyperlinks are liberally provided on the web page to support ease of navigation (including return paths) to course material and the professor. One feature that has proven extremely useful to the utility of this technology has been the implementation of a revision page, which allows tracking of modifications to the web page.

This paper describes utilization of technology to successfully improve student-faculty communication and in the process has improved student satisfaction with the course.

INTRODUCTION: The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) 2000 Report1, "National Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice” points out that student engagement is enhanced by contact between students and faculty members. The study concludes that the more contact the student has with the faculty member, the better in terms of improved student engagement.

The author has observed that students, in general, have developed study habits that lead them to expect to obtain faculty input at non-standard hours; basically students are now desiring 24/7 uptime of faculty. Since no faculty member can provide this access, the methods described in this paper have allowed the author to effectively produce a faculty-student communication environment that approaches 24/7 with little additional effort on the faculty member’s part.

It is the intention of the author to help other faculty members increase their faculty-student communication through utilization of similar methods of utilizing the described Web Page Approach and List Serve Approach.

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Szaroletta, W. (2001, June), Web Page And List Serve Utilization To Approach 24/7 Student Faculty Communication Paper presented at 2001 Annual Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico. 10.18260/1-2--10040