With the incoming flow of students now getting their results, it's a good time to be refocussing on how you choose to communicate with them both about your course and on general information. It can be a very tricky line to walk between function, form and staying relevant to your students.
Here's a quick tip video with some examples of where I've seen & heard it work effectively across Higher Ed.
Transcript: This week, we're going to take a look at communicating with students, as it can be a really challenging area for a lot of instructors to work out. Who do they communicate with? How do they do it? What formats do they do it in? So let's jump in.
It can seem a little bit overwhelming to think about all the different methods that we have to communicate with students. You've got their student emails, you've got WhatsApp. There's text messaging, there's Discord, there's WeChat—there are hundreds of different variations of how both the institution itself might communicate with students and then also how you will communicate with them.
It's important to remember that each and every cohort will be different. Their preferences will vary. There isn't a single system that's going to fit the needs of every single student. And it's important to remember that you're never going to find one solution that fits everybody, that meets everybody's needs.
The basis of it comes down to how accessible do you want to be? Now, there is an argument to be said that for cohorts with 4,500 to 6,000 students, you really don't want to be immediately available at all times. I know from experience that students will often send messages outside of normal work hours and expect an almost immediate response some of the time.
Having worked in customer support functions within higher education for digital solutions, I know that the emails can come in thick and fast. And it's also worth remembering that lots of students operate in completely different time zones from us. And also their life schedules can be different. They may not have the same time constraints that you and I do, or they may have additional ones that mean they can't communicate with you in normal time.
So it's important to set out your store quite early about how accessible do you want to be. The second part is, what are you trying to say to them? It's a widely known feature of marketing that you need to be talking to your audience in the medium that makes sense for what you're trying to say, in the same way you would use LinkedIn for doing professional communications, in a way that you wouldn't use maybe your Instagram or your Facebook account for that.
So understand what the tone of your normal communications are like. You might be using your course page in your LMS or your VLE to give course updates about when a piece of work is due. But is that necessarily the vehicle that you want to use for chatting with students or giving them sort of a virtual office hour? Think about how you're going to make your decision about what medium makes the most sense for what I'm trying to say.
Now, that being said, there are some pretty interesting ways that I've seen this student communication be handled across different institutions. One school of thought is that by having something, a broad group-based and chat-based, say a Discord site or a WhatsApp group, is that you can empower students. Many of them will be asking the same questions that lots of other students are asking. They'll all have the same things, and giving them a space where they can communicate, but you're still involved in some way, that can really give them some empowerment.
We know that students are going to have, let's say, a WhatsApp group, or there might be ten or twelve or 15 different groups of friends within a certain course, or people who have worked together previously on other group projects. These groups already exist, and they're already being internally moderated by the people that are inside them.
So potentially you could bring that moderation into a group setting. Creating a shared space for people to go and communicate, whether that be, as I said, in a WhatsApp group or a Discord channel, finding the places where students actually spend a lot of their time can be a really powerful tool in understanding what sort of modes of conversation are they likely to have.
Discord is a really powerful example. It's not known by quite a lot of the academic community, but that's where students go to talk to each other when they're playing games or to communicate, or to find out information about whatever it is. So setting up a server in Discord is very simple and straightforward to do. And you could create that for your course. That then allows you to assign your own student moderators, that they will then self-police the conversation to go there.
But it's all still visible, it's all still able for you to make sure that the right information is being discussed and that you're not potentially opening up anybody to any kind of malfeasant behavior.
A really powerful example of this was working with a very large economics module, about 500 to 600 students that were on there. And what they decided to do is that they actually took students who had performed very well in the prior year, and when they moved into their second-year course, they chose and selected a few of these students to become moderators for the current first-year group.
Now, that's a really empowering thing for those students to be able to do. They can put it on their CV, they can discuss that kind of communication aspect, leadership aspect that they had in there, but also they know a lot of the questions that the students are going to ask. They are probably much more likely to be able to give the student-centric answer to a question much more quickly than you are.
So it's something worth thinking about, about how can you actually leverage the student body that you're trying to communicate with to do that communication for you. Maybe create some sets of FAQs that the students from the prior year have had and get your outgoing students to provide the information, the knowledge back into the incoming group.
It's all about understanding and understanding your students and thinking a little bit like you're a marketing company and thinking about how am I going to best communicate the information that's relevant to this medium and which medium do I choose to do it through?
So there are lots of different methodologies that you can use for this. It tends to be that the university dictates what happens and what you're able to go and drive through. But don't be averse to trying new things, exploring new avenues, and making sure that what you're doing is the best fit for the group of students that you have.
And just as a reminder, it's okay to make mistakes on this. You're never going to be able to predict exactly what your students are going to want from one cohort to the next. I remember from personal experience the move from MySpace over to Facebook and the great consternation that caused—some students wanting to be on MySpace and some wanting to be on Facebook.
The plethora of apps that are available now are going to make it impossible for you to know what your students want without asking them. So don't be afraid, ask them, talk to them directly, and I'm sure you'll be able to find something that makes sense for you and for them.
That's all for now. As always, if you've got any questions, please feel free to drop me a message, talk to the podcast. We do read every topic, and I'll see you in the next one.
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