Cruising the Electronic Classroom
by
Stephen D. Sowle and Richard Warner

E-mail and threaded discussion groups can expand the walls of the classroom by facilitating continuing contact between professors and students. This article discusses several of the most common uses of these devices, but many more are possible, depending on the nature of the course and the teacher's instruction style and goals.

Using e-mail

1. Continuing discussion outside class

Every professor has experienced the frustration of having to stop discussion of a topic in class before it has been fully aired. E-mail can provide an effective means for you to continue these discussions without taking up additional class time. You can use e-mail to pose additional hypotheticals, to address policy considerations or doctrinal subtleties, or to clarify areas students seemed to misunderstand.

You can use e-mail to create a virtual classroom by encouraging students to respond to your postings with comments and questions, as they would if you were presenting the material in the classroom. You can then forward to the entire class the comments or questions that you find particularly perceptive or useful, along with your responses. If you decide to use e-mail in this manner, consider whether your "default rule" will be to identify the students whose messages you forward, or to keep their identities confidential. Students are more likely to participate in e-mail discussions if they are assured anonymity, unless they explicitly authorize use of their names.

If you use a Socratic teaching style, you may view e-mail discussions as either boon or bane. On the plus side, you are more likely to receive considered responses to your questions because students have more time to think, which allows the dialogue to move quickly to a more sophisticated level. On the negative side, the immediacy of direct interaction is absent, and students are not challenged to think on their feet in a focused exchange, which many instructors see as the main advantage of the Socratic method.

2. Answering student questions

Students often have questions that cannot be addressed in class because of limited class time, because the question is tangential to the issues you want to emphasize in class, or because the student fails to raise his or her hand due to shyness or a sense of intimidation. E-mail can provide a useful means for answering these questions.

Some instructors believe that encouraging students to use e-mail for questions and comments signals that the instructor does not welcome office visits. In our experience, exactly the opposite seems to occur -- as long as you clearly communicate to students that you welcome office visits and view e-mail as a complement instead of a replacement.

Many students are too shy to visit their professors, even during set office hours, and e-mail provides a means for these students to express their thoughts in a way that seems more anonymous. These students are more likely to visit you in person once they have broken the ice via e-mail. For less timid students, your willingness to address their questions by e-mail may help convince them that you are serious in encouraging them to come see you in person.

3. Conducting short-answer quizzes

E-mail can be an efficient means of conducting optional or graded quizzes on class material. One of our colleagues (Ralph Brill) has used e-mail to pose short-answer questions in his first-year Torts class, distributing the questions by e-mail and asking that students submit their e-mail responses by a designated date. He then uses e-mail to draft and return comments on each student's answers. The entire process can be done from the professor's and students' computers.

4. Administrative use

For many professors, the first several minutes of class are frequently devoted to administrative matters: what the students should read for the next class, rescheduling a canceled class, announcing an upcoming event, etc. Over the course of a full semester, these minutes can add up to a significant amount of time. Addressing such matters in e-mail can both save these precious minutes and contribute to an atmosphere of studiousness in class.

Threaded discussion groups

Threaded discussion groups are electronic bulletin boards that use Internet technology. When you access a discussion group, your screen will display all of the messages that have been posted by participants in the group to date. Typically, messages are listed, or "threaded," by topic and, within topics, by date. You can read an existing message by clicking on it with your mouse and can add a new message either by replying to an existing message or by creating a message with a new topic. All messages posted to the group can be read by all participants and retained indefinitely.

Discussion groups can be used for all of the purposes discussed above, with the exception of short-answer quizzes. Because all postings to such groups can be viewed by all members, they can be used to post questions, but in most cases are inappropriate as a method for students to post their answers.

Comparative advantages of e-mail and discussion groups

Assuming you have the technology to support both e-mail and discussion groups, which should you use? It depends. For many instructors, an important advantage of e-mail is that it allows them to control discussions by acting as the gatekeeper for everything distributed to the class. With discussion groups, by contrast, students can post anything they want for all members of the class to read. For some instructors, this feature may be an advantage rather than a disadvantage. It may be particularly well-suited to smaller, seminar-style classes. E-mail lists can also be set up to allow students to post messages to the entire class.

Another potential advantage of e-mail is that students are more likely to see (and, one can only hope, to read) your messages. With discussion groups, you may find it hard to persuade students to access the site regularly, and participation in discussions may suffer. We have had noticeably more success using e-mail than discussion groups.

One of us (Richard Warner) is experimenting with using class credit as an incentive for students to access and participate in a discussion group set up for class discussion. The results so far are encouraging -- significantly more students are participating as compared with a similar discussion group set up for the same course a year ago.

Threaded discussion groups have one distinct advantage over e-mail groups: Because messages appear in threaded form and all messages can be accessed from a single screen, it is much easier for students to follow the flow of particular discussions and to comprehend the development of concepts and arguments, especially during the first year, when students are struggling to learn basic legal concepts and styles of legal reasoning.

During this time, threading can be a considerable advantage in helping students understand the material. A compromise solution is the threaded archiving of e-mail discussions on a Web server through commonly available free programs such as Mhonarc and Hypermail.

Effects on the classroom

As noted above, you can save classroom time if you make announcements or give quizzes electronically. More important, using e-mail or a discussion group to continue classroom discussion and to answer student questions allows you to devote more time to expand issues discussed in class or to clarify areas of confusion; you no longer need to worry that spending additional time addressing a particular topic will be at the expense of an equally important (or more important) topic later in the course.

One consequence of this is that using e-mail or discussion groups to supplement classroom interaction frees up additional classroom time for delving more deeply into theoretical and policy considerations, exploring hypothetical applications of the legal rules under discussion, and so on. Classroom time can thus be reserved for discussion of difficult or sophisticated issues that are best taught in direct exchanges with students.

Another benefit is that students who lack the confidence to participate actively in class may feel more comfortable taking part in on-line discussions, particularly if they can be anonymous. This helps counteract the unfortunate tendency for classroom discussion to be dominated by a few students.

Making it work: Final thoughts

To use e-mail effectively, all of your students must have e-mail accounts and must be persuaded to consult their accounts on a regular basis. This task is greatly aided if your school has an ingrained "e-mail culture." At Chicago-Kent, for example, students are given e-mail accounts when they arrive, and they quickly realize that the administration and their professors rely on e-mail heavily to make announcements and communicate information on a wide range of academic and administrative subjects.

Use of e-mail and discussion groups will work effectively, of course, only if students have reasonable access to your school's computer network from lab computers, their own laptops, or through dial-in access from home computers.