Oncourse communication tips for instructors

Oncourse offers many different ways to communicate with students; see Tools for managing site communication. Consider the following tips for using communication tools:

• Determine which tools you want students to use; add those tools, and remove any you don't want students to use. Students may be confused by extraneous links on the menubar. See Adding, removing, hiding, or reordering tools.
  
  
• Consider setting a memorable course-specific email address in the Email Archive tool and sharing it with students. Even if you later remove the Email Archive from your menubar, participants will still be able to send email to the site email address. See Sending and receiving mail using Email Archive.
  
  
• In Settings for the Messages tool, select Yes for "Auto Forward Messages" to forward messages to an email address you created specifically for a course. This allows you to collect messages in one place, and helps you avoid receiving a large number of messages in your other email account. See Viewing and managing messages.
  
  
• To help promote classroom collaboration, encourage students to add their photos and contact information to Profile in My Workspace, and consider doing the same for your Profile. See Profile: Overview.

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