Netiquette

"Hey you!" "Yo!"

Teaching in a classroom with an online course website, teaching a hybrid class and teaching a fully online course all require students to appreciate the need for courtesy. As we have all learned the hard way at least once, written communications are easy to fire off and difficult to erase from memory, if they are offensive.

The recommended link for online etiquette, or "netiquette" that the Lane faculty technology course recommended for sharing with students was this.

The same rules appear at this site, in a relatively nicer format, although you can't see all of the rules at a glance, at least on my screen. Also the explanation of the concepts is very brief. This is either an improvement or not as useful, depending on your perspective. As time passes it would be nice if these ideas were becoming absorbed in tech culture, but I am not sure if that has happened, or if it will.

Another best practice to prompt student courtesy is to define expectations for email and posting online. An engaging way to do this that I learned from Barbi McLain is to collect some of the more bizarre and egregious communications you receive, scramble them to protect student privacy, and share them with new students working in pairs or trios. The students can use the samples to create guidelines they feel are appropriate and workable. Or, students could compare their sense of the guidelines needed to the collection of non-examples that you provide. You could also ask each student to bring a non-example to class, redacted to protect privacy.