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'Student Evaluations of Departmental Email: Electronic Communication at Rochester Institute of Technology ' By Bruce A. Austin and Rudy R. Pugliese, Rochester Institute of Technology Fifteen years ago, when department chairs wanted to announce something to the students in their department, the choices were simple: post a message, in chalk, on the blackboard or make an announcement in class. Some departments had individual mailboxes or folders for their students where “dear occupant” notes could be dropped, and the sender would hope that all of the intended audience both received and read the message. Today, multiple media for reaching out to students are available. Which medium or media should one choose for any given message? How does one make the choice? Is one medium better than the others for particular kinds messages? How does the audience define “better”? No one questions whether academic departments have legitimate and myriad reasons for staying in touch with their students. And no one questions the value of email as one such medium for communication. Anecdotally, the medium and its content dominate as a topic of water cooler conversation. Hyperbolically, email has emerged as the answer to nearly every communications need. As if, somehow, email is a magic bullet, loaded with a secret elixir, shot by electronic marksmen. Department chairs often like to think they are doing the right thing by staying in touch with students. Two years ago Bruce Austin, a Department Chair, began communicating on at least a weekly basis with Professional & Technical Communication (PTC) students via an email list. The list is regularly updated as new students enter and older ones graduate. Austin likes to think he is being a “good” department chairman by peppering PTC students with messages on a variety of subjects. Moreover, Austin likes to think he is embracing the PTC students by including them in evolving events (e.g., faculty hiring), alerting them to upcoming opportunities (jobs, co-ops, scholarships and contests) or congratulating them individually or as a group for some success. While Austin likes to believe these things, and while there is a certain intuitive appeal to such thoughts, no empirical data support his self-satisfaction. For all he knows, students perceive departmental emails as spam and with the same cheerfulness as we all greet mortgage reduction missives at our own terminals every morning. The present study reports currently enrolled undergraduate students’ evaluations of their department’s email contact with them and the students’ preferences for the medium through which they want to be contacted, and reveals what the students report they “do” with all the information the department sends them. In 1999, the National Communication Association Task Force on Technology Use suggested that assessing technology use in instructional contexts be a top priority (Eadie, 1999). Unfortunately, the context of email is rarely the subject of investigation. This is especially unfortunate since this medium not only allows for the transcendence of space and time (Spears & Lee, 1994) but also appears to be growing in its use and importance as a communication medium among students (Kuenzi, 1999-2000). In the organizational setting it has been reported that frequent use of email results in increased face-to-face communication (Conrad & Poole, 1998; Johansen, 1984) and that frequent users regard the communication system more favorably than less-frequent users (Hacker, Goss, Townley, & Horton, 1998). In the home setting, email can be used for maintaining interpersonal relationships and providing gratification opportunities (Stafford, Kline, & Dimmick, 1999). Along with fax and written letters, email was perceived to be more competent than face to face, telephone, and voice mail channels for inclusion and relaxation needs (Westmyer, DiCioccio, & Rubin, 1998). Importantly for PTC, where about one-third of the department’s students are deaf or hard-of-hearing, email facilitates communication between the hearing and the deaf or hard-of-hearing; email eliminates the need for an interpreter to be immediately present. Additionally, the literature reports a number of uses of email in the instructional context. In a study of peer evaluation, students rated email more serious and helpful than online chats (Honeycutt, 2001). Apprehensive students showed higher levels of confidence and receptivity during email sessions than during face-to-face sessions (Mabrito, 1991). Reticent students showed a greater preference for using email in communicating with faculty and reported greater levels of comfort and ease than they would have when using oral channels (Kelly, Duran, & Zolten, 2001). Research conducted in the 1970s and 80s documents that face-to-face communication between faculty and students outside of the classroom results in a number of benefits, especially to students: greater levels of satisfaction (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1976; Wilson, Gaff, Dienst, Wood & Bavry, 1975), increased clarification of career goals (Wilson et al., 1975), lower levels of attrition (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1977; Pascarella, 1980), greater integration into the social life of the college (Terenzini, Theophilides, & Lorang, 1984), improved academic skills (Terenzini et al., 1984), and higher educational aspirations (Pascarella, 1985). Popular acceptance of email as a medium for communication occurred beginning in the 1990s. In the educational context, instructors who have positive attitudes toward the use of email in general report higher levels of course-related email than those with negative attitudes (Mitra, Hazen, LaFrance, & Rogan, 1999). Among students, the more they relied on email, the more positively they rated its use overall (Waldeck, Kearney, & Plax, 2001) but the more negatively they rated its use with faculty. The authors report that the students’ most prevalent use of email was for procedural or clarification purposes. Its least frequent use was for personal or social reasons. Waldeck et al. further suggest that students may consider email to be a social medium to be used with their family and peers, and that students may not be comfortable with “on-task communication with higher status individuals” such as faculty (p. 67). In sum, email has a number of advantages for student-faculty communication and is increasing in its use. It provides advantages for deaf, hard-of-hearing, and communication apprehensive students. Email can be used to augment face-to-face communication, but whether it can provide any or all of the same benefits as oral communication is still unknown. Given the research finding that the more students rely on email, the more negatively they rate its use with faculty, we need to know how students rate their email communication, which medium they would prefer, and what they do with the email they receive. METHOD A 38-item self-administered survey was distributed to currently enrolled PTC students by PTC professors during classes in mid-January, 2001 (See Appendix A). The specific survey items and response options are introduced and presented in the Results section below. Students were instructed to complete one and only one survey instrument. PTC students were emailed and their mail folders were stuffed with an announcement of the study and their participation was encouraged. At the time of survey distribution there were 67 students enrolled in PTC. A total of 48 surveys was returned representing a 72 percent response rate.1 RESULTS Students were asked to rate the department’s email contact with them “overall” on a four-point scale: 25 percent reported it was excellent, 56 percent checked “good,” eight percent “fair” and 10 percent “poor.” How often do they check their email? Three-quarters reported they check it daily. By way of contrast, few (eight percent) reported they checked their mail folders daily (see Table 1); most (48 percent) reported they checked their mail folders two or three times a week, once a week (21 percent) or less than once a week (17 percent). Spearman correlations computed between the students’ overall evaluation of the department’s email contact with them and the frequency with which they check their email and the frequency with which they check their mail folders were both negligible and nonsignificant (rho=.014 and rho=-.047, respectively, both p>.05). One-quarter (26 percent) has their email forwarded to another address, such as AOL or Yahoo. In addition to email, most (66 percent) reported they would like to receive information from the department through its web page; few indicated a preference for a newsgroup (nine percent), a user group (five percent) or a locker (seven percent); 14 percent reported “other” in response to this question. The web page choice that was so popular among respondents, of course, requires proactivity on their part: one must go to a web page, it doesn’t come to you. When asked to select one means of receiving messages from the department, 70 percent indicated email; 26 percent selected “place in my mail folder.” The above offers generalized self-report data on PTC students and email. We turn now to the relationship between more specific and particular kinds of information sent to the students and their email behavior. Two-thirds (66.7 percent) of the respondents indicated that the subject heading of the email message sent to them from the department was most likely to determine whether or not they opened the message. One-third reported it was the source of the message that determined whether or not they opened it. What the message is about, in other words, is far more important than who it is from in terms of deciding whether or not to open the email.2 This is not to say that reading occurred following opening an email. A bank of nine survey items asked respondents to rate the level of importance they associated with nine specific types of information. Respondents rated “importance” on a six-point scale labeled at one end “least important” (1) and at the other, “most important” (6). A second bank of 12 survey items inquired about respondents’ preferred mode of delivery for each of 12 specific kinds of information the department sends them. Closed-ended response options were provided. And, in a separate bank of 10 survey items, respondents reported what they had “done” with 10 specific kinds of information. Closed-ended response options, including “other,” were provided.2 About half of the nine subjects that PTC sends students emails on were rated as important with average scores of 5.0 or greater: information about scholarships (5.0), job and Coop opportunities (5.1), career-related information (5.2) and scheduling changes (5.4). Information about the department received an average score of 4.9. Subjects that were rated as less important by the students include information about off-campus events (3.0), campus events (3.5), contests (3.6) and (in one category) the College of Liberal Arts or the Institute (4.3). Unsurprisingly, the subjects students rated as important reflect pragmatic, and in some instances day-to-day concerns one would expect to be relevant to college students. Among the subjects the students viewed as less important for the department to make them aware of are things that, perhaps, the respondents feel they can find elsewhere or are viewed by the respondents as simply less relevant to departmental concerns (e.g., campus-wide events, contests). By which means do students say they prefer to have information presented to them? For most of the items in this bank, six response options were available to respondents: mail to my permanent address, mail to my temporary address, send me an email, place in my mail folder, make an in-class announcement or post on the PTC bulletin board (which is located above their mail folders). With only two exceptions (grades and pay checks) out of 12 items evaluated, email is the preferred mode of delivery; paychecks cannot be delivered via email at present. Three-quarters prefer receiving information about scheduling changes via email, two-thirds report the same for job and Co-op opportunities, and about half the students want to be alerted by email for information about the PTC department (58.3%), careers (55.3%), campus events (55.3%), off-campus events (53.2%), contests and scholarships (48.9% each) and the College of Liberal Arts (48.5%). What do students report they do with information the department sends them via email? Respondents were offered a six-point closed-ended response option: delete before reading, delete after reading, read and save for a later date, save the email for a later date, print the email message or other. For half the items (campus events, off-campus events, information about PTC, information about CAL and information about the Institute), the predominant response was to delete after reading. The other half of the items were read and saved for a later date: contests, scholarships, scheduling changes, job/Co-op opportunities and career-related information. Few messages were deleted before reading them, few messages were printed and few messages were saved for a later date. Finally, in an open-ended response format, we asked what other kinds of information the students would like to receive and, conversely, what kinds of information they were not interested in receiving from the department. For each question, the majority of respondents offered no response (52 percent in the former and 48 percent in the latter instance). Of those responding to the “other kinds of information they want” question, topics included alumni news (six percent), jobs (10 percent), academic advising (10 percent) and new course information (six percent). A modest number (15 percent) wrote that all information was important to them; nearly a quarter (23 percent) stated they were not interested in receiving non-PTC information from the department. DISCUSSION Students enrolled in PTC evaluated the department’s email contact with them positively. They check their email frequently and more often than the paper mail placed in their folders. Most (70 percent) report they prefer email if they had but one choice of the means by which to receive information from the department. Students report that email is the preferred method of delivery for most kinds of information. Message subjects that were viewed as important to the students uniformly were those that were of personal salience; less important and less personally salient subjects include those about which information might be obtained elsewhere, without departmental email contact. The more personally salient the information sent to students by the department, the more likely it was read and saved by the students; departmental emails that were viewed by the students as less germane, more generalized kinds of information were reportedly read and deleted. Two-thirds of the students report they would like to see the department use its web page as a vehicle for information. The web is a “pull” medium requiring students to seek it out; email is a “push” medium allowing students to act as passive recipients to messages sent them from the department, unless blue line links are included in the email. By including blue lines in PTC email messages to students, we employ the push medium in the service of the pull medium. However, until such time – and it is probably not far off – as students become accustomed (or habituated) to checking the department’s web site, email offers the greatest and fastest opportunity to stay in touch with the department’s students. No recipient is fooled (or, at least they aren’t often fooled) into thinking that an email distribution list is a personal message to them and them alone. “Tricking” email recipients with “inflated” or disingenuous subject line claims is certainly the wrong approach and would be as effective as USPS envelopes emblazoned with “You’re a $1 Million Winner!” We believe our regular use of an email list for both administrative-informative (e.g., course scheduling announcements) and affective (e.g., congratulatory notes) purposes is an important contributing factor to the students’ sense of inclusion and connection and their perception of the department’s interest and goodwill toward them. The present study’s results are limited by the sample size, homogeneity of the sample (one academic department) as related to external validity, and the usual cautions concerning self-report data. These limitations notwithstanding, conceptually, the present study serves as a springboard to an investigation of an associated issue. Currently, there is robust discussion at colleges and universities across the country on the related subjects of student persistence/retention. Anecdotal reports and empirical studies suggest that one means of increasing the likelihood of student persistence/retention is the quality of contact students have with their professors and academic departments. No one would argue that email is a substitute for interpersonal contact. And, likewise, interpersonal contact is not always the best means for staying in touch with students. While quality of college experience – as defined as first-year experience, introductory departmental seminars and other not-for-credit courses – surely yields positive benefits for some students, so too can the department’s email contact with its students prompt a sense of inclusion and satisfaction. Thus far there are no studies on the long-term effects of email on persistence/retention. The present research is preliminary to such an investigation and the results of the present project suggest that email contact is one means for enhancing likelihood of persistence/retention and diminishing likelihood of attrition. In our view, interaction and contact with PTC students begins at the time they enter the program and extends through post-graduation.4 And one means for accomplishing this goal is by using email. Moreover, beginning in September, 2001 we will initiate a pilot project that broadens our electronic reach to include individuals who inquire about and/or apply for admission to PTC, as well as currently enrolled RIT students who have selected the Communication minor to meet part of their Liberal Arts requirements. We previously implemented a web-based “Alumni Connection” as a way for the department to stay in touch with alumni. Too, this device is designed as an opportunity for currently enrolled PTC students to become engaged with alumni. In short, the present study, reporting on one department’s currently enrolled students and their evaluations of the department’s email contact with them can be folded into a broader context. We suggest this as a model for the Institute at large and argue that email should not only be used as a means of promoting retention but be extended to create and nurture alumni relationships on a virtually life-long basis. How such a relationship is – or at least ought to be – achieved is the subject of both a larger and more cohesive strategy coupled with a longitudinal inquiry that seeks to measure such things as student interest in and satisfaction with a number of dimensions that are part of the college experience. NOTES 1 The response rate reported is conservative since some students were out on Co-op and not enrolled in classes thereby making them unavailable to respond to the survey. 2 Using Chi-square we compared the determinant to open an email from the department (subject heading vs. source of message) on each of the 12 items inquiring as to the students’ preferred method of delivering information to them. There was no significant difference (p>.05) between subject and source on the 12 items. Likewise, there was no significant difference (p>.05) between subject vs. source on the 10 items asking what they did with the information. T-tests compared subject vs. source on the set of nine items respondents assessed the importance of and on only one item (job/Co-op opportunities) was the difference significant (t=-2.16, df=44, p=.037): source respondents rated this type of information more important than did the subject respondents. 3 A summary table of quantitative results from the importance scale, preferred mode of delivery scale and the “what they did with the info” scale is presented in an Appendix. 4 We also intend to create an archive of departmental emails to PTC students, a task for which the web is perfectly suited. REFERENCES
• Conrad, C., & Poole, M. S. (1998). Strategic
organizational communication: Into the 21st century (4th ed.). Fort Worth,
TX: Harcourt Brace. Table 1.
APPENDIX A The PTC Department is interested in improving its communication with PTC students and learning about your information needs. To help accomplish this we would like to learn your answers to a series of questions. First we'd like to know your preferred means of receiving information.
Now we’d like to learn how you would prefer to have information delivered to you. For each type of information there are probably several delivery choices. Below are different kinds of information the PTC Department might want you to have. For each of kind of information indicate which medium you prefer the Department to use deliver the information to you. Circle one response.
Biographies Bruce A. Austin is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Communication, Rochester Institute of Technology. He earned a Ph.D. in mass communications (Temple University), an M.S. in communication (Illinois State University) and a B.A. in communication (Rider University). His research interests and publications have focused on mass communications, the audiences for theatrically exhibited motion pictures, and economic, conceptual, historical and aesthetic issues pertaining to the American Arts & Crafts Movement. At RIT he teaches courses in mass communications, film and research methods. Department of Communication Rochester Institute of Technology 92 Lomb Memorial Drive Rochester, New York 14623 Rudy R. Pugliese is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Rochester Institute of Technology. He has a Ph.D. in mass communications, an M.A. in speech communication, and a B.A. in psychology. He has taught a broad range of courses in human and mass communication at the college level for 25 years and designed the College of Liberal Arts' courses in Persuasion, Public Relations, and History of Communication Technology. His awards include a graduate fellowship from Temple University, a research grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a CINE golden eagle award for educational video production, and the College of Liberal Arts’ Eminent Teaching Award at Rochester Institute of Technology. His research interests focus on communication in the contexts of distance education, computer-mediated messages, and politics. Department of Communication Rochester Institute of Technology Phone: 716-475-5925 Email: rrpgsl@rit.edu Fax: 716-475-7732
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