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Communication Rules

As the course is massive with hundreds of students, you are expected follow the communication rules throughout the semester. There are two options to communicate with instructors: 1) via virtual office hours on the course blackboard page, 2) via email.

Virtual Office Hours

If it is a general-purpose question, an answer to which will be useful to other students, then a student must post it via virtual office hours on the blackboard discussions page. Virtual Office Hours is not a place for asking for specific help/guidance about your assignments (e.g. how to fix this or that error). Before posting, a student should check if:

  • a similar question has already been asked by another student or not.
  • the question has a meaningful title (for other students to navigate through).
  • the answer can't easily be found with the help of google or other resources.

Emails

If it is a personal (private) question, then a student should opt for an email. Emails should follow the provided template (see below) and have all the relevant emails in carbon copy (CC). For example, in case of writing an individual question to your instructor, you should put all co-instructor emails in CC. In case of writing an email regarding your team project, you should put all co-instructor AND all teammate emails in CC.

Your emails should have a meaningful title (subject), introduction, body, and signature. The following is one possible template that you can use in your daily email conversations. You can automatically generate it for yourselves for ADA University. .

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Extra tips

You can have different signatures for different courses or different emails. You can also use your signatures as your email templates. You can set up and use your signatures by clicking on the pen icon above your email (in Outlook, after clicking New Email), so that you won’t have to copy-paste it every time.

If your instructor has a Ph.D. degree, then refer to your instructor as Dr. or Professor. Otherwise, use Mr./Ms. (unless the person you are writing an email to has a title, such as M.D.). Use only surname immediately after.

In case of requesting something, use the phrase “Thanks in advance” at the end of your email in order to not write single-line and unnecessary “Thank you” emails. Avoid excess emails and do not use Outlook as a chat box.

Do not click REPLY ALL when your reply concerns only the sender. Use REPLY instead. Learn to make proper use of forwarding an email when necessary. See the official Microsoft instructions on the matter. You can also flag or pin important emails if you wish.