Communication

How to contact and communicate with your students
Here at NTU, we offer five main online tools for communicating with staff and students. The main two of these, in our learning and teaching context, are the Discussion and Chat tools available through the NTU Online Workspace (NOW).

There are three other options for text-based communications:

email
messaging
buzz tools.

Students can expect their course tutor or administrator to offer advice on how communication is to be conducted on a programme or module of study. Each eTool provided by the University has distinct advantages and disadvantages, depending on the context of use. In addition, students may already have an email account and belong to social networking websites.

Discussion tool
The Discussion tool is used to create online forums which facilitate peer interaction whilst supporting and encouraging student-to-student and tutor-to-student interaction, normally within the learning and teaching context. The tool allows you to:

Encourage students to share reflections with peers.
Set-up areas for students to ask questions.
Pose a question for the class to debate.
Create areas for groups to work on tasks.

Messages are stored in the discussion tool and users can only delete or edit messages that they have sent.

Chat tool
The Chat tool in NOW allows you to engage in real-time, text-based discussions with students and colleagues. It supports both public and personal chats and is best used for discussions that have been arranged at a predefined time.

NTU email (Microsoft Exchange/Outlook)
The University provides all students and tutors with an NTU account which can be used for communicating course-specific and non-course-specific information. An example of non-course-specific information is the NTU eNews. Staff will normally advise students how they intend to conduct course related communication at the beginning of their programme or module of study. This email system is reliant on addresses available in the Exchange address book (i.e. individual addresses and group addresses). Messages can be saved or deleted by the account holder.

Messaging tool in NOW
The messaging tool in NOW, like email, is an asynchronous (not instant or real-time) communication tool. For easier management, messages received within your NOW messaging tool inbox are automatically copied (forwarded) to your main NTU outlook email inbox. These messages also are marked as read in the messaging tool in NOW. Both of these features mean that the messaging tool need not be monitored and staff may concentrate on their main NTU email inbox.

The tool can be used to communicate with students within a specific module or programme and offers some distinct advantages over standard email. For example, messages can be filtered automatically in NOW by different academic groupings:

a module group
seminar group
project group.

The NOW messaging tool then enables distinct groups of students that are automatically defined by NOW to be contacted. In many places it is possible to select email recipients from a pick list, for example, the Classlist, Dropbox and Attendance Register tools. Additionally, managing of student replies is simplified by the ability to filter by module. This facilitates the viewing of messages from a specified group of students. Messages can be saved or deleted by the account holder.

Buzz tool
The Buzz tool in NOW is an online messaging tool that you can use to send simple, text-based messages directly to other users who are logged into NOW at the same time. If the recipient fails to collect the message it is stored in NOW and can be retrieved the next time a user logs on. Messages can be saved or deleted by the account holder.

Education Development Unit (EDU) support
Should academic staff wish to explore the use of the above tools, EDU are able to offer: