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I work as a professor at a university. Email, and in-person meetings, are the default methods of communication. Looking at my inbox now, messages include: - So

I work as a professor at a university. Email, and in-person meetings, are the default methods of communication. Looking at my inbox now, messages include: - Some discussion about an upcoming conference. It is being hosted by someone at another university and several of us are offering advice and support. - Some discussion internal to my department about course planning - Some FYI emails about upcoming committee assignments, a move to a new office, etc. - A copy of some exams that I've been asked to grade within the next week or so - Some personal stuff and more. No messages from students now, but when the semester starts I will get those as well. Email is the only communication system that's used by everyone here, by default. Communication, at least in my corner of the university, is asynchronous -- if you really need to get someone's attention now, then the building had better be on fire. As an exception, professors hold "office hours" where they are available to students for drop-in help on demand. Chat like Teams, Zulip, etc. is also used, but it tends to be set up by small groups at their own initiative. For example I have a longstanding Zulip chat with two of my close colleagues.

saimiam 4y ago
> copy of some exams How do you segregate emails for different exams? E.g., if you teach two courses and have to grade assignments in both, what’s your workflow? Is this a solved problem in some LMS that your org uses?
- impendia 4y ago
  These were graduate comprehensive exams. These are an unusual case, as they are a rare occurrence, graded by more than one faculty member, and only a handful of them. For ordinary classes, how I receive exams is up to me. For large classes I always administer and collect the exams in person and in hard copy. (Except as the Covid situation dictated.) For small classes I sometimes give take-home exams, and allow students to hand in a hard copy or email it to me. I've also set up folders via Dropbox or MS OneDrive (individually for each student) in the past. We use Blackboard as our LMS. In principle this is a solved problem there, in practice I'd rather finagle a couple dozen emails than deal with Blackboard more than I have to.
  - saimiam 4y ago
    I saw in your HN profile that you teach math. Is that why you prefer hard copy submissions? Must be hard to deal with sheaves of paper. My wife is a assistant prof as well. I built her an e-mail bucketing system where her students email assignments to different email addresses (like assignment1@her-domain.com OR mid-term@her-domain.com) and it sits inside different buckets with the same name as the email address. That’s why I was curious about how other profs handle this situation. Edit_1: what’s the issue with Blackboard?
    - impendia 4y ago
      I do teach math. If the exams are given in class, then I don't have any choice but hard copy. Exams are free-response, where showing your work matters, and these are difficult to pigeonhole into any particular format. As for Blackboard, I find it obtuse, slow, and painful to use. Anything you want to do requires multiple clicks, each of which takes a noticeable amount of time. Not that much, but after a lot of clicks my patience quickly runs thin. It is also a very elaborate piece of software, which has a very particular idea of what a course should look like -- and this idea is based on conversations with senior administrators, not with faculty or students. It is after all the former who are making the purchasing decisions. You can read this famous Twitter thread on Blackboard and baby clothes: https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 I have no desire to adapt my course to anyone else's workflow, let alone to one I find obtuse. That said, I am unusually stubborn in this regard, even by the standards of math departments. For example I still prefer to keep my schedule as a .txt file, rather than using Google Calendar/Outlook/etc., which pretty well marks me as a luddite. Not everyone hates BB.

saimiam 4y ago

> copy of some exams How do you segregate emails for different exams? E.g., if you teach two courses and have to grade assignments in both, what’s your workflow? Is this a solved problem in some LMS that your org uses?

impendia 4y ago
These were graduate comprehensive exams. These are an unusual case, as they are a rare occurrence, graded by more than one faculty member, and only a handful of them. For ordinary classes, how I receive exams is up to me. For large classes I always administer and collect the exams in person and in hard copy. (Except as the Covid situation dictated.) For small classes I sometimes give take-home exams, and allow students to hand in a hard copy or email it to me. I've also set up folders via Dropbox or MS OneDrive (individually for each student) in the past. We use Blackboard as our LMS. In principle this is a solved problem there, in practice I'd rather finagle a couple dozen emails than deal with Blackboard more than I have to.
- saimiam 4y ago
  I saw in your HN profile that you teach math. Is that why you prefer hard copy submissions? Must be hard to deal with sheaves of paper. My wife is a assistant prof as well. I built her an e-mail bucketing system where her students email assignments to different email addresses (like assignment1@her-domain.com OR mid-term@her-domain.com) and it sits inside different buckets with the same name as the email address. That’s why I was curious about how other profs handle this situation. Edit_1: what’s the issue with Blackboard?
  - impendia 4y ago
    I do teach math. If the exams are given in class, then I don't have any choice but hard copy. Exams are free-response, where showing your work matters, and these are difficult to pigeonhole into any particular format. As for Blackboard, I find it obtuse, slow, and painful to use. Anything you want to do requires multiple clicks, each of which takes a noticeable amount of time. Not that much, but after a lot of clicks my patience quickly runs thin. It is also a very elaborate piece of software, which has a very particular idea of what a course should look like -- and this idea is based on conversations with senior administrators, not with faculty or students. It is after all the former who are making the purchasing decisions. You can read this famous Twitter thread on Blackboard and baby clothes: https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 I have no desire to adapt my course to anyone else's workflow, let alone to one I find obtuse. That said, I am unusually stubborn in this regard, even by the standards of math departments. For example I still prefer to keep my schedule as a .txt file, rather than using Google Calendar/Outlook/etc., which pretty well marks me as a luddite. Not everyone hates BB.