Methods to enhance community through messaging in the online classroom

This descriptive educational practice paper details how instructor-initiated messaging can be implemented to enhance community and student–instructor connection in the online classroom. Messaging such as e-mails, announcements, alerts or phone calls is often used as a way to inform or clarify course content or expectations, remediate or encourage student performance, or to build community. Messaging is a deliberate form of instructor-initiated one-way communication that is not included in the body of the course content when the course was designed. In this paper, various types of instructor-initiated messaging will be described. Dimensions of messaging, such as level of personalisation and whether the message is public or private, will be explored. Additionally, a use case will be presented from an economics department in a large public university. Instructors and online administrators can use this information to systematically develop and integrate messages into online courses to enhance community.