If you are interested in protecting your grade, this page is important to you.
If you think that in the future, even in the distant future (within the next ten years) you might be asking me for a job reference, recommendation letter, letter in support of a fellowship application, then this page is important to you.
If you fit one of the two categories above, read this page carefully and in full. If you do not, communicate with me as you wish, but I make no promises about how well I can track what we have said in writing.
I am putting here the "quick reference" summary of the below comments for those who have already read this page and just need to double check if their memory is correct:
Use email when you want your words to me kept for the duration of the semester or longer, especially if you want me to reread and/or remember comments, extra credit and promises having to do with your course grade or plan to contact me someday about recommendation letters or similar things. Remember to use the proper format and include this keyword when relevant: gradeissue.
Use bCourse messaging when you don't care if your words disappear soon, as if on a whiteboard that is frequently (and definitely before grades are calculated) cleaned to pure empty white.
Before writing me you should, using the ADVICE in the next section below, make a decision as to whether you should contact me via email or bCourse messaging. (By the way, bCourse tracks the number of times you write me and I can use that information, if I want, as part of determining a grade. I don't use that information—I consider it misleading.)
I preserve my emails and I can search their content effectively. I can neither preserve, or even search content of bCourse messages. This situation, in my case, the way I run classes, makes a HUGE difference because ...
... because at the end of the term, before giving a final grade, I search all emails relevant to that course, using the keyword searches gradeissue and ecearned.
In the case of gradeissue, this allows me to recall reasons why a student was absent, grade changes on the gradebook (so I can double-check that they are indeed there), personal issues that the student informed me of that might affect the grade ... in other words, anything that might raise the grade that I report for a student to the University. I do NOT try to remember these things, I trust in the system. If it is not in the email, it is as if it doesn't exist, even if we talked just the day before I submit grades.
In the case of ecearned (a tag I give you, not one you can give yourself), I list up all the extra credit activity that all students have done. Then, on a comparative basis, I decide how much upward pressure these activities might have on the grade. Usually I boil all the activity down to "none" "moderate" "substantial" "remarkable" or something like that. Then, before submitting final grades, if that student is near (as is just below) a grade cutoff line, I might move the student upwards into the new grade category. As with "gradeissue", I do NOT go by memory; I work with the record as it exists within emails ONLY. *This is a separate category of extra credit from what you receive directly on quizzes and such. That is recorded in the gradebook and need not be in an email or any other written correspondence. This is only about the "extras" that students do that aren't related to a quiz, test or essay score.
BEST AS AN EMAIL
If you have a grade issue that is major.
If you have a grade issue that is minor but you want me to revisit our conversation about that point before calculating and submitting the final grade.
If you have something very interesting to say about an assignment or that day's discussion. (There is a possibility I will tag your interesting comments with a "ecearned". Even if not I will see that conversation again as I review correspondence for the final grade. That might have an indirect or unconcisous but positive influence on your grade. Who knows.)
If, weeks, months or years from now you think it might be useful to you if I were to see that email again. When in doubt assume that it will be useful since the future is a mystery to us all.
You just want to contact me about something, email happens to be the most convenient way of the moment, and you don't care if it takes a couple of days to get an answer.
BEST AS BCOURSE MESSAGING
I like bCourse conversations and I am on bCourse all the time so I see incoming messages very quickly and tend to respond to them a bit faster than emails. So, it is a great place for sorting simple things out, double-checking assignment instructions, all that administrative stuff.
You just want to contact me about something, and bCourse happens to be the most convenient way of the moment and you can decide later whether the conversation should be moved over to emails (perhaps with some repetition involved).
You don't care if there is a record of the conversation. It is just a friendly exchange of some sort. While I won't reread any bCourse conversations before submitting final grades, I will of course in one way or another remember that we chat now and then in this fun and interesting way.
I will not review your emails for a course grade or later for recommendation letters and such if you do not use my system to tag the emails. In theory, yes, I can find your emails anyway by using well-phrased search engine actions but in practice this is too time consuming. I won't do it. (I have huge time pressures at the end of the semester for grading, triple-checking gradebooks, etc. before submitting grades. It is the one of the busiest times of the semester.) So, if you email me and you don't want that email to go invisible, use the subject line system.
My subject line systemhas components that 1) locate you within the correct class and the correct semester for that class, and 2) identify you using the name I know for you, and, sometimes, 3) tags the email for my later review. For example:
EA105Su13 SUZUKI Ken gradeissue
This student's roster name (let's imagine because he is fictional) is SUZUKI, Kenzaburo but he likes to go by "Ken". He is in EALC 105, in the summer of 2013. He is writing about a grade concern.
Another example:
J7AFa14 CORNWELL lizzi randomcomment
This student's roster name (let's imagine because she is fictional) is CORNWELL, Elizabeth but she likes to go by "Lizzi". She is in JAPAN 7A, in the fall of 2014. She has something on her mind.
... and that's how it work!