When IM Is the Best Way to Stay on Top

We like this, the SCUP office uses AIM a lot:

It’s tough to keep up on your workload, whether you’re a faculty member responsible for several classes or a student juggling a full schedule. The logistical dance becomes even more daunting for those learning remotely — from computers hundreds of miles away, or another campus in the same college system.

Yet those are everyday problems for students and instructors at large, sprawling community college systems, especially those that offer a significant portion of their courses online. The country’s largest singly accredited system, Ivy Tech Community College, in Indiana, thinks the solution is already staring many of its students in the face: instant messaging, hardwired into every teenager since the heyday of America Online.

The community college system, which serves more than 115,000 students a year on 23 separate campuses across the state, adopted an instant messaging platform called Pronto, from the collaborative learning software company Wimba. Like a turbocharged AOL Instant Messenger or Google Talk, it lets students chat online with their professors in text, audio or video form, for virtual office hours or impromptu question-and-answer sessions.

Faculty Communication 101: What They Didn't Tell You in Chair School

In this article from Inside Higher Ed, Elia Powers interviews former administrator and faculty member, Christopher J. Loving, about the programs he has designed "to help those working in academia better communicate with each other":

When I talk to faculty who are in a “safe” place, I still hear their innocence, their curiosity, their compassion. If you’re in a department that isn’t as healthy as it could be, all these people who are cynical and arrogant create conversations that look realistic and authoritative, and they require thick skin. They flame each other in e-mail, insult each other in faculty meetings and tell and demand more than listen and invite.