Using E-Mail for Teaching, Learning and Research

DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
FACULTY OF SOCIAL AND MANAGEMENT SCIENCES
BAYERO UNIVERSITY, KANO

Using E-Mail for Teaching, Learning and Research
It seems that students of all levels are eager to start using E-mail for learning and research. In the last three years all categories of my students, in their comments on “critical comment on classroom experience” agitated for going E-mail in my programme of teaching. In 2005/2006 Academic Session all my teaching programmes for levels II, III and IV contained provisions for E-mail learning. For obvious reasons i.e. lack of adequate computers and internet facilities easily accessible to every students, we are unable to start.

What is E-mail? Mail simply means send by post. An E-mail is an electronic mail i.e. sending message by electronic means. In other words an e-mail message is a simple text message sent to a recipient. One of the many advantages of being online is the use of electronic mail, which is popularly known as e-mail.

Every training manual on internet also teach about e-mail. There are two main methods one can start e-mail programmes:
- When you open your internet explorer click on your browser’s mail icon.
- You can also start your e-mail programmes by clicking the windows start button by the lower left-hand corner of your display which will also carry you to the e-mail software on clicking the e-mail programmes.

Using an e-mail software to send an e-mail message has four-step process:
- Open your e-mail software
- Compose a message
- Send the message to your outbox
- Transmit the message

When you send the message to your outbox, you have to transmit it by the same process. Otherwise the message will never leave your computers as sending the message to outbox is different from transmitting the message.

E-mail is another great machine of the modern ICT for teaching, learning and research.
- It is easy to use, very fast and allows sharing of or collaboration on documents
- Like the internet system it has an advantage of communication from one-to-many
- It can widely be used by students for debate, discussion, disseminating information, surveys and questionnaires, locating colleagues and even electronic meetings.

The structure, content and wordings of e-mail text determine the understanding of the message by recipients. Therefore, there is need to manage e-mail carefully. This is because what you send might not be what is received. Thus:
- Remember that your message could reach thousands of peoples, therefore think carefully before sending polemical response
- Normally use two-line breaks between paragraphs.
- Be concise and clear
- Check your texts to correct grammatical errors before you send
- Try to avoid sending large attachments
- Use plan text as styled text may cause problems for some e-mail programmes
- E-mail messages – if you are a regular sender of texts that will gradually refine your written English language.

There are many automated distribution systems in e-mail software. These include: JISmail; LISTSERV; NYPERmail; MAJORDOMO; etc. The JISC mail website is the major server of e-mail for teaching, learning and research. This server provides electronic discussion lists for the higher education community. It has thousands of discussion lists with variety of subjects and hundreds of thousands members world-wide.

I have no doubt that as we have already gone internet for teaching, learning and research each one of you has an e-mail address. My level IV students 2005/2006 session had already started using e-mail for learning and research

Therefore, if you do not have an e-mail address it is a requirement that you have it. This is important because all you need to send an e-mail message is the e-mail of the person you are e-mailing.

If you do not have an e-mail account go to any ICT centre or internet café and request that you want open an e-mail address. E-mail addresses have three parts: username e.g. mmyusif; the symbol e.g. 58”; then the Host name i.e. the name of the server where the users e-mail account resides e.g. yahoo.com. There is a password which your e-mail account will not open without it. But there are mails account without passwords.

M.M. Yusuf October 2006