Email Is Dying — Here’s What That Means For Your Classroom

Let’s pretend one of your students has a question about an upcoming assignment and wants to ask one of his or her peers. What do you think he or she would prefer: sending an email or a text message?

It’s crazy to think that as recently as 2014, people didn’t have a preference when it came to communicating via email or instant messaging. But only two years later, instant messaging took a clear lead.

With the emergence and popularity of apps like Slack, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, it’s clear that instant messaging is currently the preferred method of communication, and it will continue to be in the years to come. This is valuable information for educators around the globe who can take advantage of this shift and improve the classroom experience of their students.

We’ve compiled a list of three questions educators should ask themselves before making any decisions about how to communicate with students.

1. How can I make classroom communication more personal?

It may seem like instant messaging isn’t suitable for lengthy statements and important alerts, but it’s the fastest way to reach people these days. Instant messaging gives students an individualized and private way to communicate with you and their classmates.

Chat rooms feel more comfortable and less formal than e-mails, and this allows students to reach out to you without much effort. You might worry about receiving messages at inconvenient times, but you can take advantage of an app’s do-not-disturb settings to only receive notifications during certain hours. Tools like Classuite also offers professors the opportunity to set chat office hours, and your class will feel no anxiety about asking for help.

2. How can I make communication convenient for my class?

E-mails often go unread — this is an unavoidable phenomenon. With so many things calling for our attention, it can be hard to give everything the consideration it deserves. Research has found that students only spend six minutes a day checking their email, which isn’t encouraging news for educators.

Instant messaging provides a quick and easy way to get your class to listen. Students are already on their phones constantly, so what better way to reach them? It’s quicker and more convenient for them, and they can get push notifications from an instant messaging app anytime they’re tagged. So what are you waiting for? Reach out to your students, offer them valuable content, get them engaged and earn the respect of your pupils!

3. How can I make classroom communication effective?

We’ve all gotten stuck in long, back-and-forth email chains that seem to not get us anywhere. There’s nothing more annoying than being looped in on messages that have nothing to do with you. Give your students a chance to use instant messaging; they can create groups, mute irrelevant conversations, and collaborate within seconds. We all know the millennial attention span isn’t exactly great — one study found that it’s somewhere around eight seconds before they get distracted. Effective communication is intrinsically linked with clear and quick dialogue, so what better way to provide value for your classroom than introducing instant messaging as the primary form of collaboration?