Online Etiquette Expectations
Published in
1 min readJul 8, 2020
If part of your course has students interacting with other students, you may want to pre-emptively define expectations about how those interactions should work, especially in the case where these are asynchronous interactions where you may not be able to immediately address concerns.
Online expectations do not need to be entirely dictated from the instructor and an early part of your course may be collaboratively building these expectations with students to form a social contract for the course.
Whether you set expectations or offer some starting points you may want to consider some of these points or examples:
- How you and others will be addressed (e.g. professional titles, tone)
- Keeping things choral (Mike Caulfield has a blog post on choral explanations where the goal is to make sure all voices are included)
- Managing or avoiding sarcasm
- Dealing with personal information and stories.
- Whether or not emoticons/emoji are encouraged or discouraged (can help with tone or expression but can be unprofessional in other contexts)
- Providing adequate sourcing, credit, and citation
- How to address concerns about violations
Here are some different examples of etiquette expectations
UBC Communicating Online: Netiquette
