Housekeeping for Moodle (or other VLE) spam?

[sensibal]

My son is at UCL. When he was home recently, and using his university email account, I noticed it was full of unread Moodle forum messages. I asked him what they were and he said he gets an email every time someone posts in one of the course-related Moodle forums he is subscribed to. He showed me some and a lot of them were questions from other students about assignments, with answers from the course tutor, so not directly relevant to him. I asked him why he didn't unsubscribe from the emails and he said that was because occasionally there is something important, though he didn't explain how he would recognise that from an unopened email when they all seem to have the same subject line (something like 'message from UCL moodle forum x'). I left it there, but I'm wondering if all student email inboxes are similarly clogged. Surely it can't be the default?

Learning to deal with an inbox is an incredibly valuable skill.

I’m with you - unsubscribing sounds like the sensible approach here! Or if he doesn’t want to not get the emails, set up a rule so that they go into a separate folder.

I do suspect that a lot of students’ inboxes are similar (and partly why many are so crap at seeing and actioning important information!).

I also think having a school email address can be unhelpful - it doesn’t really seem that they’re ever taught how to manage their emails (unsurprisingly given how stretched schools are), but they fall into bad habits which matter less at school, but much more when they have to take responsibility at uni.

This is normal. I use our VLE as the main form of module documentation and communication. Because if I announce something in a lecture they forget or don’t write it down or complain they weren’t there so didn’t know etc etc.

Its also a way to let students know that there’s new material or a bit of important information about assessment and so on.

I need to activate the notification email because my students can be very lazy about reading or checking the VLE and send me inane emails for information that is already carefully posted up on the VLE.

It is an important part of professional life now - learning to manage email.

It is an important part of professional life now - learning to manage email.

I totally agree with this, but do universities pro-actively offer students guidance on how to do it? And is it possible to distinguish between staff forum posts and student posts in notification settings?

Information about IT is easily available via Google or on many many websites. It’s mostly common sense. It’s not rocket science.

I teach actual content. I expect students to have some common sense and take responsibility about how they organise their work. I don’t tell them how to file their notes or when they should study!

There's teaching and then there’s hand holding.

I wouldn't expect the lecturers to lower themselves, 🙄 but universities do provide this sort of guidance in their FAQ's - I've actually found some now, so will pass it on..(He probably didn't think to look for it himself because he assumed the default settings would be optimised).

Default settings are never optimised.

Universities do provide information on how to use tools. However the assumption is that students are adults and can figure out what they need to do and find the information whether it be on the university help pages or elsewhere. Expecting that "universities pro-actively offer students guidance on how to do it" is a ridiculous level of hand holding.

An unecessary post. Did it give you pleasure? I'll never understand why people take pride in putdowns.

Actually no, not an unnecessary post. Students are increasingly expecting to be spoon fed and hand held. Let him figure it out himself and build the necessary skills to become a productive employee. You doing it for him doesn't help in the long run.

It's not something that is taught in schools, especially not when their school accounts often have emails blocked outside the organisation. That means you're expecting them to instinctively know that filtering exists, that email rules exist, that creating actions/automation exists.

Half of them get to the workplace with almost zero useful experience - much like, say, a 55 year old coming into the workforce and being expected to know instinctively how to print a 47 page document, two sheets to a page, full colour, stapled on the top left left hand side and combining portrait and landscape pages on a network print release system where the printer is currently jammed with a torn piece of paper behind the bottom left staple array and there's half a sheet of A4 stuck in the top cover feeder. They need to be taught.

I'm not doing it for him, but I will pass on the guidance, which will help him for now and in the future. He doesn't know what he doesn't know, so wasn't searching for the guidance himself. Everyone has to learn some time, and his time is now.