Because students like using email, I have made this a major form of teaching interaction in my courses. In the early 1990s I began compiling an email list for the entire class, in order to distribute data sets for the labs. By the mid 1990s, most students were using email regularly, so I began distributing responses to individual questions that arrived by email. If I thought the question and response would be of general interest to the class, I would distribute the response and the question (after removing the name of the person who posed the question). The email query rate went way up when I started posting replies in this fashion. I respond as quickly as possible, to encourage students to use email to ask questions. In a few cases, students who discovered something they think might be of use to other students have sent the material along to me. If I judge it to be of interest as well, I distribute the student's email to the entire class.
      Because of the peculiar nature of email (very personal but without the person present), several students were able to communicate via email that they were having difficulty or feeling frustrated by the course. This allowed me to meet and provide encouragement and one-on-one instruction to students who would never have told me in person they were having trouble.
      In summary, I have found many uses for email as a teaching adjunct: communicating organizational details about the course, communicating explanations of marking by the demonstrators in the course, distributing answers to questions about labs or assignments as they arise, responding to students having trouble with the course. To give a sense of the variety of uses, I have attached several emails from the Fall 2000 term (Appendix B1). I have removed students names where appropriate.