Once upon a
time, as e-mail was becoming more prevalent in education, I was a whole hearted
supporter. At that time, I still encountered students who had never used a
computer before. This has not happened in a long time. I
even wrote about how computers save time using words like “quietly
turbo-charged”. I was really impressed by the productivity enhancements of
e-mail. At the time I was also an early adopter of e-submission, first via
email and later via something called WebCT. I loved both. I also had the
opportunity to be trained to submit grades directly into a programme called
banner. This was about 8 years ago. It was also in the developing world.
Now that
e-submission and e-mail are no longer at the leading edge – having been widely
adopted and now the status quo – I have come full circle. I think we have lost
our way. Both have become ends in their own right rather than means to an end. With
that comes stagnation, decline and lost productivity. Why the change of heart?
My inbox
and outbox are what done it. My inbox brings in nearly 11,000 items a year. At
the same time, I have been sending about 4,000. This does not take into account
that many of these items might go to multiple recipients. An e-mail sent to a class
(module for UK readers) of 135 students counts as one. I do not know exactly
how long it takes me to consider each of the 11,000, but let’s take a
conservative estimate of 15 seconds. This single activity consumes 45.5 hours.
Writing emails takes longer. Depending on what I have been asked to do, a
response may take an hour (or longer). Others such as routine student questions
might take 30 seconds. When I recently returned from 2 days away from the
university, I noticed that it took me the better part of a day to clear my
inbox and during one two hour period it took me 2 hours to complete 12 emails.
It is hard to say I wasn’t asked questions outside of the virtual world during
those 2 hours, but that would be about one e-mail every 10 minutes. For the
sake of illustrating my point use a round number of 5 minutes each. Answering
emails then involves 333 hours of my time.
Together, these two activities amount to about 378
hours. The UK work week is typically 37 hours/wk (not 40 like the US and a
variety of other countries). This means we are looking at around 10 weeks of
time devoted to screening and responding to e-mails. That is a lot of time. I
will be honest, in the nearly two years of my current inbox there are over 500
items I have not even had the time to click on and at best I will have just
scanned the title.
What is
worrisome about that number (378 hours)? The academic contracts I have seen
from the UK (excluding professor) are for 1575 hours of work a year. The 378 is about 0.25 of the contracted
amount. If the flood of e-mails continues to rise (it has increased on the
order of 500 to 1000 items a year) I will drown. I do not think I am alone in
feeling on the ragged edge of being overwhelmed by this. While I am sure there
are people who receive less e-mail and perhaps manage it “better”, I am equally
sure there are those that receive more and do not manage it as well.
Are these
estimates extreme? Perhaps, but I think 25% of time devoted to maintaining
e-resources of various types (including e-mail) is not extreme.
Given the
choice, what would students and staff (and academic managers) choose? Would
they all say that devoting 25% of academic staff resources to e-mail is the
best use of time? I think not. Extra academic tutorials would go a long way to
helping students. More fully marked assessments (rather than portfolios) would
go a long way to helping students. More time available to work in lab and write
grants and papers would go along way to helping the reputation and competitiveness
of a University.
I genuinely
believe that institutions that crack this problem will be at a very substantial
competitive edge. In the meantime, I genuinely believe a vicious cycle is at
work. The maintenance of e-resources and keeping up with e-mail is a drain on
time which is driving institutions to implement more e-learning and e-mail
based communication while lowering assessments. The more they do this the less
time is available for face to face interaction and tutorials.
