Good-bye email, welcome Slack

Abstract

Email is the standard in communication with university students; as a one-to-one communication device, students repeat their doubts along multiple messages, multiplying the teacher's work and preventing the participation and learning of other students. The topic forums on virtual campuses allow better a management of doubts but require the active participation of all the students to achieve a final outcome. We propose to abandon the email and traditional forums of the campuses and enter tools with a higher professional profile to manage communication with the students. The results of this first experience, carried out with more than 90 postgraduate students, encourage its mass employment in both undergraduate and postgraduate. The survey conducted over 102 students in three different subjects of two different MSc shows how Slack, the tool we used, has been highly valued, with differences depending on the studies but neither on the gender nor on the intensity of use of the social networks.