Important Information for Part-time Faculty: Communications
How do students and the law school communicate with me? Where can I get mail addressed to me?
Even though e-mail is the standard form of communication between faculty and both students and the administration, we urge part-time faculty to check your mailbox in the Part-Time Faculty office, room 1301, each time you come to the Law School. Students may leave messages there, and our staff will forward mail to you in your mail folder. Law book publishers often send review copies of books in your areas of law, and these are left for part-time faculty in room 1301.
How do I communicate with the students in my class?
All law students have mailboxes on the university's GroupWise e-mail system. That system, and most e-mail systems, allow users to set up groups. We urge all faculty to set up e-mail groups for the students in their classes, so that you can communicate easily with the students, either individually or as a group. Near the end of the semester, students will discover that, as they review the class material, they have questions, which they will e-mail to you. We ask that you be alert to these messages - although you are certainly free to set your own rules as to the kinds of e-mail questions you will accept (if any) and other standards; please be sure to announce those standards to the students. If you do receive a question from a student, you may want to consider transmitting your answer to the entire class and not just to the student who asked the question, so that all students get the benefit of your answer and so that there can be no accusation of unintentionally benefitting only the one student who asked the question; it may also save you from having to answer the same or similar questions from other students.
Some teachers have used the TWEN platform available from WestLaw, and other platforms such as Blackboard (which the university has adopted; see http://www.blackboard.luc.edu/), for putting their class materials on-line. These systems usually contain their own group communication system. If you want information about TWEN, full-time faculty should contact their Law Librarian liaison; part-time faculty should contact Fred Barnhart, the Associate Director of the Law Library, (312) 915-8516, fbarnha@luc.edu. For information about Blackboard, please contact the system administrators by e-mail at blackboard@luc.edu.
