The proper methodology to contact me is either through your ASU.EDU email address or our discussion forum. If it is of a personal nature, please please use your asu.edu email address. No one needs to know anything about your personal life (including me), and so when grade discussions and similar items need to be discussed, email, email, email. Given that we need to ensure security within our communications, we are told to NOT respond to non-asu email addresses. I still respond, however, the response will be to say, email me from asu.edu, not your yahoo.com, google.com, aol.com, or your AltaVista.com (Hail Zorp!).

Now I know we have methodologies through our homework systems and Learning Management Systems (Canvas), however, we cannot guarantee those are secure. Moreover, for Canvas specifically, 100’s of instructors over decades have asked for the functionality to turn off messages. Goal being to have everything in one place, i.e. our email. They have refused to do this simple request and inquiring minds want to know why. The belief (with our tin foil hats on) is that they are data mining as when things don’t make logical sense, usually there’s a financial reason behind it.

Lastly, we want to make things easy. With email, we can directly reply and if we all reply back and forth, we create a historical reference chain. Bare in mind that while you have one instructor, we have 400+ students. So having a solid (easily viewable) reference of previous conversations is invaluable. So please once again, asu.edu email addresses!

Content related questions must be in the discussion board as mentioned previously. The reasoning behind that is because for every homework assignment there’s usually one or two tricky questions. I can answer that 10 times in email, or once in the discussion board. Moreover, while 10 may have been willing to reach out for help, we have to take into account the rest of the class. I’m sure there would be many people who want to ask a question but chose to stay silent, however, if an answer is there they will receive help as well! Lastly, since I’m an old decrepit man, I go to bed at 8-9. You may need help at 9 and I’m sound asleep. However, your fellow classmates probably maintain normal schedules for young kids where you go to bed post midnight, perhaps pull all nighters and thus to ensure the quickest response for help on a given problem, you should be using the discussion forum.

I reserve the right to refuse to respond to ANY email that drips the usage of AI. AI loves to throw random words together to make it sound like the most flowery nonsense I’ve ever heard.

EX:

Dear most esteemed professor,

could you please elaborate on what the result was of this most significant interaction? (Blah blah blah)

This is seen as insulting. You cannot be bothered to take the bare minimum time to draft an email with a request / query and instead use AI to get the job done. It also makes us stop and think, “Do they believe we are that dumb to not recognize it?”, hence the insult.

I would rather have an email in your own words littered with grammar issues than some word salad produced by AI. That being said, grammar checks are easy, so that shouldn’t be an issue anyhow.