Is all of that bland text in your LMS starting to get to you? Do you wish you could jazz it up a bit? As far as web browsers are concerned, emojis and Unicode symbols are the same as text.

This is module view in one of my Canvas courses. I put suns on either end of an announcement title, a red exclamation point and a blue-boxed 1 in the titles of modules, and a gold star in a text header.

Once you fine Unicode/emojis you like, copy the image. Go to your LMS. Edit the text, and paste the image. Save. Done! Be aware, though, that the image may look different depending on what device or browser your students are using. The graphics I used look much better on the Canvas Android app than they do in Chrome or Firefox, for example.

Here are a few websites to get you started. Yes, these are rabbit holes. Set an alarm if you don’t want to spend an entire afternoon here.

• List of Unicode symbols: arrows, Greek characters, dingbats, musical symbols, etc.
• Emojipedia has a pretty robust search engine that shows what the emojis look like on different platforms; click on an image of a person, and then scroll to the bottom to see the image with different skin tones or as a different gender (woman health worker, for example)
• The Unicode.org’s emoji list also shows you what the emojis look like when viewed in different platforms

If you’re teaching and attending committee meetings remotely, you’re spending some serious quality time with your headphones. I had never found earbuds that didn’t irritate my ears after an hour or so. Over-the-ear headphones make my ears hot, and the pressure on my head bugs me. A year ago, I bought bone conduction headphones, and I am thrilled with them.

Bone conduction headphones sit in front of your ears and transmit sound, not through your ear canal, but through the bones of your skull. Here’s a blog post I wrote in a different forum on how bone conduction headphones work. They take a little bit to get used to. The best way to describe the sensation is “weird.” I predict you’ll adapt quickly, though.

Because they sit outside your ear canal, you can still hear ambient sound. Of course, given how attention works, you can only pay attention to one sound: the sound from your headphones or the ambient sound. If someone is talking to me, I have to take off my headphones to pay attention to what they are saying. When I put in earplugs, however, I can’t hear anything but the sound from the headphones. I find that the bone conduction headphones/earplug combination works better at blocking out external sound than noise-canceling headphones do.

If your current headphones aren’t working for you, give bone conduction a try. You can get them wired or Bluetooth wireless. This April 23, 2020 MakeUseOf.com article identifies “The 5 Best Bone Conduction Headphones.” For what it’s worth, I have the AfterShokz Trekz Air headphones (and as far as you know, I look exactly like their model when I wear them).

Faculty seem to always be thinking about the best way to communicate with our students. While most academics still live inside of our email, most of our students do not. Some instructors use Remind or Slack to message their students, and both are good solutions. Both also require students to install an app on their device, and then a bit of instruction on how to use it.

As we’re about to start a new quarter here in the Pacific Northwest—a quarter that will be entirely online—the question of how best to contact students has risen to greater importance. A special shout out to my colleague Janet House who teaches students who don’t have strong tech skills for prompting me to spend some time thinking about this question: How can an instructor text, say, 30 students at once—without sharing one’s own cellphone number in the process?

The solution

Send text messages via email.

Every cellphone number automatically comes with an email address. It is the phone number followed by the carrier’s email extension.

If you have any kind of communication with your students now, whether it be through email or your course management system, ask your students that if they are willing to give you permission to text them important reminders about the course to please send you the name of their cellphone carrier and their cellphone number. Use this handy table listing 13 carriers and their extensions provided by Simon Hill at Digital Trends.

Alternatively, if your institution makes student phone numbers available to instructors, use the Free Carrier Lookup to find the carrier for each student’s phone number.

Whichever way you go, in your first message, always ask for the student’s first and last name to confirm that they give you permission to text them regarding the course. Also, since the address you sent to and the address that comes back will likely be different addresses, you won’t know which address is attached to which student. As names and addresses come in, update your list of names, addresses, and phone numbers.

Try it yourself

Send a message from your email to your cellphone number to see what it looks like.

I sent a message to <mycellphonenumber>@vtext.com (@vtext.com is the email extension for my carrier, Verizon) using my work email account. The text that came to my cellphone was from Sue Frantz (the name associated with my work email account). I replied to the text. The address that came into my email from my texted reply was <first part of old email address>@vtext.com. What Verizon used to create this address was undoubtedly from the email address I used when I first signed up with them years ago. While I sent a message to a phone number, the reply came from something that was not a phone number.

With your students, keep a table or spreadsheet of their names, their phone numbers, and their non-phone number carrier email addresses. (I’m certain carriers have a name for these. Surely, they don’t call them “non-phone number carrier email addresses.”)

Use your email’s bcc field

If you’re messaging more than one student at a time, be certain to type the addresses in the bcc field. You don’t want to give away student phone numbers to other students!

Message length is limited to 160 characters

Use the SMS address from the Digital Trends table or Free Carrier Lookup and keep your message to 160 characters. Remember, you’re texting. (The MMS address is for longer messages, but all of your students may not have the ability to receive MMS messages. Stick to SMS.)

Type your message in your email program (delete your signature!), and check your character count, including spaces.

Desktop Outlook

Click the Review tab, click on Word Count and look for the “Characters (with spaces)” count.

Office 365 Outlook, Gmail, and other web-based email programs

Install Word Counter Plus in Chrome or Word Count in Firefox. (See this blog post.) Once installed, highlight all of the text in your message, right-click and select Word Counter Plus/Word Count. In the pop-up, look for the character count. Both will include spaces in their count. That’s good, because the carriers include spaces in their 160-character limits.

How can students text you?

In their text messaging app, where students would enter a phone number, have them enter your email address. Their text message will go to your email. When you reply, delete everything in the message except for your 160-character-max return message.

Conclusion

Students can use text to email you, and you can use email to text students. Just get their permission.

As my colleagues at semester institutions are trying to finish out their terms and those of us on quarters are gearing up for the start of the spring term during this time of coronavirus online education, email management is more important than ever.

Much more of our communication with colleagues will be through email. And, more importantly, the primary way—or, in some cases, the only way—students will have to contact us, their professors, is through email.

That means that it is more important than ever that we practice good email hygiene: responding to what needs responses, deleting what needs deleted, filing what needs filing, and tucking away for later what needs tucking away.

The typical email strategy and why it’s not the best strategy

In working with faculty, I have seen a lot of email inboxes. It’s not a pretty sight. Thousands of messages in the inbox. Too many messages have been left to linger, and when they drop below the visible screen, they seemingly no longer exist. A lot of those messages were mentally delegated to the deal-with-later box, but you’ve never gotten around to dealing with them. Now your inbox is just one giant shoebox filled with paper.

My friend, it’s time for an intervention. It’s time to deal with those messages.

Your inbox should just contain messages that you need to deal with soon. It should not be a repository of every message you have ever received.

Where to start

In your email program, create two folders. Name one “Move Back to Inbox” and the other one “Archive.”

Highlight the top-most 40 emails, then click and drag them into the Move Back to Inbox folder.

For the remaining emails, select them all. How to do that will vary by email program.

In gmail, click on the box near the top of the page.

Then click on “Select all [x number] conversations in Primary.

Finally, click and drag into your Archive folder.

In the desktop version of Outlook and Office 365 Outlook, press CTRL-A. Click and drag to your Archive folder.

Dealing with the top 40

Now, take the 40 messages that are in your Move Back to Inbox folder and move them back to your inbox.

With the weight of your inbox reduced to 40, it’s time to deal with each message, one by one.

For each message, you have five options.

1. Delete it

   If this is something you know you don’t need, just delete it.

2. Archive it

   If you think you might need it later—or if you’re just afraid to throw stuff away—move it to your Archive folder. If your inner librarian needs to file messages according to type of content, then create subfolders in the Archive folder. The search function in today’s email programs is much better than it used to be, but if using subfolders is easier on your brain, it’s okay to do that. I use subfolders.

3. Respond now

   If you’re going to respond now, respond now. Go ahead. I’ll wait for you here.

4. Respond later today

   If you really think you’ll respond later today, it’s okay to skip the message. For now. If you get to the end of the day, and that email is still sitting in your inbox, see the next point, #5.

5. Maybe respond/do something with at some future point

   These are the messages that are most likely cluttering up your inbox. You don’t want to file them or delete them because you might want them. But, dang, you’re just not sure. Maybe you want to attend that webinar, but maybe you don’t.

   For all of these messages, I recommend using Nudgemail. It’s free. Forward the message—along with anything else you’d like to add, such as, “Do I want to attend this webinar?”—to, say, Monday@nudgemail.com. On the next Monday that rolls around, that message will arrive in your inbox. If you’ve decided to attend the webinar, then go sign up for it. If you’ve decided not to, delete the message. If you’re still not sure, in the message will be a snooze option. To give yourself three more days to think about it, click on the 3d link. A new email message will be generated, and just click Send.

   

   In three days, your webinar email will appear in your inbox again. Sign up for it, delete it, or snooze it again. If you need to, keep snoozing the email until the date of the webinar has passed.

   To get started with Nudgemail, just send a message to any Nudgemail email address. Send a message to 12pm@nudgemail.com, for example. Nudgemail will immediately send you a welcome-to-Nudgemail message—and at the next noon, you’ll get your message back. It does take some time for Nudgemail to process your message, so if you sent your 12pm@nudgemail.com message at 11:56am, it probably won’t arrive by noon.

   Here’s a cheat sheet for Nudgemail commands, such as specific dates, specific times, and recurring Nudgemails.

   For those “respond later today” messages that you didn’t get to, forward them all to tomorrow@nudgemail.com. Your inbox will now be empty, and you can start again tomorrow.

   A note about privacy. All email messages are essentially public. They’re more like postcards than letters. Anyone who has access to an email server can read your email. Additionally, if you are a government employee—as I am, an employee of a state community college—your emails are subject to disclosure through a public records request. I believe that the good folks at Nudgemail.com are not reading my email messages; they have enough of their own emails to read. This is just a reminder that your emails are already pretty public—or could be. Now, if you want to encrypt your email, that’s a whole other ballgame.

Order inbox with oldest first

Now that every message in your inbox has been dealt with, change the order in which your emails appear so that the oldest ones are at the top and the newest ones are at the bottom. This will encourage you to deal with the oldest ones first—which will keep them from piling up.

In gmail, at the top of the page where you see the number of message, click the right-most arrow.

In desktop Outlook, click the arrow to change from newest first to oldest first.

In Office 365 Outlook, click on Filter, select Sort, and then check “Oldest on top.”

Conclusion

Take a few minutes to reset your email inbox. You may be surprised at how much lighter you feel. And, just as importantly, your students and your colleagues will appreciate your quicker email responses.

I first wrote about the YouCanBook.Me scheduling tool in 2010. YouCanBook.Me checks your web-based calendar to see when you are free, and then makes your free times schedulable by others, such as students. To access YouCanBook.Me’s full power, you need a pro account ($9/month, billed yearly). For what it can do, the money may be worth it to you. It was to me—until Office 365 Bookings.

Recently, Microsoft developed a tool with similar functionality as part of its Office 365 suite. If you have Office 365, you have Bookings. Because Bookings and Outlook are in the same suite of tools, Bookings automatically has access to your Outlook calendar. (If you live in Google Calendar like I do, consider using Outlook4Gmail to sync your Outlook and Google calendars.)

When I send students to my Bookings calendar, they can choose between a “virtual 1-hour meeting” and a “virtual 30-minute meeting”. Once students select one (the 1-hour meeting in the screenshot below), the calendar will show students my next available times. On March 16^th, I see that there are two times available 1:30pm and 2:00pm. If those times don’t work for the student, they can choose a different day. Days that are in black (17, 18, 30 and 31) have available time slots and are clickable. The type of meeting must be selected in order to see the available time slots.

In this case, the student has chosen a virtual 1-hour meeting on March 16^th at 1:30pm.

Now the student can scroll further down the page.

I ask the student to enter their name, email address, phone number (optional). If students enter a phone number, the checkbox at the bottom of the page is automatically checked: “Get booking confirmation and reminder via text message.” Then I ask for “additional information”: student ID number, a topic (from a drop-down menu: advising, question about a psych course you are taking, other), and a little more information about why we’re meeting.

After the student clicks the “Book” button, the student will get this confirmation page.

Also, the student will get an email, such as the one below. In that email, if the student clicks on the “Manage booking” button, the student will be taken to the booking confirmation webpage above where they can reschedule or cancel their appointment.

I also get an email. Most importantly, the appointment is automatically added to my calendar.

If I need to cancel the appointment, I go to Office 365, click on Bookings, then select the “Calendar” from the left navigation menu. I click on the appointment, then click “Cancel.” Now I can enter an “email message to customer”—again, Bookings is built for business, not education—and click “Cancel Booking.” The student will get an email saying the appointment was canceled. On your Outlook calendar, the appointment will now say “Canceled” and the time will switch from busy to free.

If this looks like a tool that would be useful to you, let’s get you set up.

Getting started

Go to Office 365 and log in, if you are not already. If Bookings is not in your list of apps, click the “All apps” arrow. Click on Bookings.

In the Bookings left navigation menu, there are three areas we’ll be using.

The Booking Page contains the settings for your booking calendar. That includes color schemes, the url for your bookings page, time increments (such as 30-minute blocks of time for appointments), and customization for the dates when your students can make an appointment when you are free.

The Services page is where you can enter the form information you want people to fill out to make an appointment. Since the Bookings tool was built with businesses in mind, they used the word “services.” Perhaps you would want customers to fill out one form if they wanted a new dishwasher installed but a different form if they want their current dishwasher repaired. For instructors, you may want students to be able to schedule a face-to-face meeting with you in your campus office or perhaps you may want students to be able to schedule a virtual office hour with you via Zoom. Or maybe even an old-fashioned phone call.

The Business Information page is where you can enter your contact information, such as your office location. Your “business hours” also go here. Think of these as times when you’re okay with students making an appointment with you – if you have free time on your calendar.

Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.

Booking Page

Here you can find your Bookings page url. Give this your url to your students; post it in your course management system, for example, or add it to your email signature. Students—or anyone else—can use it to make an appointment with you.

Once we have all of our settings done, we’ll come back here to “Save and publish” thereby making our bookings calendar available. Any time you want to take your Bookings page offline, click “Unpublish”.

Click “Embed” to get the html embed code. Your course management system, for example, may give you the option to enter html code. If so, paste your Bookings embed code there. Students will be able to book an appointment with you from inside your course management system.

I want to give a shout-out to Tom Pollard, Highline College’s database-master. In our staff directory, he created space for an extra tab that can handle embedding. All we need to do as faculty is enter our Bookings url.

Visit my staff directory page. Click on the “Schedule an appointment” tab to see my Bookings calendar.

Scroll down the Bookings Page to the “Scheduling policy” area.

“Time increments” refers to the times students can choose from to start an appointment. Since mine is set to 30 minutes, students see times like 12pm, 12:30pm, 1pm, etc. If this were set to, say, 15 minutes, students would see 12:15pm, 12:30pm, 12:45pm, etc. This doesn’t affect how long the appointment may be. We’re not there yet. This just shows when an appointment can start.

The “minimum lead time” is how many hours in advance an appointment can be made/cancelled. Mine is set to 24 hours. That means that regardless of the availability I have on my calendar, the next 24 hours do not show any free times for me. Unfortunately, the same is true for cancellations. A student may want to cancel a few hours before their appointment, but they can’t do it through the Bookings email they received if it’s within this same 24-hour window. I hope in some future iteration of the Bookings tool, Microsoft separates the lead time for appointments from the lead time for cancellations.

The “maximum” lead time is how many days in advance you’ll let people make appointments. Mine is set to 30 days. Today is March 15, 2020, so the latest availability anyone sees on my Bookings calendar is April, 14, 2020.

Under “email notifications,” check the box to “notify the business [me] via email when a booking is created or changed.” If this is unchecked, appointments will still be added to or canceled from my calendar, but I like getting the emails. I don’t like to be surprised when I look at my calendar.

Scroll down the Bookings Page even farther to the “Availability” area.

The Bookings tool will always check your calendar to see when you are free. Additionally, you can set the dates when you want the Bookings tool to use/not use your calendar.

In the first area, you can see that I’ve told Bookings to show students my free times between Jan 6, 2020 and March 18, 2020 – those are our winter quarter dates. In the next section, I’ve told Bookings to make the dates March 19, 2020 through March 29, 2020 as not bookable. That’s the end of finals week and spring break. In the last box, I give the dates for our spring quarter as bookable.

Clicking the link at the very bottom of the page allows me to add more blocks of time that are bookable/not bookable. [Side note: I have a set a Nudgemail for June 5^th to remind myself to set the next round of availability dates.]

Services

The “Services” page is where you create the different kinds of appointments students can make.

Here, you can see that I have two “services”: virtual 1-hour meeting and virtual 30-minute.

Before the coronavirus drove us off campus, I had two other meeting options here: in-person 1-hour meeting and in-person 30-minute meeting.

At the top of the page, click “Add a service” to, well, add additional meeting times.

Let’s add a “service.”

The “service name” is what you want to call this type of appointment, such as “virtual 30-minute meeting.”

Add a short description, if you’d like.

Enter your office location or your virtual location, such as your Zoom room url.

The default meeting time duration is 1 hour. If you wanted to make this a 30-minute appointment, change it to 30 minutes.

You can add a buffer time before and/or after the appointment. Let’s say that up above you set your calendar time increments to 15 minutes and here you set the buffer to 10 minutes after the appointment. If a student made a 30-minute appointment with you from 12pm to 12:30pm, the 10-minute buffer at the end would make you busy until 12:40pm. The next open time increment when someone could make an appointment then would be at 12:45pm.

At the very bottom of this section is “Maximum Attendees.” If this appointment is for, say, individual advising, you may only want a maximum of one. If you were holding review sessions for the next exam in a nearby conference room that holds 8 people including yourself, you could set the maximum number of attendees at 7. If one person books the time slot, it will still show as available on your calendar for this appointment. For all other appointments it would show you as busy. Once 7 people booked this time slot, it would no longer show as available on your Bookings calendar.

Now we’re getting to the real power of Bookings. Scroll down the Services page to “Custom Fields.” Click the “Modify” button.

These are the questions that go in the form students fill out when they choose this appointment option. Bookings will always ask for a name. I’ve checked “Customer email,” so that will be included on the form. The “Custom Fields” are questions I’ve created before. Clicking on one will add it to the form. Choose them in the order you want them to appear on the form. Here, I clicked on Student ID number, then “please provide…” and I have made the “please provide…” question required. Students will not be able to submit the form without typing something in this box.

If you want to add a question, click “add a question” at the top of the page. Your question choices—as of this writing—are a text box answer or a dropdown menu.

When you’re good with the questions, click Ok at the top of the screen.

On this screen, you can also decide when you’d like a reminder to go out to the person who made the appointment. The default is one day. Add more information to their email confirmation, if you’d like.

Business Information

Remember, as far as Office 365 Bookings is concerned, you’re a business. The “Business Information” page is all about you.

Enter your contact information.

At the bottom of the page, enter your “logo.” It could be your institution’s logo or your photo.

On the right side of the page are your “Business hours.” These are the times during the week when you open for appointments.

For example, Monday, I’m “open” from 12pm to 5pm. Even though my Outlook calendar says I’m free at 9am, Bookings will ignore that time. It will only look between 12pm and 5pm. If I have something on my calendar that says I’m busy between 2pm and 3:30pm this Monday, Bookings will not show those times as bookable.

Once you have your times set, click “Save” at the top of the screen.

Let’s publish!

Go back to the Booking Page and click “save and publish” at the very top of the page. That’s it. You are now open for business. All you need to do now is let people know your Bookings url.

Living near Seattle during COVID-19 has been… interesting. While as of this writing, my college is open for face-to-face courses, our college president wrote, in part, “In accordance with King County Department of Public Health 
guidance, we encourage supervisors to provide telework options to employees whose job duties can be performed remotely without hampering operations or instruction.” This means that faculty have the option to continue to meet their classes on campus or to take their instruction online. “Online” means either an asynchronous course—think of your typical online course—or through some sort of synchronous webconferencing, such as Zoom or Bb Collaborate, or synchronous webcasting, such as Panopto.

For those who are exploring the adventure known as telework, there are some challenges in working with students at a distance. Our course management systems and email are certainly perfectly fine tools for asynchronous communication. It’s the synchronous communication that is challenging.

Whichever you route you choose, please start with your institution’s faculty development office, instructional design office, or your institutional technology office. Your institution may have a contract with Zoom or Bb Collaborate. Whichever one they are with, they will be able to support you and your students with that particular technology.

General guidelines for moving a class online

If you’re facing a campus closed to face-to-face courses, you’re stressed. Your fellow faculty are stressed.

If you’ve never taught a typical, asynchronous online course before, now is not the time to start. Anyone who has tried to pick up a face-to-face course and drop it into an online format knows that it’s not that easy.

If your class meets at 10am MWF, then meet synchronously at 10am MWF using whatever webconferencing tool your institution recommends. Practice in advance. Get a feel for the basics—how to turn your mic/webcam on and off, how to share your screen to show a PowerPoint, how to see questions when students ask them. Don’t worry about all of the other features. Deliver your lecture as you normally would. Are your in-class activities something that can be replicated via video, if so, go ahead and do it. Some tools, like Zoom, allow you to send students to breakout rooms. If small group discussions are an essential part of your face-to-face teaching, don’t be afraid to use the technology available to you to do that.

From the student side

Students are stressed, too.

Most of our students don’t know how to use this new technology, either. Many of our students don’t have good Internet access. Quite a few of our students are doing all of their work on their phones.

Find out what resources are available to your students. If you move to synchronous delivery, can students participate from, say, a campus computer lab or the library? If so, do they need to bring their own headphones?

One-on-one communication

If you’re not in your campus office for office hours, you’ll probably be at home.

Home/cell phone

The easiest way to communicate with a student one-on-one is to call them from your home/cell phone. If you’d rather your student not have your phone number, dial *67 then the student’s number. This will block your number from your student’s caller ID. If you do that, warn your student that that’s what they’ll see, otherwise they may not pick up.

Google Voice

You can use a Google Voice phone number. After you select a new phone number, you can place and receive calls to that phone number. And you can send texts from and receive texts to that phone number.

Slack

For those of you who are feeling more adventurous, try out Slack. Slack is like the old Internet chat rooms. On steroids. Try it out with a small group, first, such as the members of your department, a research team, a seminar class. Use Slack both on your computer and your phone. It’s made for more conversational communication with a group or with individual or select members of a group.

It’s new for everyone

It’s okay if you stumble. It’s okay if your students stumble. Let’s all give ourselves and each other a break. You are doing the best you can.

Last week, after a student confessed to using a “study guide” site to complete one or more of her homework assignments, I did some Googling. While I think I found what she was using—the words and phrases were changed up—I discovered that another of my students was using the answers in their entirety. That led to more searching. Here are two sites that a few of my students are using.

First, let’s find your college or university. In the top navigation bar, click on “Find Study Resources” and search “by School”—K-12 or higher ed.

For my college, here are the “Popular Departments.”

Under each department are documents and Q&As.

Documents

A document is a file uploaded by a student. Clicking on a document gives you a preview of the first part of it. If you want the whole thing, you need to do one of two things. You can pay $119.40/year, $59.85/three months, or $39.95/month. Or you can share your own document.

Q&As

Students can “Ask Expert Tutors” questions—like homework assignment questions—and the “tutors” will, well, do the student’s homework for them—in as little as 15 minutes. If a student signs up for a year’s membership, they can “ask up to 40 Tutor Questions” per year. The 3-month membership allots 20 questions per quarter. The monthly membership grants 10 questions/month. At 8am Pacific Time on Monday, March 2, 2020, CourseHero reports that I can “get help from our Psychology tutors, 538 are online now!”

Is it cheating?

If a student uses a document or an answer from the site, yes, it is cheating. What if a student uploads a document to the site? The only reason to upload a document is to get a document, so that certainly points in the direction of obtaining unauthorized assistance. Your institution’s student code of conduct may also explicitly state that giving unauthorized assistance to other students is also cheating. The Washington (State) Administrative Code 1231-125-100(1)(a) (part of the rules that govern my college) reads “Cheating includes any attempt to give or obtain unauthorized assistance relating to the completion of an academic assignment” (emphasis mine).

If you can’t match a document with a student, you may not know which of your students has uploaded content, although sometimes students make it easy. A couple of my students have used their names in their Course Hero account name. Others left their names on their documents when they uploaded them.

As you would with any instance of cheating, submit a report to the person/office at your institution who handles student conduct code violations.

Copyright violation?

If the document or question a student has asked includes your words, it is a copyright violation. For example, my students have submitted questions I’ve asked on homework assignments or take-home exams—word for word.

On Course Hero’s copyright page, there is a “Submit Takedown Request” button. You can use this to request that documents students have uploaded be removed and that questions that you wrote and that students have asked “tutors” for answers to be removed. In Part 2 of the form, note that you can click the button to “Add another work.” The “Remove Item” button is for deleting the request you just entered. It’s confusing, I know.

When I have submitted these requests to Course Hero, the offending documents/Q&As have been removed with a day or two.

Here, students can ask “experts” for help with homework, they can have Chegg look for plagiarism in a paper, and they’ll solve a student’s math problems (and they’ll show their work)—all for a price.

The cheating my students have done has come from asking “experts” for help with my assignment questions. I have found questions new to my assignments this term posted to Chegg. Finding them is a bit more labor-intensive than it is with Course Hero. At Chegg, you need to paste content from your assignments into the Chegg search box.

Like Course Hero, you will see the question and part of the answer. To see the answer, you need to pay $14,95/month (allowing you to ask 5 questions/month) or $19.95/month (allowing you to ask 20 questions/month).

Is it cheating?

If a student pastes one of your homework questions, someone else answers it, and the student uses that answer or some version of that answer, yes, it’s cheating.

Copyright violation?

If the question the student asked on the site was written by you, then Chegg is violating your copyright on those words by using them without your permission.

Chegg, unfortunately, makes it harder to submit takedown requests. At the very bottom of their pages, in the “Legal Policies” column, click on “Intellectual Property Rights.” This is the pdf they want you to complete. It’s not a fillable pdf, so you will have to open it in a program that will allow you to edit pdfs. There is only space on the form to enter one web address at a time. I recommend filling out all of the information and saving it as a new document. Change the webpage information, and save as a new document. Repeat. Once you have all of the documents complete, “fax it to Chegg at (408) 855-8954, email it to CopyrightAgent@Chegg.com, attn: Copyright Agent – Dana Jewell, or mail it to Copyright Agent, Chegg, Inc. 3990 Freedom Circle, Santa Clara, CA 95054.”

Conclusion

When you find a few students who are cheating, remember that their cheating is not about you. And, just as importantly, most of your students are not cheating.

What “study guide” sites are your students using?

My college is on quarters, so it’s time once again for me to reset the due dates on my courses in preparation for spring quarter. I organize my class schedule by weeks, so it’s helpful for me to know what week it is in the quarter—both when I’m setting my due dates for the upcoming quarter, and when we’re in the middle of a quarter. When I do this at home, I write the week numbers on a paper calendar to help me with scheduling. Today I was working on it in my office where I don’t have a paper calendar. I thought, “Hmmm… I wonder if Google Calendar has a notes-type feature that I could tack on to the beginning of each week.” It doesn’t. And then it hit me. I could create a new calendar just for the week numbers.

After I took a couple minutes to beat myself up for not thinking of this sooner, I thought I should share this calendar hack with you.

In Google Calendar, at the bottom of your list of calendars, click the plus sign next to “Other calendars.” From the pop-up menu, choose “Create new calendar.” On the next screen, name your calendar, then click the “Create calendar” button. I called mine “WEEKS”.

Give Google Calendar a minute, and then your new calendar will appear in your list of calendars. I then added an “all-day event” to each Monday in the term, naming the weeks as I went.

To see the weeks, I check the WEEKS calendar box. To turn them off, I uncheck the box.

Update 11/29/2022: For those of you on quarters, Yolanda Miller has created a Google Calendar with weeks that may match yours. (Thanks, Yolanda!)

USB condoms

Let’s start with USB condoms, because, frankly, that’s why you decided to read this post. It’s okay to be honest. We’re friends.

The cable you use to charge your phone and your tablet serve as both a power cable and a data cable. Electricity and information both flow through this same cable. As long as you are home, you are safe. When you venture out into public, however…

Let’s say you’re at the airport and you’d like to top off your phone’s battery before boarding your plane. You plug your USB cable into one of those now-ubiquitous charging stations. Unfortunately, someone with nefarious intent has been there before you. Once you plug in your USB cable, the nefarious person begins to steal any data that flows through your cable, such as passwords, or sends malware to your phone.

This is called juice jacking.

How much do you need to be worried about it? Frankly, probably not much. As of this writing there have been no known incidents. But we do know it’s possible. The FBI officially recommends not using USB outlets in public spaces [added 4/11/2023]. And since it started getting press a couple months ago, someone is probably working on it.

What you do about it depends on your risk tolerance.

Option 1: Do nothing.

Option 2: Don’t use public USB outlets. Instead, use your device’s adapter and only plug into electrical outlets.

Option 3: Use a USB data blocker, dubbed a USB condom. Plug your USB cable into a device that’s about the size of a flashdrive then plug the device into a public USB outlet. You can purchase two PortaPow Data Blockers from Amazon for $11.99.

The real risk

While it’s unlikely you’re in much danger from using a USB outlet for charging your device. In addition to juice hacking there is much more risk with using public wifi. Every time you connect to public wifi, such as at a coffee shop or airport, a nefarious person may be lurking on that same wifi. With the right skills that nefarious person could swipe any data you send over that connection, such as your login names and passwords.

VPNs

Like a USB data blocker, you can put a layer of protection between you and public wifi. In this case, the solution is software, not hardware.

A virtual private network (VPN) is well, a kind of private network. After installing the VPN on each of your devices (phone, tablet, laptop – anything that may leave your home and connect to the Internet), every time you connect to public wifi, sign into your VPN with your username and password. That login provides the layer of protection you need. All of the information flowing between your device and the Internet will be encrypted. No one can read it without knowing your VPN username and password.

There are several very good VPNs out there. I use Private Internet Access (PIA), but ExpressVPN is always on the lists of excellent VPNs. A good VPN costs a few dollars a month, but most occasionally run big sales or offer year-long or multi-year purchases. You can install the VPN on all of your devices, but there is a limit to how many devices can connect to the VPN simultaneously from that same account. PIA allows 10, and ExpressVPN allows 5, for example. There are free VPNs, but they may not be as fast or may limit how much data you can send through their servers each month. If you want to go that route, I recommend Hotspot Shield Free or TunnelBear.

On your device, when you connect to a VPN, you can choose where the server is that you’d like to connect through. Going through a VPN will always be slower than traveling the Internet naked. The VPN is a password protected gateway. You first have to go through the gate, don your virtual hazmat suit, and then head out to the Internet. It takes a little bit of time to do that.

For fastest speeds, connect through a server that’s physically closest to you. From my home router, I generally don’t use a VPN. My password protected router gives me the shielding that I need. Here are some sample Internet speeds I just ran today; check yours with Speedtest.net.

From my home router without a VPN: download speed was 77.0 Mbps; upload speed was 9.46 Mbps

Connected to PIA VPN going through a Seattle server, the one closest to where I live: download 75.2; upload 8.81

Connected to PIA VPN going through a New York City server that’s almost 3,000 miles away: download 59.0; upload 7.92

Connected to PIA VPN going through a Norway server that’s about 4,500 miles away: download 33.5; upload 5.3.

Yes, you can connect to servers just about anywhere in the world. This is very handy if you’re traveling in, say, Europe, and want to spend an evening watching Netflix. You may, though, only watch Netflix shows for a European audience. If you want access to all of the Netflix shows you watch at home in the United States, you can use a VPN, and choose a server location in the United States. Netflix will think your device is in, say, Chicago even though you and your device are actually in Vienna. If you intend to use your VPN in this way, choose ExpressVPN as your VPN provider. Netflix isn’t fooled by all VPNs, but ExpressVPN, at least as of this writing, can pull it off. (Here is a short list of other VPNs that can, too.) ExpressVPN is a little more expensive than other VPNs; you get what you pay for.

Travel router

If you travel a lot and are frequently connecting several devices to, say, a hotel’s wifi, it can be a hassle. You (and your spouse, and your kids) have to connect each of your devices, and then—as you now know—run a VPN on each of your devices. Some hotels limit the number of devices that can connect to their wifi. The last hotel I stayed in had a limit of six devices. Since it was just me, I came in well under their limit. If I added my wife and a couple teenagers (fyi, I don’t have any teenagers, and, no, I don’t want yours), we’d easily be over the six-device limit.

Consider purchasing a travel router. The travel router connects to the hotel wifi just like any device does. The router works by adding a new password-protected wifi signal. My travel router uses the same name and password as our home wifi. As soon as the travel router is up and running, all of my devices see the home wifi name and will connect to it automatically. And what about that hotel device limit? The hotel sees the travel router as one device; it won’t see all of the devices connected to the router.

With a travel router, there is no need to use a VPN since it comes with the built-in protection of a username and password and encryption. (If your router doesn’t come with encryption automatically enabled, enable it.)

I use the TP-Link N300 travel router. Setting up the software and connecting can be intimidating. It’s been a couple years since I bought it, and other travel routers have since come on the market. Try this RAVPower travel router for about the same price.

Conclusion

A couple years ago, I wrote about password security. In that post I advised using a password manager, like LastPass. Still, the number one threat to your online security are your passwords. Strong, unique passwords for every site you log into will provide you with the best protection.

VPNs, travel routers, and data blockers (if anyone actually steals data that way) keep your passwords protected as they flow from your device out onto the Internet.

Stay safe out there.

For the discussions in my online courses, I have added an expected minimum word count to help students better gauge what is expected of them. Each initial post has three sections, and each has a different word count minimum. Same with the discussion responses.

I am certainly not going to count the words myself. And it seems silly to copy and paste each discussion post into Word to get a word count.

Instead, I added a word count tool to my browser.

In Chrome, I use Word Counter Plus. In Firefox, I use Word Count.

While both look a little different, they work exactly the same way. Once you’ve installed your chosen tool into your chosen browser, highlight any text on a webpage, right-click, and then choose the tool from the menu. You will get a pop-up that will give you the number of words and number of characters in your selection. Word Counter Plus will also give you average word length and longest word length thereby illustrating that just because you can calculate a statistic does not mean that you should.

To make the pop-up go away, you have a couple options.

Chrome’s Word Counter Plus: Click the “OK” button, or press the ESC key on your keyboard.

Firefox’s Word Count: Click the X, or go about your business and the box will disappear in 6 seconds.

Happy counting!