University course e-mails

Posted on September 9, 2021 Updated on February 15, 2023

I am the responsible teacher for a flipped classroom course with many students that runs five times a year with me teaching it three times a year. The course makes heavy use of e-learning technology. The blackboard hours are very limited, but the administrative burden feels very large. The administration tasks include set up of the e-learning technology IT systems (this is particular hair-raising during course startup and exam), answering questions on a question-answering site and answering emails.

It is somewhat difficult for me to estimate the time spend on answering emails related to the course as they are usually coming asynchronous throughout the year. However, I do store course-relevant emails sent to me in a specific folder. So while it difficult to count the course-relevant emails I send, it is easy to count the received email. The folder is a generic “teaching” folder with other teaching emails that are not related to the course, but a scanning a sample of the messages indicates to me that this is a very small part for the last couple of years. I have another email folder for teaching assistants practically exclusive to the course.

For the eight months from January to August 2021, I count 870 emails in the “teaching folder, while the teaching assistance folder has 115 emails for the same time period, i.e., almost 1,000 emails. The autumn may see less emails, but a simple extrapolation yields almost 1,500 emails for the full 12 months of the year 2021.

In 2020, I count 1,728 “teaching” emails and 295 teaching assistance emails, i.e., over 2,000 emails.

The question-answering site sends emails in batches. I delete these emails, so the above number does not count the extra course-related emails that are generated from the question-answering site. Posts on the question-answering site may be answered by teaching assistants as well as by other students, so they are not all requiring my full attention. I do need to determine whether I need to answer them. I sometimes also answer the posts that could be answered by teaching assistants.

It is difficult to estimate the time spend on answering the individual emails. At one point I timed my response to a particular type of email that often recur. The stopwatch showed two minutes. That was with a speedy typing (this particular task requires opening of a terminal, navigation to the relevant file directory, executing a custom made script with a student number, copied from the email or searched on the university homepage, opening a spreadsheet, finding the student across hundreds of rows, writing an email response). In some cases the task is more difficult and usually one should not expect the task to be completed in two minutes. The average could be five minutes. Some of the emails I have saved in the “teaching” folder do not require a response other than reading and saving it. This might be a student email that reads “Thanks for the information” following a series of other emails. Again it is difficult to estimate the time spend for thanks emails. Reading, deleting or saving such an email may take a couple of seconds, but the effectual time could be longer due to an effect of task switching.

I randomly sampled ten received emails from the “teaching” folder and attempted to guesstimate the time used for answering:

• 5 minutes – generic email about transfer of project score
• 10 seconds – thank email
• 2 minutes – email about hand-in time
• 10 seconds – thank email
• 3(???) minutes – email with co-teacher
• 15(???) minutes – email about a technical detail concerning the download of specific information on the learning management system.
• 5 minutes – email about upload of the exam text.
• 15(?) minutes – email from a student asking about other programming courses.
• 10 seconds – thank email

Note that none of these ten sampled emails concern actual course content.

The distribution of the guesstimated times probably has a long tail making the estimate for an average time fairly uncertain. Some of the emails do not require an answer per se, but rather results in administrative work, e.g., an email about “technical detail concerning the download” will result in examination of the detail of the learning management system and noting down relevant information from the received email in a knowledge base, – as well as the actual task of downloading and processing the data from the learning management system, including learning the intricacies of a new system.

2,000 emails of five minutes are 10,000 minutes, over four full 40-working-hours weeks of work. 1,000 emails of one minute is 17 hours.

I hope to get time in the future – between emails – to reflect on these guesstimates and whether there is anyway my handling of emails can become more efficient. Until then I can point to Donald Knuth’s “Email (let’s drop the hyphen)” which begins with “I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address.” There is a single question on Academia Stackexchange “How many minutes per day do most professors spend reading and replying to emails?” with two answers. There is also a Master Thesis from 2008 titled “Email Overload in Academia” which I haven’t yet read.