Spamming our students? The use of email as a mass communication tool in higher education

This paper explores the advantages and disadvantages of using email as a mass communication tool to correspond with students. Staff who write and distribute emails were interviewed, as were a panel of students. The study found that difficulties in targeting messages towards particular student groups meant that students received a lot of emails, not all of them relevant to them; as a result, they read only a small portion of what they received. It also became clear that students preferred to receive messages from staff they knew rather than via unknown administrators.