Yes, I said, "Netiquette." I know it's a funny word but it's quite an important concept! In today's mobile, digital society instructors really need to make an effort to carve out how we expect our students to behave and treat one another in an online learning space.

There are behaviors associated with socializing online, for example, that don't translate into the acceptable category of online learning etiquette. If you implement blogs into your online class, you will expect your students to write in complete sentences with proper grammar; whereas, if your students have their own personal blog, chances are they're writing in lingo that you may not B able 2 Dci4.

Netiquette (net-etiquette) actually stems from the traditions established long ago in online user-groups. Over the years, there have been many variations of netiquette adapted for online classes. Below is an infographic of one version that has been customized for online learning, adapted from www.albion.com.

If you would like to use an optional Netiquette policy in your course policies, feel free to use these or adapt them further for your own online classes. You may want to consider referring to these as "ground rules" instead and have students "agree" to these rules as a condition of participating in your class!