Using electronic mail as a teaching tool

1. Introduct ion This paper describes my use of electronic mail in an undergraduate software engineering course at Rutgers University. The class was divided into seven small teams of three to five members each. Since I was employed full-time in industry, I was concerned about the time necessary to guide 26 students. In addition, the students involved were affiliated with five different colleges, and some were night students, others nonresidents. A way had to be found for this widely divergent group and me to communicate easily and quickly. My course's objective was to teach students a set of heuristics for designing programs and to offer them experience in team programming. Each of the seven teams worked on its own student-selected project. The projects were: (1) Adding a new set of formats to the PUB text formatting system. These would enable the PUB user [7] to specify the journal for which he /