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This article is more of a mix of anecdotes and common sense than my normally technical pieces about using data science to help make learning better. Normally, when I'm looking at the intersection of Human Learning and Machine Learning, I'm considering how to measure course impact, how to automate things, how to optimize such that the right courses are recommended to the right people, and things like that. This is about something much more simple, that far too many organizations of all types get wrong.

I opened my email this morning to find the usual mix of around one-third people emailing with actual questions/conversations, one-third schedule appointments, and the last third being referrals to training opportunities or people trying to sell me things. Then I looked in my custom-filter folder to find around 100 more new messages, that all had two things in common. The first thing the messages in the custom-filter folder had in common was that I was not going to read them. The second thing in common was that they all had some variant of "no reply" in them... whether it was noreply@, no.reply@, no-reply@.

One of the core principles of communications is that we communicate because we want the recipient of our communication to do something. The fundamental problem with no-reply emails is that the sender is effectively saying "This topic is not important enough for me to have a conversation about." We would all understand the sheer futility of sending out an email with the subject line "This topic is not important enough for me to have a conversation about," which begs the question, why is it so universally accepted for the reply to sender line to say that?

As someone on the ASD spectrum, I've been working to be more mindful about making my correspondence to friends and colleagues seem more personal, doing things like addressing people by name, trying to mix up salutations with something other than a rather generic "best regards", and writing in a manner that better reflects the value I place on my personal and professional relationships. I had thought that maybe I was a bit behind the curve on this topic, and have received some helpful hints from my peers, but it occurred to me that somehow this thing that we all know as individual people has not transformed into institutional knowledge.

Subsequently, I submit to all of you that we should go check our own systems this week. Are you sending out emails with a noreply@ email address from one of your automated systems? Does the sender-line of your email tell recipients that you don't actually care about what you're sending them? We all know better than this, let's share some of our knowledge with our employers and our automated systems so we can not just know better, but do better.

P.S. You should definitely reply to this, I read everything anyone writes on my articles because I really do care.

About the Author

Kenneth Lord is a Data Scientist currently working for SAP’s Learning Center of Excellence, he has led numerous learning impact studies, and projects to help determine learning modality effectiveness and automatically tailor learning experiences to the modalities that work best for an individual learner. Kenneth holds an MA in Economics from the City University of New York.