There’s been enough talk about email and other IT systems here at EMU to potentially make this interesting for some EMUTalk.org readers: Forward Into the Cloud from Inside Higher Ed. The opening paragraphs:
Students are increasingly arriving at college already managing multiple e-mail addresses with “cloud”-based e-mail services — such as Gmail and Hotmail — which are hosted remotely by third-party companies. These students are often reluctant to use the e-mail client provided to them by their institution.
“We did a survey several years ago, and the overwhelming majority of incoming students said they had between three and four e-mail accounts,” said Beth Ann Bergsmark, director for academic information technology services at Georgetown University.
In order to keep things simple, many students set up their institutional accounts to automatically forward mail to one of their existing, cloud-based mailboxes. Students prefer not to check multiple mailboxes if they don’t have to, said Geoff Nathan, faculty liaison to computing and information technology at Wayne State University. When he asked his students recently why the majority of them auto-forwarded their e-mails to an outside account, they cited features often unavailable on campus accounts, such as texting, video chatting, and virtually unlimited storage space.
From my experience with both students and colleagues, there are two related problems with using a non-official email account. First, too many folks do not understand/do not know how to set up their email accounts so it automatically forwards– either their EMU email to Yahoo mail (or whatever), or vice-versa. So I frequently will send one person the same email message to multiple accounts because I don’t know which they will read. A closely related second: if I use any of the EMU services for emailing all of my students in a class, something I do frequently, then students who have not set up their email to forward and/or who do not read their EMU email are out of the loop.
Anyway, the article raises some other important/interesting points. Worth the skim for sure.
I tell my students I’m going to use their EMU e-mail addresses. Period. If they want to incorrectly set forwarding to other e-mail so that EMU gets tagged as a spam generator, I won’t impinge upon their freedom to do something unwise.
I make it quite clear that if they don’t get the e-mail I send to the EMU address, it’s not MY problem. And my quota of actual children has already been reached.
Life can be tough. Complaints can be made on the ninth floor of Pray-Harrold.
What about the wasteful spending of having institutional e-mail accounts in the first place? Something I ranted about for a decade so far and I ain’t done ranting.
I will say this, Jeff: I was somewhat dubious about EMU making a good choice about what to do with email problems, and I was surprised that they did not opt for the freebie of gmail. But I think Zimbra has proven to be a very reliable and feature-rich choice. I think it’s been “down” for about 15 minutes total since it went online.