Students and campus email problem #42
Posted by Jesse Rodgers on October 06, 2008 at 03:38 PM
Email is something higher ed institutions have been providing to students since the beginning of email. Many long-term staff and/or faculty believe it to be a perk while others now simply see it as essential communication. With phones and paper no longer practical ways of official communication, higher ed has been approaching email like corporations when the client (students) see it in a completely different way.
The problem (and my assumption for this post) is that students have an email address before they get to higher ed and they will have it after. For the four years they aren’t going to use some feature crippled email and they aren’t going to switch their primary contact address.
There was an argument a number of years ago for higher ed to provide top notch email to students and encourage them to switch. They will then retain that service as Alumni and retain a great connection with campus. I am not sure that would work anymore.
What students (and Alumni) currently use is their @hotmail or @gmail or @yahoo and that creates a problem. Computers on campus can get compromised, when they do they usually result in the campus domain being blacklisted which means no email is received for a while. IT thinks you fix this by forcing students to use campus email. But that doesn’t change the fact that the higher ed institution can’t contact the rest of the world.
My thought: move your email to a different ‘email’ only domain or move machines on campus to a special domain and stop forcing students to use a bad service. Also stop spending money on a service that no one uses. Email services should be for staff, faculty, and grad students (optional) with forwarding to undergrads email address of choice.
Just a thought.
Comments
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Four years is a lot of time for an 18 year old, and a school address does come in handy, if only for looking “professional”. You can get a professional-looking user ID at the free emails, but @uwaterloo.ca still looks better than @gmail.com, at least to me.
From a communication point of view, there’s also value to having university-controlled and -logged mailboxes for users, where you can verify that a physical person has this username, and that their mailbox exists. PDEng, for instance, has a policy to only send emails to @engmail.uwaterloo.ca student emails.
I will agree that the university’s webmail interface sucks a lot.
With all sorts of internet devices getting more common, I think we may see a bit of a decline in webmail popularity as people use the devices’ dedicated POP3/IMAP clients.
Agreed Jesse.
Why not drop all the disparate email servers around campus and simply build out the UWDir system to be more friendly. If I were a student I would love to put my GMail into UWDir such that my @uwaterloo.ca address redirected to my GMail. I would use +uw to mark them and then filter them accordingly.
Kids have email addresses usually before they are 13 these days (for MSN) and there is no way for IST or faculties to compete with todays free email services.
I thought that was how UWdir worked already…you put whatever address you wanted in (@ https://ego.uwaterloo.ca/~uwdir/Update) and your @uwaterloo.ca email forwarded there? It’s one of the reasons that mail server hopping is so easy on campus. :)
@Jarek – there is nothing wrong with what pdeng is doing but if you are going to have a policy like that then you really should provide a service that people will use that won’t annoy them every time they do. If you annoy your client they form a negative feeling towards you and in 5 years when they are asked to donate to UW the more positive feelings they have the better…
@Adam – I think there could be a way but it is a big job… email isn’t the only part of that service. Universities could play a role in the ‘cloud’ but they only should try if they are willing to take a risk on there not being a return.
@Kevin – that is where blacklisting is a problem though. The fwd doesn’t work if a computer on campus just went nuts and sent out a billion emails that gets any email with uwaterloo.ca blocked with folks.
Meh, I would love it if shitty webmail was anywhere near the top of the list of things that annoy me about the university.
@Jarek – but the thinking/creativity that gives you the crap email service is likely behind the other things that annoy you. I am just picking on email.
I think there could be a way but it is a big job… email isn’t the only part of that service. Universities could play a role in the ‘cloud’ but they only should try if they are willing to take a risk on there not being a return.
but the thinking/creativity that gives you the crap email service is likely behind the other things that annoy you. I am just picking on email.
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