Email Part Deux-Or Revisiting the Prior Post
Sometimes you write a post thinking it is no big deal, just a reference to something, and all of a sudden gets more interest than you would think. So it went with the prior post about Boston College no longer offering campus email accounts to students.
In my mind I thought this was a no-brainer. So much a no-brainer I really didn’t spend much time explaining why I thought it was a good idea. Well commenters, and emailers, disagreed so I thought I would explain a bit more.
Campuses got in the business of offering email prior to hotmail and gmail, when many students arrived at campus without having an email account. In fact my first email account in 1993 was a uchicago account. Given that moment in the development of the internet it only made sense for campuses, regardless of infrastructure cost to offer accounts to all of their students. The only way that they could be assured that students had email accounts was to provide them. This in turn produced a low cost way for campuses to communicate with their student body. And for the most part students used these accounts as their primary accounts. Indeed I recall when students used to scramble to figure out how to keep their email accounts after leaving college, because it was their primary or only account.
Fast forward to now, most, in not all of our students come to campus with an existing email account, one which they have used for several years already, one attached to their “online identity” (okay I really don’t believe in the idea of online vs. offline identity, hence the scare quotes, but you get my point). So having a campus email address is now a burden, one more piece of information for them to monitor, which they generally only begrudgingly do, because the only communication they get via this account if official campus stuff. (In fact the younger generations don’t use email nearly as much, instead relying on text messaging, but I digress.)
Allowing students to register their accounts they use as their official accounts greatly increases the chance of reaching them, and doesn’t create a “garbage account” that they will only be so happy to get rid of when they leave the institution.
But what about the students that don’t already have an account?
Good question, but wouldn’t it be better to teach those students how to get a free account, one they can continue to use later in life after they have left the institution. I for one believe in empowering students.
What about just having an official account which they can forward?
Fine by me. But why bother? If you are just going to create an account which they then forward to another account why bother with the time an effort of managing such a system. Instead, free up the server space, save money, and have the IT folks teach people digital literacy skills. Perhaps each address would be just a forward service that students are required to point somewhere else. This would work, but seems like an extra step. Just require students to register an email account, like any online registration does, done.
What about Privacy?
This is a red-herring. There is no privacy and the university supplying “safe” email accounts just teaches students bad habits. Instead teach them how to maximize security on their own. Honestly I have more problems with the official institutional email addresses I am forced to have then I ever do with the ones I manage myself.
But having a .edu address is useful.
Only because other people/institutions treat .edu with a special import, one which is probably starting to fade. At any rate said institutions would deal when suddenly large numbers of students don’t have .edu addresses.
But as Faculty I like my account.
Faculty seems a bit more reasonable to me, the relationship is longer term and as a representative of said institution you might want to officially sign your email as relating to the university. I personally find it a pain, but it seems a reasonable investment for a school to provide official addresses for employees. But please for the love of all that is holy, let me forward it out of that account.
But student emails might get stuck in spam filters.
Again an important intelligence for students to learn,: how to craft an email that will not, and which free services are best. Again my own spam filters do a much better job of accurately filtering than do the ones the university sets up.
It’s a liability issue, institutions have to have official channels they can be sure students receive.
Again you are far more likely to reach the student on the email account they do read rather than the one you want them to read. If you want a guarantee send a courier and have them sign for it, otherwise no guarantee, campus email or not. This is again where providing students email produces a false sense of security.
What about security?
You really think students read those security updates? Besides they are far more likely to read them if they go to the account they check regularly rather than the one they only check occasionally. Important principle of communication: If you want someone to hear you state it on a channel they usually listen to. Wouldn’t hurt to make them interesting/fun to read. I have seen a few like this, and students are far more likely to read if they aren’t official campus speak. And for real emergencies email is not fast enough try text messaging.
But I like my harvard.edu address.
Seriously? Okay if you want to carry your college address around with you like that 20 year old college sweatshirt trying to brag and relive the glory days of your college years, trading on the prestige of an institution rather than your own reputation feel free, but Universities should just start charging for this. Consider it premium service.
Are institutions going to start providing all students with a cell phone and number since they text each other to communicate? Obviously not. Managing student email accounts is just spending bad money.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:48 pm
i agree that universities may not need to supply an email MAILBOX (a place to store email). as someone who must maintain and use student contact information, i support the continued distribution of an email ADDRESS which must be configured to store/forward email to an outside MAILBOX. the distinction of mailbox and address is not well understood by the vast majority of email users.
i support email addresses distribution because i know for a fact that i can send an email to a student (or staff or faculty) by simply using their university provided identifier (i.e. at ut dallas it?s called the ?netid?). the university uses that identifier in many records and databases since it is a short, unique, and simply key to use (i am aware that it is technically not a database key). having to relate a netid to a students current email address in some database is simply not efficient in many cases.
information resources at ut dallas has discussed the possibility of out sourcing student email accounts to an email service provider, like google, hotmail, yahoo, etc. for sometime. i wonder if it will ever happen…
December 4th, 2008 at 12:53 am
I definitely agree with many of your comments regarding separate email mailboxes for students. These are going the way of the dinosaur. And good riddance. Gmail is so superior to any other email service I’ve ever used, it’s stunning.
However, I do think .edu forwarding addresses are of use for students and especially faculty. In certain ways, this provides the same effect as stationary in the analog era. Any person can send a letter, but if it’s on stationary from an important institution, it gets the readers full attention. Likewise, in email boxes the reader initially has only the subject and email address to judge an email’s content. If you’re getting emails from john.smith@gmail, barry@hotmail, Tom@yahoo, it’s difficult to make this initial sort of what’s official, read now business and what’s from an email list to which you belong.
December 4th, 2008 at 2:52 am
Spot on Post. I have two campus email accounts that the colleges I attend won’t let me forward or download. Remembering to check these accounts is a royal pain, and the emails usually sit in the inbox for days before being read.
Another problem is I don’t have my address book up on their servers, which makes using the account very difficult. I have to manually look-up and enter any email address I need, that annoys me.
As far a security goes, teach your students to use PGP in their emails. As long as the institutions exchange public keys with the students, authentication and privacy aren’t a problem. With many plug-ins freely available for most email clients (even gmail via Firefox), PGP isn’t very hard to use at all. Besides, PGP is much more secure than any campus email account will be. Even large free email providers such as Google have far more robust and secure systems than colleges do.
December 4th, 2008 at 3:07 am
There is one other “but” that I haven’t seen in this post: Separate email accounts keep your email separate! Think about snailmail. We have different physical mailboxes for home and office. Imagine if the post office suddenly started putting your home utility bills and letters from grandma into your university drop box. Most people want to keep those things separate. With a single email account (me@hotmail.com or whatever), it’s impossible to separate the two domains, not even with a rule filter. But if the university provides you an .edu email account, keeping your work email separate from your personal email is easy and automatic.
December 4th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Campus services usernames/email addresses might serve as an authentication method. Don’t many campuses use databases that serve multiple functions in the quest for single-sign on or, at the least, synchronized usernames and passwords? Email, network services, webspace, LMS access, SIS access, etc. are often bundled together.
December 5th, 2008 at 1:15 am
I like the idea..except when it comes to keeping track of my 200 students email addresses. The new system would require reconfiguration of large databases on campus, to include the email address. The netid that the students have is also their email address — so it comes on my class roster. It is doable…just more would have to change than just allowing them to enter a contact email.
December 7th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
I completely agree. The three universities that I have attended have all wasted significant financial and institutional reasources trying to mantain and update their email systems. My current University is advertising their upcoming update as “blowing Gmail out of the water!” If an email address was required but not provided, IT departments would have remarkable amount of resources to educate students about how to use free services, a novel thought for an educational institution.
December 11th, 2008 at 3:34 am
One advantage of the university’s giving students email accounts — and assigning their usernames using an algorithm based on real names rather than letting them choose their own — is that I will not be put into the uncomfortable position of having to respond to a student whose personal off-campus email address is something like “8meatyinches@dotcum.com” or “nukemexico@nativistnazis.com”. To avoid this, in my syllabus I always say that I will not respond to any student email messages from any address other than their official university account. Am I evil? Perhaps. But at least I’m not going to wind up in the newspaper as the instructor who carried on a correspondence at taxpayers’ expense with a student whom he “called” (in an email address) “hotlipsbabe”.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:37 am
To follow up on Dude’s comment, I find it’s extremely useful to have student emails and listservs at the ready before I even meet them for the first time. I get tons of administrative emails, too, like from the Health Center or from the police telling me about stolen bikes and attempted assaults and whatnot. I suppose an alternative would be to require students to register their private emails with the university when they enroll, but that seems wrong somehow. Do I really need to know their ISP? Additionally, I’m thinking I like the idea that they have online personas, and probably more than one. One hopes that the students use a different tone when they send emails from their edu account.
And lastly, what do you think the effects are now that my university’s email is provided by gmail?