Coaxing students out of the ‘cloud’

While a number of colleges and universities devote resources to keep campus e-mail grounded on their own servers, they are finding it difficult to coax students out of the cloud.

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.

However, this is presenting colleges/universities with a dilemma regarding privacy issues with third party providers. If e-mail accounts are hacked or go down, like Google’s Gmail did recently, how will this effect university communications and what is the institutions responsibility to their students and faculty?

Great questions, not really sure we have the answers yet. As technology begins to grow faster than college e-mail procedures do to implement the advances, only time will tell whether or not the “cloud” will be lifted.

The full article by Steve Kolowich