Posted by saepl on July 28, 2010 at 5:34pm
I work at a small college and historically the students are not given an email account but can use their personal email account for "school business" The problem is that students have email addresses like "sexybabe123@example.com"
Does your school give out a school email address for students to use?
What platform is used to manage students emails (exchange, etc)? Specifically, does anyone have experience with using google apps as their provider? Google apps seems like a great way to go but what the disadvantages?
Comments
Google Apps
I know for certain that several of the larger universities in the Providence, RI area have switched over to Google Apps for student accounts, and at least one of them has done it for all staff as well.
Regards,
Jason
Jason Pamental
[ @jpamental ]
Penn State is looking into
Penn State is looking into Google Apps but there are a number of issues to surmount.
Eric Aitala - ema13@psu.edu - f1m@f1m.com - @aitala
www.essp.psu.edu - www.f1m.com
Could you elaborate a bit
Could you elaborate a bit more on what these issues are?
Not really.... mostly it
Not really.... mostly it centers around the very large, diverse user base here at PSU. And giving every student a Gmail account still requires provisioning them a local (Webaccess) account to do things like registering for classes, paying bills, etc. So also providing an email account (POP or IMAP) is not a big deal since we already have the infrastructure.
Also there were some issues with FERPA and data retention at one point...
Eric
Eric Aitala - ema13@psu.edu - f1m@f1m.com - @aitala
www.essp.psu.edu - www.f1m.com
We use it at Cal State Monterey Bay
We switched a year ago to Google Apps from FirstClass (ugh!) for everyone on campus, about 4800 students and 1000 staff, faculty, and persons of interest.
Our students were already using Gmail or something like it because FirstClass sucked so much, so the transition was very clean, and in fact, we have received much less support calls since switching. All-in-all it's been a pretty positive thing for our campus.
Some pitfalls to look out for is provisioning (which brings up the inevitable question of "Who is a student, really?") and integration with authentication systems. We are using CAS as a single-sign-on solution so students log into our (Drupal) portal, and then jump off to email, calendar, etc within Google without having to enter their credentials again.
Google Apps
Yes, we also switched over to Google Apps (email, calendar, etc.) last year here at Wheeling Jesuit University. It is a major improvement over the previous email system.
The IT folks really like it. It works well and they can still retain all of the university emails "in house" with backups and archives.
RJ Seward
Center for Educational Technologies - Wheeling Jesuit University
Oregon
The state Department of Education in Oregon has signed an agreement to make Google Apps domains available to all K-12 districts in the state (see http://oregonk-12.net). They negotiated a modified agreement with Google that provides better FERPA/CIPA protection. A lot of the districts are doing some long hard thinking about if/how they want to roll something like this out to their staff and students.
-Greg
Thank you for the comments,
Thank you for the comments, much appreciated.