Tampa, Fla. – College leaders are struggling to find the best ways to set up campus emergency-notification systems. Which of the dozens of service providers best fits the campus’s needs? How do you get students to sign up? Who should have access to the send button?
Technology officials, provosts, and presidents shared their experiences with emergency-notification tools on Tuesday during the closing session of The Chronicle’s Technology Forum. A recent string of campus shootings, including those at Virginia Tech last spring, and weather calamities, like Hurricane Katrina, have led campus officials to look for ways to blast out information to students, faculty, and staff members during a crisis.
Michael L. Dame, director of university Web communications of Virginia Tech, says 54 different companies selling emergency-notification systems contacted the institute after the shootings. He says Virginia Tech officials looked for a product that showed strong protection of student data and that was reliable. And they immediately ruled out the companies that offered a free service in exchange for the right to send advertising to participants. (The institute ended up using a product from 3n.)
Only five people at Virginia Tech have the ability to send an alert via the new system, said Mr. Dame. Two of them are in the campus police department, and the other three are in the communications office. “The president’s office and provost’s office didn’t want that responsibility,” he said. And, officials decided, “the fewer people authorized to send messages, probably the better” so that there would be fewer temptations to use the system in situations in which it was not absolutely necessary.
Getting people to sign up for the services can be the biggest challenge, officials said.
Brian T. Nichols, chief IT security and policy officer at Louisiana State University, said that 15,000 students, professors, and staff members have signed up so far, but that’s a relatively small percentage of the university’s overall population.
Why not just make sign-up mandatory? Mr. Dame said that in the past when students have been required to give private information, “students gave us bogus data in large numbers — so why do that?” — Jeffrey R. Young
