Academia has seen “explosive growth” in the outsourcing of student e-mail systems, according to a new study.
Nearly 20-percent of the senior IT leaders surveyed said commercial providers now host their primary student e-mail systems, said the report from Educause, the nonproft higher-education technology consortium.
Faculty and staff e-mail is another story. Only 2.3-percent of those primary systems were hosted commercially, Educause found, in part because of concern over confidentiality.
You’ll find lots of other campus communications topics addressed in the study, titled Spreading the Word: Messaging and Communications in Higher Education.”
The lure of outsourced e-mail from companies like Google and Microsoft was a hot topic at The Chronicle’s Technology Forum this week.
Steven Zink of the University of Nevada in Reno told a room full of campus IT professionals at the forum that his institution was planning on not providing e-mail.
“For the life of me, folks, I just don’t understand why you do it,” he said. “Students have e-mail from fourth grade on.” —Marc Parry
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