| Newsletter 11, February 1996 |
Funding for full student electronic mail was not available again this year, so it remains a facility for Faculty of IES students only. The following policy is in place.
We have to have a clear policy on this because the current rate of requests is unsustainable. During the whole of last year, we registered 91 non-IES students for email. Already this year we have registered more than 400, and have a number of unprocessed requests.
Student email was introduced a year ago as a pilot for IES students, at the request of the faculty. We bid for capital funds to extend the service to all students on the basis of the popularity of the service to students, the feedback from IES lecturers that they wanted it to continue, and feedback from the LSSUG that other students were requesting access. Our total capital bid was deemed too large and student email was one of the proposed projects that did not receive funding.
We have registered all IES students again for email, and we can take a small number of other students. We cannot register all students as the student email server is not large enough. We have automated to some extent the registration of IES students, but the registration of additional students is largely a manual process and we do not have the staff time available to cope with the demand.
We propose to implement the policy set last year quite rigorously in order to control the demand, and support from academic staff would be appreciated.
In addition to IES students, access to email will be available to:
Students must complete an application form stating why they need access, and provide a letter of support from their tutor. We would ask tutors to be cautious about supporting requests which are not within one of the above categories. We do not guarantee a fast turnaround because of the resources available, but we will aim to have fully-completed requests processed within 7 days.
Lecturers who would like full courses of students registered need to talk to us (me) directly as this is dependent on the space available on the mail server, and can only be accommodated in exceptional circumstances.
IES student are supported by their own faculty staff in the use of email. We have no support resources available ourselves, so students who do register are very much on their own. There is an on-line help system and students must be encouraged to use this.
Josie Driver
