Next semester, Information Technology Services (ITS) will give students the option of transferring from their current University-run WebMail account to a Gmail account run by Google Apps for Education.
While no specific date for the switchover has been set, ITS is currently forming a contract with Google and determining the details of the process.
“We currently allow everyone to forward their e-mail and a significant amount of students take advantage of that,” said Ganesan Ravishanker, Associate Vice President for ITS. “In other words, a lot of people are reading their Wesleyan e-mail elsewhere already, so why not facilitate this in a way that we get to keep our branding?”
“Branding” refers to the “@wesleyan.edu” part of a student’s e-mail address. Currently, when students who forward their Wesleyan WebMail to a Gmail account send a message, the sender is listed as both their University address and their Gmail address. The new switch would keep students’ “@wesleyan.edu” addresses without an additional “@gmail.com” address.
Google Apps for Education is a free program for colleges and universities that currently provides 6.5 GB of email space per user. While students remain at the school, the email account is free of advertisements. If, upon graduation, students wish to continue using their Gmail account, it will transfer to a regular Gmail account with small advertisements on the e-mail page.
The Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) ITS Committee approved the transition to Google Apps for Education after making one significant change to ITS’ original proposal for the switch.
“As it was brought up, the impression I got was that it [the transition] would apply to all students and that there would be no choice,” said Justin LaSelva ’09, a student representative from Help Desk on the ITS Committee. “Some students took issue with that. There are a lot of privacy concerns with outsourcing University e-mail. When it’s on campus, we have physical control over that information. A lot of people put private information through their e-mails, so when these servers are out in California or Washington, physical control of that information is outside the University. We have to look into the legal process by which Google might not keep University property and student property as safe as the University might want to.”
The Committee worked with ITS to revise the plan so that students would have the option of keeping their University WebMail or transferring to Gmail. Ravishanker and other ITS staff are now working with a Google Technology Coordinator to figure out how the transfer will happen.
“It poses some challenges when you’re only taking a portion of the people and moving them,” Ravishanker said. “Google has done this for some schools, but there are many details we don’t know yet because we just had our first discussion [with Google].”
Nonetheless, he is confident that the switch will occur soon.
“We believe that we’ll be ready to roll out by the beginning of spring semester,” he said. “That is a goal, but technically we are pretty confident that we can make it happen by January.”
Despite privacy concerns, members of the WSA ITS Committee are embracing the change.
“Gmail offers free word processing, calendaring, spreadsheets, Power Points, an easy website builder and community tools,” said Cesar Medina ’09, co-chair of the WSA ITS Committee. “No one is going to be forced to transition over, but it is encouraged because we do believe that Google Apps for Education will allow students to be more productive and efficient with their work and also start transitioning them to how work is done in more professional environments with collaborative programs.”
Gmail offers tools that not only allow students to share information and chat in real time, but also to collaborate simultaneously on a word processing sheet, spreadsheet or Power Point-type presentation. Gmail also has significantly more space, with over 6.5 GB per user, rather than WebMail’s 100 MB, and has better spam-removing software than what the University currently offers.
Students will still be able to log on to their e-mail through their Student Portfolios, preventing Google from having access to student usernames and passwords. While ITS is only in the first stages of determining how the process will work, Medina said that they will be using a Token program that identifies student Gmail users on the University server. The program then authenticates the password and directs students to the G-Mail page.
Those who wish to keep their University WebMail account will be given a period of time to log onto their E-Portfolio and indicate their decision to opt out of the switch.
“It is all is going to depend on what exactly this offering is,” Ravishanker said. “Are we going to simply tell the students, ’You have agreed to be switched over, here are the instructions for you to take your email from Wesleyan and move it over to Google,’ or will we do it for you? If we do it for you, it will take a longer time, so all of these things need to be worked out.”
ITS is also consulting other schools that have already made the switch to G-Mail, such as Northwestern University and Trinity College, about technology and privacy issues.
“We were one of the earliest to be looking at this, but a lot of changes happened, so we sat on it for a while,” Ravishanker said. “This fall, I renewed the discussions, mostly based on the fact that many more schools have decided to move, so thankfully others have done all the technological groundwork.”
As ITS develops the new email program in the coming months, they will likely create a website where students can view updates and information about the transition. In the meantime, Ravishanker will keep the student community up to date through his blog,
“Our goal is to make [the switch] as easy as possible for the students,” he said.