JR Schulden and the Registrar have participated in the entire discussion
of sending email to students as part of the course website work they
are building. They are working on strategies that are compliant with
FERPA, do not generate "mailing lists" that others can use to spam,
and meet the needs of the instructors for communicating with current
class lists. I'm hoping we will be seeing some finalization of these
plans this spring. I understand that the addresses used in this system
will be those that students have identified as their primary email addresses.
Jacqueline
>On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 08:44:18AM -0800, Steve Masover wrote:
>> Hi Michael, Tom, et al. --
>>
>> I'm not sure whether you'll see this as falling within the scope of the
>> user@berkeley.edu project you have proposed, but because you are proposing
>> that the service be closely integrated with CalNet it occurs to me that a
>> similar and very useful functionality might be built into the same
>> forwarding server:
>>
>> Faculty (and other UCB course instructors) have access to student ID
>> numbers, but do not as part of the normal business of course registration
>> get a list of students' e-mail addresses. What if instructors were able to
>> use student IDs as e-mail addresses in order to send course-related
>> announcements to enrolled students? I can envision this in a couple of
>> different ways. Perhaps the instructors would simply send e-mail to a set
>> of student IDs (1234567@berkeley.edu, 2345678@berkeley.edu); or perhaps
>> some other application would automatically generate and maintain majordomo
>> lists from extant course-enrollment databases (about which I know
>> absolutely nothing, so I really have no idea how hard or easy this would
>> be) -- so the instructor would mail to something like
>> Sociology107_Fall2002@berkeley.edu.
>
>Coincidentally, I was talking with Helen Kelly (Chancellor's Office
>Information Systems) yesterday, and she's bringing a proposal to the
>EBITF tomorrow for just such a system. I don't know the extent of it
>(whether it will support class mailing lists such as the above), but
>there is definitely talk about being able to mail to a student ID number
>and have it forward to the student. Posession of the student's ID
>number is generally considered enough to get around FERPA regulations
>(if you have the student ID, you're not a third party, and you can mail
>them without bringing up questions of privacy).
>
>I think some people would dislike the idea of being able to mail
>everyone in a course using a well-known address, unless it could be
>restricted to legitimate users somehow. Spam continues to degrade
>our culture of openness.
>
>> I'll take this opportunity to thank you for putting your proposal forward,
>> whether my suggestion fits it or not. For years now I've been hearing from
>> colleagues and friends at other universities how ridiculous it is that
>> UCB's addresses have to be so cumbersome.
>
>And thank you for your comments.
>
>--
>Tom Holub (tom_holub@LS.Berkeley.EDU, 510-642-9069)
>College of Letters & Science
>249 Campbell Hall
==================================================================
Jacqueline Craig jcraig@socrates.berkeley.edu
IST Customer Affairs Manager
235 Evans Hall
Associate Vice Chancellor's Office
Information Systems and Technology (510) 642-0334
University of California at Berkeley FAX: (510) 643-5385
==================================================================
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