FAYETTEVILLE — The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville plans to outsource its student e-mail to Google, joining a long list of colleges and universities that were enticed by the technology giant’s offer of free e-mail service and applications.
On March 14, the university announced the adoption of Google Gmail as its official student e-mail service. Through the rest of this year, student e-mail will be moved to Gmail from the university’s existing e-mail accounts.
Students will be required to opt-in to the new service, which will be provided through Google Apps for Education, a software package designed for college campuses. More than 14 million K-12 students, college students and teachers around the world use the software, according to Google.
Michael Dodd, president of the university’s Associated Student Government, said his peers are “absolutely ecstatic” to have Gmail, because they think it’s better than the university’s existing e-mail system. Student leaders have “been pushing and hoping and praying for this,” Dodd said.
“Now that we have it, people are going to be overwhelmingly supportive of the system,” he said. “I have not heard one negative thing about it.”
Each student Gmail account will offer 25 gigabytes of storage, far more than the existing student e-mail limit of 100 megabytes of storage. In addition to e-mail, students will also have access to Gmail features such as Google Calendar, Docs, Chat and Talk.
Many of the university’s 23,000 students already use Gmail Mail, Dodd said.
“It will be a pretty smooth transition,” he said.
Faculty and staff will continue to access their university e-mail accounts through Microsoft Exchange software, said John Diamond, the university’s chief spokesman.
University students will not be subjected to marketing or advertising through their new Gmail accounts, said Diamond, associate vice chancellor for university relations.
“As for the benefits, the university receives free e-mail services, students receive a larger e-mail quota and access to Google Apps, and the institution realizes financial savings as we no longer need to purchase software licensing,” he said. “We do not pay Google, nor does Google pay us.”
The university projects the agreement will save it about $100,000 annually, Diamond said.
The university’s move reflects a trend that began a few years ago, said Kenneth Green, founding director of The Campus Computing Project, which studies the role of computing, “eLearning” and information technology in American higher education.
Of 498 U.S. public and private colleges and universities polled last fall, 67 percent had either outsourced their student e-mail or were in the process, and another 22 percent were reviewing it for the 2012-13 school year, according to the 2011 Campus Computing Survey conducted by Green’s organization.
Moreover, 75 percent of public universities that responded to the survey had outsourced or were in the process, and an additional 15 percent were considering it, Green said.
“This is a movement in many ways,” Green said.
Google began offering its pilot Gmail for students in 2004. It and Microsoft are the “major players for outsourced campus e-mail services,” Green said. Zimbra is a distant third, he said.
Northwestern University, just outside Chicago, outsourced its student e-mail to Google in 2007. Students there were “thrilled” by the news at the time, said Wendy Woodward, Northwestern’s director of technology support services.
“It’s been nothing but positive for us,” Woodward said, adding that Northwestern alumni are allowed to keep their addresses after graduation.
Sixty-six of the nation’s top universities have adopted Google Apps for Education for their student e-mail services, according to Google. Those schools include the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind.; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland; and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.
The migration to off-campus e-mail services allows institutions to provide free e-mail hosting services while still keeping their brand, Green said. Fayetteville students will retain a university e-mail address and account, with a modification. The current addresses end in uark. edu. The new accounts will end in email.uark.edu.
Students already have moved away from university e-mail systems anyway, Green said.
“The typical full-time undergraduate has 3.3 e-mail accounts,” he said. “Many campuses report that students don’t use their [university] e-mail accounts.”
That’s true for Dodd, a senior transportation and logistics major at the university’s Sam M. Walton College of Business. He has been importing all his university email into his Gmail account for years, he said, because Gmail is easier to search and it essentially has no maximum capacity, Dodd said.
“I can easily go back and trace e-mail that was sent, even as a freshman,” he said.
But there is a deal-withthe-devil aspect to the agreement, Green said.
Google Mail, like any free hosting service, scans and stores e-mail on off-campus servers. So there’s the potential for a third party to access students’ e-mail, including any messages that contain highly sensitive information, Green said.
“There is a kind of Faustian pact when you sign up for free e-mail services. Somebody is hosting your stuff,” he said.
But Google maintains that it is not interested in reading individual e-mails, he said, and students may not even care.
“Students, for whatever reasons, seem to be less concerned about privacy issues” than older adults, Green said.
In 2010, Yale University delayed its move to Gmail because of security concerns from faculty and administrators but eventually adopted the system.
The University of California at Davis, also concerned about privacy in 2010, removed its students from Google Apps for Education and returned to a campusbased e-mail system.
The University of Massachusetts phased out Gmail two years ago, but for a different reason. Administrators there said at the time that only 7 percent of the 20,000 students at the Amherst campus had switched to the new service.
Arkansas, Pages 13 on 03/25/2012