The 2/15/08 Chronicle of Higher Ed has an interview with John A. Bielec, from Drexel University. They’re starting a pilot project where students can select to have email via Google Apps for Education, Microsoft Live@edu, or stick with the standard university account. Among the reasons for the switch: students already come in with email accounts, why not let them choose what they prefer; cost avoidance, as video and other media files continue to require more disk space; and fragmentation of offerings is not a worry.
As students get move more of their online interactions to non-email services, such as FaceBook, it seems natural to move email off campus too. It wasn’t that long ago that a campus email account was a student’s first exposure to digital communication. The funny thing is that for many it may well still be their first email account, but, with IM and social sites, it is much less important to them than to students of 5 -6 years ago. The move to Google or Microsoft for student email accounts makes perfect sense. Note that Drexel has no plans to move staff/faculty email accounts, which again makes perfect sense, with concerns over accountability, intellectual property, compliance, etc.
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