ACAC and e-mail

Advisory Committee on AcademicComputing

• ACAC is an advisory committee, comprised of representatives from all faculties and members of CCS, that deals with technology and academia.

• It strives to establish the appropriate and effective use of educational technology by faculty, student and staff members in the pursuit of excellence in education and research.

• The committee deals with and is responsible for – analyzing, investigating and recommending policies and guidelines on

computing technology– high-level issues and initiatives, such as identifying, evaluating and

recommending both short-term and long-term technological requirements

Survey

In March 2010, ACAC conducted a survey that was directed to members of the Ryerson University community who were current users of email systems provided by various departments at Ryerson.

The aim was to collect information to understand current attitudes towards e-Mail and communication and collaborative tools.

We received 3410 responses from the following:– Full-time student 56.12%– Part-time student 19.20%– Staff 11.12%– Faculty member - RFA 7.53%– CUPE instructor 3.22%– Faculty member - other 0.90%

How would you rate Ryerson’sElectronic Communication Services?

Interesting…(but not too surprising)

The survey questions and responses shed some light on what the university populous thinks of our technology:

• Ryerson’s matrix/blackboard e-mail is considered, by approximately half the respondents as terrible, poor or adequate.

• GroupWise (Calendaring) is used by a small number of respondents and more than half of those consider it terrible, poor or adequate.

How important are the following non-Ryerson services?

Of the services that are available outside the university, the top 4 indicated were:

• E-mail• Contacts• Calendaring (Shared Calendars)• Shared Documents

How important are the following services for Ryerson to provide?

Of the services that Ryerson does not offer to the University population, the top 3 indicated were:

• Mobile Device Integration• Collaborative Document Editing (Shared

Documents)• Shared Calendars

ACAC and e-mail

ACAC discussions have focused around finding ways to improve our e-mail and to build our electronic collaborative and communication tool suite.

To this end, we have discussed the possibilities of overhauling all CCS offerings with suites being offered by numerous external vendors. The choices are wide ranging, as are the costs.

The number of possibilities as to what products and providers can be used is not many. However, how these services can be offered can vary.

Do you have concerns about an external organization providing e-mail and collaborative services to Ryerson?

Which of these issues would concern you the most with an external provider?

Next Steps

• More input from the community on risks and requirements• Survey, online discussion, townhall, meetings with various groups,

(RFA, CUPE, RSU, CESAR, etc)

• Develop a list of requirements and risks• What functionality do we want to have?• What are the requirements around privacy, security, records

management, etc

• Issue a Request for Information (RFI) from providers

• Draft recommendation and get feedback from community

• Revise recommendation and send to executives

contact

You can contact us in regards to e-mail/tools by mailing to: apps@ryerson.ca

Information will be continually posted on: http://email.blog.ryerson.ca

You can contact me in regards to ACAC:dimitri@ee.ryerson.ca