ACAC and e-mail
Advisory
Committee on
Academic
Computing
•
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
Part-time student
Staff
Faculty member - RFA
CUPE instructor
Faculty member - other
56.12%
19.20%
11.12%
7.53%
3.22%
0.90%
How would you rate Ryerson’s
Electronic 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 nonRyerson 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