Background and Goals

DRAFT

Seattle Colleges' current student email environment is multifaceted and complex. Official college email comes to students from multiple systems. And while each student receives a college-issued @seattlecollege.edu email account, some email messages are directed to a student's personal or preferred email account set in ctcLink, while other messages are sent to a student's college-issued email account. If a student doesn't check both accounts, they can miss important information. Still, other important factors favor the use of the college-issued @seattlecolleges.edu email account.

In May 2023, the Chancellor’s Executive Cabinet unanimously decided that official communications from Seattle Colleges should go to students’ @seattlecollege.edu email accounts. District Communications and IT were tasked with developing and implementing a plan to make that transition.

Purpose and Goals

This purpose of this initiative is to use an informed, functional approach to college-issued email and related resources to achieve the following goals:

Improve communication with students
Ensure student privacy
Improve email safeguards
Prepare students for their time after Seattle Colleges

The presentation below provides more details about these goals. It is also available as a PDF.

Goals of the Transition to email@seattlecolleges.edu for Communications to Students - Andrew Svec, Assoc. Director of Communications, Internal Communications and Special Projects, District Communications Office

Background: In May 2023, the Chancellor’s Cabinet unanimously decided that official communications from Seattle Colleges should go to students’ @seattlecollege.edu email accounts. Communications and IT have been tasked with developing and implementing a plan to make that transition. IT and Communications have been developing plans, and now we want to begin alerting students leaders to this upcoming change.

The Big Question: Why? We want to: Improve communications with students; Ensure student privacy; Improve email safeguards; and Prepare students for their time after Seattle Colleges

Why? To Stabilize and Improve Communications with Students: Work toward keeping students better informed; Reduce the rate of bounced or blocked email messages when we send to students’ personal email addresses; Help students keep their Seattle Colleges messages together in one place; We’ll ask students to check their @seatttlecolleges.edu email daily

Why? To Ensure Privacy: Reduce privacy concerns: ensuring each student has their own email account eliminates concerns about sending to personal email accounts that may be shared accounts with family or friends; Facilitate the prevention of spam from outside sources

Why? To Improve Email Safeguards: Reduce the risk of data breach through email, compromised user accounts with filtering, and compromised computers due to malicious email. Faculty and staff know they can trust email from @seattlecolleges.edu accounts

Why? To Prepare Students for Their Time After Seattle Colleges: Prepare students for transfer – nearly all other colleges, including UW, send email to college-issued email accounts; Prepare students for work culture where they’ll encounter employer-provided email and technology accounts; Encourage students to use the software and data storage available to them in Office 365 – Teams, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and others

About the Transition: Sending important information via email is an established practice by nearly all colleges. Students are responsible for reading information sent to them. We’ll continue to explore ways to share and reinforce information, but reading email from your college is still an important and necessary expectation.

About the Transition: Students are already issued @seattlecolleges.edu email accounts. Now we’re simply asking them to use their account and check it daily. We’ll conduct an awareness campaign across our campuses.

About the Transition: We’ll need to coordination with ctcLink as a separate system. We will encourage students to set their preferred email in ctcLink as their @seattlecolleges.edu email.

The Complexity of Seattle Colleges' Current Student Email Situation

The following presentation, given to the Chancellor's Executive Cabinet in May of 2023, offers an overview of our current email situation. Presentation is also available as a PDF.