Re: [Bodington-developers] Group email

[Jon M. <jo...@te...>]

There's abuse and then there's abuse....
If we are talking about the students then I think most organisations 
would be happy not to give them the option to opt in or opt out of the 
Emails. If a student is accidentally enrolled on a module and shouldn't 
be and they get annoyed by lots of irrelevant emails then they can 
always complain and get un-enrolled from the module.  It's probably 
better that they can't opt out of the email to give them another good 
reason to sort out their enrollments.

However, consider the following scenario.....

Miss Junior the teaching assistant manages a course module and wants 
notification emails to go out to all the enrolled students and all the 
lecturing staff.  Now Prof. Crusty starts getting emails from something 
called WebLearn that they've never heard of.  In some organisations it's 
made clear to Prof. Crusty that he has teaching duties and is expected 
to engage in student support and since he doesn't manage the module he 
has to participate in a way that is decided by a more junior member of 
staff......
....and in other organisations Prof. Crusty gets together with Prof. 
Pure-Research and they devise a policy whereby senior members of staff 
can opt out of irritating Emails about teaching from people like Miss 
Junior.

So, if Prof. Crusty and Prof Pure-Research get their way and choose to 
opt out of all bulk email from all course areas they can ask their 
secretaries to log in with their user names and passwords add them to a 
special group;

myuniversity.bulkemail_optout

Then the tool that sends out the emails will first list the users in the 
relevant group(s) and before sending the email will check that the user 
is NOT in the optout group.


Either way wouldn't it be a good idea for users to have a personal 
messaging tool within Bodington? They could choose to have all messages 
forwarded to their Email account but also access them on-line.  The 
On-line tool could allow person to person messaging.

Jon





Alistair Young wrote:

>I think we can put to rest any fears on the publishing of email addresses.
>That doesn't happen and you can't find out about high risk groups using
>this tool. You only see the groups you're in. Whether that functionality
>exposes holes in institutional process is another thing entirely... (I
>never knew I was in *that* group!)
>
>  
>
>>remove themselves from the group
>>    
>>
>can you explain a bit more Jon? Do you mean something like a new group
>associated with a real group? e.g. MOD101 (real group) + MOD101EMAIL
>(email group for MOD101). A user can't remove themselves from MOD101 -
>that's their course. They would join/leave MOD101EMAIL though.
>
>Then again should they be allowed to opt out? How does a tutor contact
>their students if they've all opted out of MOD101EMAIL? What does the
>tutor do when they all fail due to lack of communication?
>
>The approach Naomi has taken is to prefix the email with the appropriate
>marker, e.g. [MOD101] and students are encouraged to learn to use their
>email tool of choice to manage those emails. A simple rule to bin all
>[MOD101] emails solves their problem.
>
>There is documentation on how to use the email tool of choice as it's the
>institutional one. They don't get mailed on their hotmail etc.
>
>If someone is sending large amounts of unsolicited mail using the group
>mailer then surely that's a job for the abuse of system squad?
>
>I think the chat system we're implementing in CLAN will allow users to
>blab as much as they want and leave the group mailer for academic use.
>
>  
>