Southwestern College students now have the opportunity to join university and college students across the United States who have campus emails. Though SWC is about a decade late to the game, many administrators and students indicated they are excited about the new @swccd.edu email addresses.
Vice-President of Academic Affairs Kathy Tyner said some students change their e-mail addresses frequently, making it difficult for faculty and the college to communicate with them. New college addresses will be consistent and professional, she said.
“It just really simplifies our ability to communicate,” she said.
Student emails are the last step in the process of creating a new student portal, a customizable online dashboard that will provide access to relevant information and tools.
It will be rolled out next Spring 2017.
Daniel Borges, chief information systems officer, said the college email addresses allow the elimination of personal email addresses from college files.
Step one occurred last semester, when SWC connected with Google to establish the base for the student emails. To activate their email addresses, students were asked to set up a MySWC Login account.
Everett Garnick, systems and programming supervisor, said to gain access to their accounts, students are required to set up a new password to go along with the .edu email.
Tyner said about 90 students went online to activate their new .edu emails in the first hour the system was up and running. About 5,156 students have not activated their student emails, said Suzanne Woods, admissions and records supervisor.
Tyner said a WebAdvisor Debrief Team (WADT) was formed two years ago to improve SWC’s wobbly WebAdvisor, but it soon took on the creation of the new student portal. It includes representatives from faculty, the Associated Student Organization, admissions, academic affairs, student services and institutional technology.
“Everybody has input,” Woods said.
After logging in to the portal, Garnick said, students will be able to access their @swccd.edu Gmail, WebAdvisor and a host of other information and services all in one place.
“Everything involved with WebAdvisor will be on there,” he said. “There will be a place for people to create their own links to other services that they have on the web that are personal to them, that are not necessarily part of the college’s supplied services.”
Borges said students and faculty will be able to use tools like Google Documents and Google sheets through the portal to work collaboratively and submit assignments.
Garnick said there are student workers who test out the new features to find glitches and make the portal user friendly.
Borges said the creation of college emails for students was not undertaken sooner because of the enormity of the task.
“The reason that some colleges don’t do it is because of the complexities and difficulty in doing this,” he said. “You figure what we set up were 30,000 accounts.”
Borges said emails were also sent out to 550,000 former students, instructing them to change their WebAdvisor passwords so they would have continued access to their transcripts.
Woods said current SWC students will be able to keep their @swccd.edu emails even after graduating, as long as Google continues the service.