A new mass e-mail policy has been put in place for the rest of the semester to give student organizations and OU departments more flexibility in communicating to students.
Full-time faculty and staff, including registered student organization advisers, now may send mass e-mails to all students without approval from the administration when using the OU Mass Mail account.
Under the previous policy, individuals could only target e-mails to groups of students using major, classification or enrollment status as a sending criteria and only urgent, official communications from OU could be sent to all students via OUMM with approval from Student Affairs.
The new policy was a response from “many student requests,” said Nick Key, OU IT spokesman.
“The guidelines are very specific as to who may use the system and how it may be used,” he said. “The intent of these changes is to increase transparency of the OUMM process and improve the quality of these messages.”
The goal of the new policy is to employ e-mail communication effectively, OU officials said in a press release.
“E-mail is one of the most frequently used methods that students use to communicate,” Susan Sasso, Student Affairs associate vice president, said in the release. “Our goal is to ... not open the flood-gates for mass e-mails but instead to challenge faculty and staff to send only high quality, relevant messages.”
Additional policy changes require mass e-mail senders to take personal ownership for each message.
The criteria for taking ownership include targeting specific recipients by major, classification and gender when possible, writing a clearly stated subject line with the prefix “OUMM,” sending mass e-mails from their personal e-mail addresses and not their departmental addresses, inserting a signature block with their names and departments, inputting their names into the approval field on the mass mail application and ensuring mass e-mails only communicate information about departmental or registered student organization events and programs, not personal messages.
While faculty and staff can send students a mass e-mail without approval, students also can filter them through an OU IT link.
“E-mail rules let you divert mass e-mails away from your inbox into a sub-folder,” Key said. “This combines the convenience of ‘opting out’ with the security of saving the messages. This way you can review messages at your convenience without the risk of losing important communications from your academic department.”
OU administrators will review the policy at the end of the semester to make permanent policy changes at that time.
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tayl4008 3 years, 1 month ago
Great, more emails that have nothing to do with me. I will be putting OUMM mails on my spam blocker.