The University has started a mass e-mail service, called Campus Notes, to keep students aware of campus events and news.
Campus Notes, which are sent daily to all University students, is a modified version of the Campus Updates section of Blackboard. The first note was sent on Sept. 9. The updates contain user submitted events, activities, and information.
Bonnie Blankinship, the editor of Campus Updates, said the updates used to be sent through e-mail but were discontinued because students did not like receiving the messages in their inbox. However, after switching to just displaying the messages on Blackboard, the University felt that perhaps students were not seeing the updates enough and decided to return to the old system.
‘The number of submissions from students had dropped,’ she said ‘We were worried that they weren’t really getting the news of the University.’
The goal of returning to the e-mail system is to keep students in the loop about what is going on at the University and to provide students with a way to share information about their own events and activities, Blankinship said.
All events listed in the Campus Notes are submitted through the University Web site. Anyone can submit an event or activity through the ‘Campus Update Form’ link in the drop down menu on the main page.
Blankinship reads through all of the submissions for missing information or inappropriateness, but she said that generally if it has all of the needed information and it is submitted by 5 p.m., it will be in the next day’s issue.
Students can also still view the updates on MyBGSU if they are unable to access the original e-mail.
Some students, such as sophomore Carolyn Deas, want to opt out of the new system.
‘It basically just fills up my inbox after a while,’ she said. She said she usually does not find anything that pertains to her in the e-mails. She may read a few lines, but usually she just deletes them.
Freshman Sarah Ellsmore said she finds the service useful but that other students should be able to opt out if they find it annoying.
‘The first few weeks it was pretty useful. I didn’t know what was going on really,’ she said. ‘I think if you are a freshman it can be very useful.’
Sophomore Ben Busdicker said that students shouldn’t be able to opt out because they are using an e-mail given to them by the University.
‘You can always just hit delete if you don’t want to read them, you never know if something might relate to you,’ he said.
Ellsmore said she thinks students might like the notes more if they were only sent once a week rather than every day.
According to Blankinship, students have no way of opting out because of the way the system is set up, but filters can be used if students really want to avoid the updates.
