Names not Numbers: A Summary of the Results of the Student Email Address Consultation
A Summary of the Results of the Student Email Address Consultation
The following represents a summary of the main conclusions of the Student Email Address consultation, drawing on the student survey, student focus groups and staff survey. A more in-depth analysis is available here: Final Report on the Student Email Consultation Project.
The raw data for the surveys, and the questions asked, can be found here:
Student Survey Results (Additional Questions)
Results
Topic |
Outcome |
| 1. How important is it to students to have a name based email address. |
64% of students agree this is important or very important to them. |
| 2. How important is it to students to have an @ed.ac.uk email address. | 73.8% of students agreed this is important or very important to them. |
| 3. Do students want to have their first name included in a name-based email address. | 61.3% of respondents agree or strongly agree that they want to have their first name included in a name-based university email address. |
| 4. Would students rather have their initial included in a name based email address instead of their first name. | 43.6% of respondents agree or strongly agree that they would rather have their initial included in a name based email address instead of their first name. |
| 5. Do students want to have year of entry appended in the email address. |
58.9% of students disagree or strongly disagree that the year of entry should be included. Instead, in order to avoid conflict in the case of people with the same name, participants in the focus groups recommended appending the last three digits of the matriculation number. |
| 6. Do students want to have a choice of email address format. | 46.32% of respondents said that it is important or very important to have a choice of email address format. In the focus groups, participants thought a choice of email address format would cause too much confusion and it was better to have a unified approach. The importance of a unified approach to the email address format was also reflected in many of the free text comments in the survey. |
| 7. How important is it to students to have a life-long email address. | 80.12% of students agree it is important or very important to have a life long email address. |
| 8. What method of change for introducing the new email address do students prefer: automatically changing everyone to new format (opt-in by default), or giving people the option to set the address to the new format (opt out by default) | In the survey 55.8% of respondents prefer the opt-in by default option, with 44.2% preferring the opt-out by default option. As this was not a clear-cut result, we asked the focus group participants for their opinion on this issue. They unanimously agreed that the opt-in by default option was the best. |
| 9. How important is it to staff that the student email address format is different from the staff email address format? | 48.2% of staff think it is important or very important for the format of the student email address to be different from the staff email address. |
Recommendations
1. The new format of the email address should be name-based but should include some mechanism for differentiating between people of the same name i.e. including the last three digits of the matriculation number. Taking into consideration all the results of the survey and the focus groups, it would seem the best format would be either:
firstname.surname[last three digits of matric. no]@ed.ac.uk
or
initial.surname[last three digits of matric.no]@ed.ac.uk
This looks professional and is unique to the individual, allaying staff concerns about anonymity and data protection. The use of the last three digits of the matriculation number would allow student email addresses to be distinguished from those of staff.
2. The new format of the email address should omit the ‘sms’ and be @ed.ac.uk.
3. An opt-in method of change should be used, with students being advised several months in advance when the change is going to happen.
4. Students should be given the option to have a lifelong email address.
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