Bakersfield College students do not need to fear losing their on-campus e-mails.
BC’s Information Systems and Instructional Technology committee has been trying to come up with a solution to the student e-mail issue since the early part of last year. The situation started when the Kern Community College District requested that BC review the students’ e-mail account usage.
The problem was compounded by the fact that the software that BC uses to run the student e-mail accounts is no longer supported because the company that created it has gone out of business and that the computer that is being used as a server for the e-mail accounts is in serious jeopardy of malfunctioning or breaking down altogether.
BC is the only college in the district – which includes Cerro Coso and Porterville – that provides its students with e-mail accounts.
On last fall’s Homecoming ballot for king and queen, two questions were added. They were “Do you use your BC e-mail account?” and “Should BC continue to offer free e-mail to students?” Two-hundred eighty-four students voted, with both questions receiving a yes majority.
“It’s interesting that only a little over half the students use the e-mail accounts, but almost everybody says to keep them” said Don Turney, Dean of Students.
There are currently 16,000 students enrolled at B.C. and as of Jan. 21, there were 9,041 active student e-mail accounts with only 254 of those accounts being accessed at least once in the last 30 days.
Jules Esch who teaches classes at the Delano campus, encourages her students to use the e-mail accounts because it helps in the educational process by providing her students another way to contact her if they have questions regarding her instruction.
The student e-mail accounts are funded by the district at a cost of about $30,000 a year. This money is not transferable, meaning that if the college did cancel the student e-mail accounts the money would return to the district and would not be kept by the college.
BC has looked into several options to solve this problem. Some alternatives reviewed were outsourcing the management of the e-mail service and using a private e-mail service such as hotmail.