The Student Government Association (SGA) has worked to create a new campus e-mail messaging policy, also known as megamod policy. The policy intends to provide students with information regarding student life opportunities on campus while decreasing the amount of mass emails being sent out on a weekly basis.
“Prior to this there was no standard policy,” said SGA undergraduate vice president of communications Cory Boone
Previously student organizations that wished to inform other students of campus and student life-related events and news would request the Office of the Dean of Students (ODOS) to send an e-mail to students informing them of the occasion. The result was that many students would often log in to cluttered inboxes with emails informing them of events that were not pertinent nor interesting to some of the students.
SGA has implemented a new policy regarding these emails as of July 1, 2009. The ODOS now requires that all requests for notifications of events be submitted through a standardized online form. The ODOS will then send a single email each Monday, with the exception of school holidays and days that the ODOS are closed, that is an accumulation of all of the requests entitled “The Weekly Buzz” along with the date that it was sent out.
“This effectively condenses all student organization announcements that would otherwise come to us as individual emails into one weekly digest,” said, undergraduate student body president Alina Staskevicius.
In order to submit a request for an event to be added to “The Weekly Buzz” students can go to the ODOS website and click on the megamod link. After logging into the site with their Tech accounts, students can fill out a form with information, such as the primary sponsor organization of the event, the name of the event and description, the date, time and location of the event, contact information and options for which week the notification of the event should be sent out.
The policy restricts usage of these weekly digests to on-campus opportunities or events that are sponsored by on-campus student organizations. Announcements can be submitted, at latest, by noon the Friday before the Monday the weekly digest is sent out. Furthermore student organizations (except for student governing boards) are restricted to one announcement per week and per event, unless they are announcing that the event was cancelled. Organizations are also not allowed to send multiple announcements for events occurring multiple times each semester such as regularly occurring meetings.
“This new policy is intended to help students by making information on student life opportunities readily accessible while also controlling the number of emails sent out,” Boone said.
To that end, SGA is accepting any student feedback on its new policy throughout the fall semester.