Hi Andrew,
> -----Original Message-----
<snip>
>
> I'd be interested in knowing how permission is handled with this: do
> you provide the option to opt-out? Do you make it part of the terms
> of being a registered student that they provide mobile numbers and
> accept messages from the university?
For the system we're going live with in the autumn we're
deliberately going for student self-subscription - i.e.
opt-in. The students in the relevant school will be told
that they can subscribe to a free text alert service for
last minute news about their module(s) by texting
'bbk alert [module code] [their name]' to a specific
short code number. The incoming text is redirected to
a perl script at our end by the SMS gateway provider, and
all the subscription info is maintained by the School
Administrators via a simple web interface. When an alert
is sent, a list of those it has been sent to is shown to
the administrator, together with info (from our student
records system, SITS) that indicates how many other
students need to be contacted via another means (the main
use of the system will be to notify students of cancelled
lectures, which in Birkbeck's case is important, as people
travel into central London specifically to attend their
evening lectures and don't want a wasted trip).
At the moment if a student provides a mobile number when
they enrol, it does get recorded in SITS (I think!), but
AFAIK is not maintained, and at the moment we haven't
rolled out SITS eVision 'portal' that would enable the
students to maintain this record for themselves to keep
the mobile number up to date. So at the moment all the
SMS related things we're looking at are not at an
institution-wide level, and are very likely to be on an
opt-in basis.
Best wishes,
Adrian
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