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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