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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

Student Survey Results (Additional Questions)

Results of Staff Survey

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.Graph showing responses to the question 'how important is it to you to have an email addressed based on your name, rather than your matriculation number?' Very Important has the most responses at just over 30%, followed closely by Important, then Neither Important nor Unimportant at 20% , then Unimportant at less than 10% and Very Unimportant at 7%
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.Graph titled 'How important is it to you to have an @ed.ac.uk email address rather than @sms.ed.ac.uk? The first bar 'Very Important' is the largest, with 42%, followed by Important at just over 40%. Neither Important nor unimportant sits between 15% and 20% while unimportant sits at under 5% and Very unimportant at 2%
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.Bar chart showing responses to the statement 'In a name based email address format, I would want my first name included e.g. joe.blogs@ed.ac.uk'. The first bar, 'Strongly agree' sits at just over 25%, the second bar 'Agree' sits at 30%, the third bar Neither Agree nor Disagree sits at almost 25%, Disagree at 7.5% and Strongly Disagree at 2%
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.Bar chart asking respondents 'in a name based email address format, I would prefer to have my first initial included rather than my first name'. The first bar is 'Strongly agree' at just under 20%, the second is Agree at just under 25%, the third bar is Agree or Disagree at under 30%, the fourth bar is Disagree at 15% and the last bar is Strongly Disagree which is 3%.
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.A bar chart asking respondents if they mind having their year of entry included in the email address. The first bar is 'Strongly Agree' and is the smallest at just under 5%, the second bar is Agree at just under 15%, the third is Neither Agree nor Disagree which is only slightly more than Agree at just under 15%, the third is disagree which is at 30% and the last is Strongly Disagree which is at 25%

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.Bar chart asking students if they want a choice of email address format. The first bar is Strongly Agree which is just under 20%, the second is Agree which is the largest at just under 30%, the third is Neither Agree nor Disagree which is at approximately 27%. The fourth bar is Disagree which is just under 20% and the last bar is Strongly Disagree which is just under 10%.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.A bar chart show how important it is to students to have an email address for life. The first bar is Very Important, which is the largest and lies between 45% and 50%. The second part is Important which is at just over 35%, the third bar is Neither Important nor Unimportant which is at 15%. The fourth bar is Unimportant at just under 5% and the last bar is Very Unimportant at 1%.
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.Bar chart asking respondents which method of change they prefer: opt-in or opt-out. The first bar is for opt-in and is at just over 55%. The second bar is for opt-out and is at just under 45%.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.A bar chart asking staff how important it is to them that the student email address is different from the staff email address. The first bar is Very Important and is at just under 15%. The second is Important and is just over 30%. The third is neither important nor unimportant and is just under 40%. The fourth is unimportant at just over 10% and the last is very unimportant at just under 5%.

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.

Background

Information Services are updating the format of the student email address, changing it from a format based on matriculation number to a name based format. To help inform our decisions with this change, we have been consulting with students via the means of an online survey and focus groups.

You can hear more about the background to the project, and our focus groups, in our video:

Over 3,000 students responded to our survey, across year groups and across schools. A PDF of the survey questions is available here: Student Email Survey Questions.

A Graph showing the number of respondents to the student survey by college. Arts Humanities and Social Sciences have the most at just under 1200, the graph then shows Medicine and Veterinary Medicine at just over 800 and then Science and Engineering at just over 1000

The number of respondents to the student survey by college

We disseminated the survey in as many ways as possible: an announcement on MyEd, tweets, posters and emails via the school offices. The most effective method appeared to be the email from the school offices – it was the first method of communication that we made use of and the majority of respondents answered the survey within the first few days of these emails going out. We also gave respondents the opportunity to enter into a prize draw to win an iPad which no doubt helped with response numbers!

A picture showing bright pink post-it notes on a table. On the post-it notes participants of the focus groups have written their suggestions for the format of the email address

Some suggestions from our focus group participants on the format of the email address

750 students indicated at the end of the survey that they were interested in undertaking further consultation activities with us and responded enthusiastically to our invitation to participate in focus groups. All 35 spaces on the focus groups were filled in less than 48 hours of the invitations being sent out. In the focus groups, we focused on questions where the responses to the survey had not produced a clear-cut consensus, in order to get a better idea of how to approach these. We did some group work and got the students to work together to think through different ideas for the format of the email address as well as having more open discussions.

Graph titled 'How important is it to you to have an @ed.ac.uk email address rather than @sms.ed.ac.uk? The first bar 'Very Important' is the largest, with 42%, followed by Important at just over 40%. Neither Important nor unimportant sits between 15% and 20% while unimportant sits at under 5% and Very unimportant at 2%

We can see from this graph of survey responses how important it is to students to have an @ed.ac.uk email address

One of the most unanimous results to emerge from the consultation was that the student body, as a whole, want to get rid of the presence of ‘sms’ in the current email address format and simply have an @ed.ac.uk address. Another clear consensus to emerge was the desire among students to have an alumni email address so they can retain their connection to the university after graduating.

What has been abundantly clear throughout the consultation is that their university email address is something that is very important to students because it links them to the university and forms part of their professional identity. You can view our summary of the survey results

We would like to thank everyone who has helped us make the consultation such a success, including student and staff respondents to the survey, the focus group participants and especially the staff in the school offices who helped us get word out about the survey.

A more in-depth analysis of the consultation results is available here: Final Report on the Student Email Consultation Project

The raw data of the survey results are available here:

Student Survey Results

Student Survey Results (Additional Questions)

Results of Staff Survey

Highlights

  • One of the real highlights for us of the consultation was the depth and level of participation from students from across the university. As you will see from looking at the raw data of the survey results, many of the respondents went into a lot of depth with their free-text comments, reflecting how important their university email address is to them.
  • We also received responses from across the protected characteristics of the Equality Act which was very important to us in terms of representing as many in the student body as possible.
  • The level of engagement in the focus groups was also very impressive, with participants requiring minimal prompting from the facilitator to discuss their opinions.
  • 100% of the focus group participants said in the feedback forms that they thought ‘a focus group is a good way of consulting with students’ and ‘I would participate in another focus group’. Several also commented that they were very glad to have the opportunity to be listened to by IS staff in such a manner.
  • We also received valuable information from respondents on issues not directly related to the email address format.

Lowlights

  • The answers to some of the questions in the survey were not as clear-cut as we would have liked them to be. However, we resolved this by focusing on these questions in the focus groups, and from there it was fairly easy to detect a consensus.
  • One week after the survey went live, we decided to add in a couple of new questions and we did not receive as many responses in the second week as we did in the first week.
  • The volume and quality of the free-text responses mean that the raw data of the responses is more than 200 pages and thus took a long time to read through and analyse.