Students please check your CEU e-mail accounts if you want change

This archived article was written by: Kim Booth

As a result of student unrest CEU is becoming more and more self-conscious. There has been a flurry of meetings, discussions, planning sessions and actual solution implementations. One of the many solutions discussed has been a more open line of communication throughout campus and between the students and the institution.
Upon investigation I have discovered that every student at CEU has been given an institution e-mail address for their use. I took the time to determine how to activate a student e-mail account due to some discussion as to the difficulty of doing so. I made one call and was directed the CEU webpage. After three simple clicks I was at the instruction sheet that, I was informed, was distributed throughout campus. The instructions were simple. You have to be at a CEU computer for the initial setup and you had to know your name and social security number. It stepped you through the activation of your account creation and established an e-mail address that could be checked from anywhere.
Why am I going on about this you may ask? Well, one of the solutions that has been purchased and implemented is an online survey tool. This program will allow CEU to gather pertinent and timely feedback from students as well as CEU employees. I requested the list of all student e-mail accounts from our technology department and was given a list of over 2,100 e-mail addresses. I imported them into the system and created a simple three-question survey to get things rolling.
The survey was left open for responses for almost two weeks, including Spring Break unfortunately, but I thought I would get a reasonable response even then. To my surprise I received a total of zero responses.
This is not meant to be offensive but informative. The employees of CEU are taking your concerns very seriously and are looking to improve the institution as a whole, but we need your help. Please take the time to create a CEU e-mail account if you have not already and check it regularly.
CEU as an institution needs to improve communication and that includes the students. With this tool we will be able to perform timely course evaluations, student and departmental questionnaires, graduation surveys and many other data gathering functions. But if the easiest forms of communication are not be utilized, CEU will continue to struggle in our efforts to improve. The responsibility for our institutional success extends to the students as well the faculty and staff and we need your help.