Ellissa Coburn
Equinox Staff
Keene State College students are in for a treat in regards to their MyKSC accounts. Students have been upset lately with their accounts and their newest upgrades with smart phones.
Stephanie Brown, a junior, is one of those unhappy students.
“I just wish there were some way that I could be able to access my KSC e-mail account that would be less time consuming,” she said.
Something that a lot of students are not aware of is that students have had this availability for some time already.
Laura Seraichick, chief information officer of IT, said that students right now have access to MyKSC on their smart phones.
For students who wish to have the MyKSC portal on their smart phones they can with a mobile app.
“MyKSC is bigger than just e-mail. It is the portal which includes clubs, calendars, and your academic records and such,” Seraichick said.
A common issue KSC students who own smart phones have is that they must go on the internet and sign in every single time to check their MyKSC e-mail.
There will be a new mobile app coming out this December.
Seraichick was able to preview this new app at a Campus Cruiser conference in Philadelphia.
“I think students will be very happy with it because it is a much nicer interface for a mobile app,” she said.
The only thing is with the new app, when a student receives an e-mail, an envelope will not pop up like if they received an email from a Gmail or other e-mail account.
Seraichick said that KSC has been using the MyKSC portal for 11 years.
When the portal first started being used on campus there was an advisory group in which students were part of to give their input on what they wanted and didn’t want from it.
“One of the things they [the students] said was that they did not want students to be able to forward their MyKSC emails to another e-mail account,” Seraichick said.
This decision was made 11 years ago, so now Seraichick wants to put together an advisory team to see if the decision would stay the same or perhaps be changed.
Seraichick said that if students were able to forward their MyKSC e-mail to another e-mail account then that might solve the problem of students who don’t check their MyKSC accounts often enough.
“Professors expect us to check our e-mails numerous times a day and it is inconvenient to log in every time,” Brown said. If they were able to forward the emails, they would just have to check one account and all their e-mails would be right there.
Another topic that came up about the MyKSC accounts was the survey tool.
“The way the survey policy works is it must be sponsored by a faculty member or student organization,” Seraichick said.
A student cannot just send out a survey on their own for personal use; it must be approved first. With the survey tool the data that is collected gets puts it into a more simple way of viewing it as opposed to handing out a written survey and collecting the data yourself.
The survey tool is good because it is accurate.
Students aren’t forced to take a survey so the students who chose to take the survey are giving their time to help the cause, in a sense.
The only thing is students must get the survey approved if they want to use it.
They could just send out a regular survey; however, it will not calculate the data in an easier way as it would with the survey tool.
With the improvements coming for the MyKSC accounts this will hopefully make all students happy.
Students should be on the lookout for the new mobile app coming in December.
All students should be able to benefit from this.
If you have questions about the new app coming out or the current Campus Cruiser mobile app, you can contact Laura Seraichick at IT.
Ellissa Coburn can be contacted ecoburn1@ksc.mailcruiser.com