Check this text in class: JCU enables service that will text students to alert them of emergency

Go to www.jcu.edu to sign up for emergency text messages from the University

A new text messaging system at JCU is about to be implemented, and will be able to tell students if any problems are occurring on campus.

John Carroll University announced the unveiling of a text message alert system that could prove vital in case of an on-campus emergency. In the future the system would also be useful for school closings, according to Vice President for Sutdent Affairs Patrick Rombalski.

The system will be run through Campus Safety Services and the annual $5,000 fee will be paid for out of their budget, according to Timothy Peppard, chief of CSS.

The fee is calculated from $1 per user account and the University has signed up for 5,000 accounts. Anyone, parents and off-campus family and friends included, can sign up free of charge to receive JCU Alert text messages. Each user account holds up to one e-mail address and two cell phone numbers that can be alerted.

Regular text messaging rates between a user and their provider apply upon receiving the text message.

In the case of an emergency, an all-student e-mail would be sent out to notify the JCU community in addition to the notifications sent out from JCU Alert.
Once it has been determined that there is a threat on campus that is worth notifying students, someone with administrative access to the Web site would log on and send a message to the students who have signed up for it.

According to James Burke, director of computer systems and services, there are eight or so “canned” text messages that would be copied, pasted and altered to me the threat of the ongoing situation. This is to keep the time that it takes to alert the campus as low as possible.

“How you word the text messages is very important,” said Burke. “They need to be short and clear otherwise they will cause more confusion.”
The system can send around 8,000 text messages per minute.

JCU Alert is provided through the Web site e2campus.com, which specializes in being able to have people sign up for a pre-established group and then mass-communicate to them via e-mail and text messaging.

An off-shoot of the emergency preparedness committee was established to determine what the best method would be to communicate effectively with students if there was an emergency on campus.

According to Burke, e2campus.com seemed to be the best mechanism for that.

“We know that students have cell phones and so we figured that would be the best way to alert them of something,” said Burke, a member of the deciding committee.

One other possibility would have been a reverse 911 call where a system would call all the students that were signed up and play a pre-recorded voice message.
However, it was decided that text messaging was a more popular form of communication and much more efficient, according to Burke.

Once you sign up online, a confirmation text will be sent to your phone to make sure that everything works smoothly.

Although the statistics at other universities suggest less than exciting student turnout on signing up for e2campus programs, Burke is hoping that is not the case at JCU.
He strongly urges the community to sign up online.