POLICY STATEMENT

Official email communications are intended to meet student, faculty, and staff academic and administrative needs within the campus community. Unless otherwise prohibited by law, the College and its faculty may communicate with students officially by email and will expect that such email messages will be received and read in a timely manner. This policy stipulates that all formal communication will be sent to students using the official issued College email address.

DEFINITIONS

Academic Activity: Defined by registering for a course, submitting an application for admission, or getting student status set to active.

Alumni: Former students who have graduated from NSC.

Discontinued: A period in which a student’s academic record is deactivated following a period of one (1) year since the last instance of Academic Activity.

PROCEDURES

I. Email Account Creation

Upon admission to Nevada State College, students are provided with access to Microsoft Office 365, which includes an email account. Access to Office 365 is provided through the NSC Portal (https://my.nevadastate.edu). Student email addresses are in the format of (name)@students.nevadastate.edu.

II. College Communications with Students

 With the exception of course-related communications from faculty to enrolled students, all NSC communications to students will be sent to NSC-issued student email addresses only. This includes non-course-related communications from faculty, staff, departments (e.g., Admissions, Registrar, Cashier, Financial Aid), Canvas (WebCampus) notifications, related third parties, such as facilities and housing, and groups organizing NSC events.

NSC faculty, staff, and departments must only respond to communications sent from NSC student email addresses starting August 24, 2020.

Faculty will primarily use the messaging system with Canvas (WebCampus) to communicate with students enrolled in their courses about course-specific information.

III. Student Responsibilities

A. Students must ensure that there is sufficient space in their accounts to allow for delivery of official email communications. Email users should exercise extreme caution in using email to communicate confidential or sensitive matters and should not assume that email is private or secure. Users must be careful to send messages only to the intended recipients.

B. Students are expected to check their email on a frequent basis in order to stay current with NSC-related communications and to recognize that certain communications may be time-critical. Failure to check email, errors in forwarding mail, or email returned to the college with “Mailbox Full” or “User Unknown” or other similar reasons are not acceptable excuses for missing official College communications via email.

IV. Faculty and Staff Responsibilities

To comply with this policy and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), upon receiving an email from a student, all faculty and staff must verify that the email account from the sender is an official NSC student email address that uses the (name)@students.nevadastate.edu format. If a non-NSC email is used, employees will reply stating only that correspondence must come from an official NSC email address and reminding the student to use their NSC email to re-send their message. Failure to do so could lead to a violation of FERPA.

V. Forwarding

If students wish to have email redirected from their official NSC email to another email address, they may do so at their own risk. The College is not responsible for the handling of email by outside vendors or departmental/unit servers, none of which are considered official student email accounts. Having email redirected does not absolve a student of the responsibilities associated with official communications sent to the official NSC [name]@students.nevadastate.edu account.

VI. Post-Enrollment

NSC alumni may maintain access to their NSC email indefinitely. If at any point the College has a need to discontinue the College email account, appropriate notice will be given to allow the student/ alumni to transition.

a. We do not recommend using NSC email accounts as password recovery addresses on other sites or for any similar purpose. Should a student’s NSC email account be deleted according to this policy, they may not be able to recover/reset passwords on those other sites. Students should use a personal email account for password resets and recover and forward that account to their NSC email account if desired.

APPROVALS

Approved by Dr. Vickie Shields, Provost, August 21, 2020.
Approved by Bart Patterson, President, August 21, 2020.