New system to provide rapid notice of emergencies
By James Cope
June 18, 2007 (reprinted from NDWorks)
Over the summer, the University is augmenting its emergency communications capabilities with a technology service called Connect-ED. The system allows communication administrators to contact large numbers of students and employees quickly through multiple electronic technologies.
Early technical testing is complete, and the University’s goal is to have the system fully operational by the time students return to campus for fall classes.
“Connect-ED solves the fundamental problem of reaching a highly mobile group of students through multiple communications channels,” says Gordon Wishon, associate vice president/associate provost and chief information officer. “Connect-ED can extract contact information from campus electronic directories and, on demand, send a voice or text message to a database of cell phones, office phones, home phones and e-mail addresses.”
Moreover, Connect-ED, a service of The NTI Group in Sherman, Calif., can send the same message to up to six different telephone numbers per person; do text messaging, text-to-speech recognition, and voice-to-text recognition.
Part of the Connect-ED effort this summer will be determining procedures for obtaining and retaining multiple faculty, staff and student contact points and setting University policies on how those contact points may be used.
Reaching all students on a university campus in time of an emergency has long been a challenge, notes Wishon. While a majority of undergraduates live on campus, they are always on the move and their primary phone is usually a personal cell phone. “Faculty and staff also frequently use personal cell phones on campus and when commuting to and from work,” Wishon says.
“This spring’s tragic mass shooting at Virginia Tech both saddened and startled those of us in higher education,” he says. “We had an emergency communications project in the works, but Virginia Tech was an eye-opener. A lot of universities, Notre Dame included, put emergency communications systems at the top their IT project lists.”
Wishon believes that Notre Dame is in a good position to take advantage of the Connect-ED technology. Last year, the university installed a distributed cellular antenna system that enables participating wireless providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, to cover the campus with strong cellular signals. Notre Dame, in cooperation with Comcast, also installed cable TV in every on-campus residence hall room, and it maintains a robust wired and wireless data network and e-mail systems.