Student organizations: policies and content guidelines

[Shelley Keith]

As we progress toward our goal of centralized student organization sites we're finding we need to provide some basic policies and content guidelines to the student leaders within these organizations. Things like minimum content requirements, process to acquire a site on the system, and basic blanket "the student handbook counts here and what you do and say may come back to haunt you" type CYA documentation.

My question, what are your processes, requirements, and documentation in these areas? My administration has requested examples of what other schools are doing for inspiration.

[Andy Fore]

At Valdosta State we have an acceptable use policy for IT Resources:

http://www.valdosta.edu/it/security/policies/documents/Acceptable-U...

We don't really have a particular policy that specifically discusses the Student Org websites. We have recently purchased a contract with CollegiateLink and this system allows for the different organizations to have a small, pre-defined web presence, but it is not a full blown website.

In general, as long as the student org is not being complained about they are not policed too much, but we do have the Acceptable Use policy as a CYA mechanism (and a hammer) if we need it.

[Michael J. Powers]

For student websites, we do pretty much what Valdosta State is doing, with an acceptable use policy:

http://www.iup.edu/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=83045

We don't spend much (if any) time policing student websites, but we have a policy in place to take action if we discover something unacceptable going on.

We are also discussing centralizing student organizations, and we are mostly likely simply going to extend our acceptable use policy over those sites, as well. One of the biggest issues for us is offline: there are several ways for student groups to get recognized and we don't have any central listing of what the recognized groups are and who their leaders are. We'll have to fix that first, and then include the opportunity to have a website as part of the chartering process.

[Andy Fore]

Technically we are only supposed to give web space to a student organization that is registered with the Office of Student Life, however they are a fairly unreliable bunch when it comes to providing the information I need in order to manage that.

[Nick]

For us, any student organization can request a website (limited to one page) on our institutional site. Using our CMS, we set a close date of about two to three weeks into the next school year. This keeps the information current and if the student organization is interested in maintaining a site, when it is no longer active, they will update the information and be approved for another year. This also helps us market the groups to new students throughout our summer orientation program with somewhat relevant information online but not allow groups to have perpetual pages that can quickly become outdated. Other than that, students do need to adhere to our acceptable use policy and understand that any information can be edited by the Student Activities Coordinator (who manages that content) or the web administrator (who supervises the Student Activities Coordinator).