MATC is out, and Madison College is in. The school’s name rebranding has now advanced to the school’s domain and e-mail officially changing to madisoncollege.edu.
Students and faculty should be aware that everything they use a web URL for, such as e-mail, blackboard and myMadisonCollege will all now have the madisoncollege.edu address.
Regina Mosher, Director of Administrative Applications, spoke on how communication has been the biggest obstacle in the change to the new web address. The school is doing as much as it can to get the word out concerning this change.
Changing the domain name has been a huge task to undertake. Project Manager George Matykowski stated that the school is dealing with over 25 terabytes of data. There have been 15 people working on it from a technical perspective, and over 30 people involved outside of the technical service.
Keeping both the old domain name and the new one are not an option. Educause, which control .edu domains, allows schools to only have one domain address. This means that there is a hard date when the matcmadison.edu address can never be used again. Mosher would not comment on when that exact date would be.
The school is trying to control its own destiny and figure out the proper date to switch over and end the use of matcmadison.edu themselves. They hope to have this date sometime in late September. The idea currently is October, but that is not set in stone at all.
“Not the week of final exams. Not the week before final exams. Not between the two semesters because that doesn’t do anyone any good,” Mosher said. “We’re trying to find the time that is the least bad for students and faculty.”
The domain change can cause a variety of problems. Faculty need to be aware that things they referenced on blackboard may need to be changed. If a word document was posted up for a class it will need to be changed to a new address for this term.
Everything relating to student use should be mostly fixed at this point in time. The next couple months will be spent cleaning up all the little links that can be broken in things like blackboard.
Students are encouraged to help out if they find a broken link. They can search broken links on the schools homepage, or simply go to madisoncollege.edu/broken-links. This will let you fill out a form on what your problem is so that it can be corrected. Students can also call the student help desk, and are asked to please have information on where and when your problem occurred.
There are a number of things being done to alert the student body to the changes including mass e-mails and signs in the cafeteria and library.
Matykowski says that they have definitely learned from this experience. There will be a page of lessons learned handed out so the team will be able to deal with future endeavors like the domain name change more efficiently.