48 Hours Web

Due to the massacre that took place at Virginia Tech in 2007, many have taken steps to improve the security systems in colleges. However, students do not seem very interested. One solution that would help to alert the students of any dangers would be to send them text messages to their cell phones. As attractive and effective as it may sound, the solution did not find many advocates as students are not interested in enrolling for the service, even in an age when they consider their mobile phones to be indispensable. For example, Omnilert, a company that provides an emergency alert system to more than 500 campuses reported that less than 40 percent of students enroll for the alerts. There are a lot of people that seem to be alarmed because of the lack of interest in such campaigns among US students. Hopefully, the awareness of the existing danger will increase the enrollment rate among students and faculty. Another thing that could possibly help is offering email alerts. Students these days check their email very often, and such alerts could be as effective as sending an SMS message. A lot of people have a program on their desktop which immediately notifies them of any new email, even if they have email boxes that have to be accessed by browsers.