Winter Storm Octavia has definitely put everyone behind schedule, professors and students alike.
We all have deadlines to reach and it didn’t help at all that the campus was closed for an entire week.
However, some teachers, in an attempt to keep on-schedule, resorted to posting assignments on Blackboard for students to complete throughout the week. It’s a good idea, provided that everyone has access to the Internet. But the thing is, not everyone has access when campus is closed. The only access to the Internet some students have is on campus, so how can they be expected to complete their assignments without the proper tools necessary to complete them? That’s like handing out a test, but instead of handing out the whole thing, you only hand out the scan card. Sure, the simple answer is for the student to contact the professor as soon as possible and hope to work something out. Even then, how can professors expect students to do any class work when all classes are cancelled and the university is shut down?
If the assignment is to be given online, it should be made sure that each and every student has equal access to the Internet.
To play devil’s advocate, this semester is going by extremely fast and professors have deadlines to meet just as students do. If one week of classes is cancelled out of a 14-week semester, that’s actually quite a bit of material that either can’t be covered or that will have to be crammed into the remainder of the semester. How are they supposed to decide what isn’t as important as the rest of the material? In a way, the quality of our education would be compromised by not covering all the material because we aren’t getting the full range of what would normally be covered.
Photo credit: Camille Hall
