I was sitting in my living room the other day, bored, and as usual I found myself logging onto facebook. For those of you who have facebook, you know that on your News Feed, you can see all the different things your friends have been doing lately and their status updates. Well, it was status updates galore! and all with the same theme.. “WEBCT DOWN!! OH NO!!” “MYUCF ISN’T WORKING!? WHAT KIND OF TIME TO DO MAINTENANCE IS THIS-IT’S FINALS WEEK!” etc.
After writing a paper on online education, something I also recently blogged about, it does make you realize how much people not only conveniently use the Internet for school, but how much they rely on it.
My sister was in her room when SHE then came out and told me how she had 3 quizzes due by 11pm and Web Courses said it would be up by 9, then 9:45, then 11:00! Our roommate also informed us that it was also down at 4pm when she checked it! Obviously, for those people who had something due, this wasn’t looking good!
Then there’s the double scare that if you try to tell your teachers about it, they’re simply going to respond with “you had weeks to do this, you shouldn’t have waited for the last minute.” which is true, but why should one student have to cram all of their assignments into one day just because MAYBE the server will be down or ,MAYBE UCF will be doing Maintenance on Web Courses!
Either way, it is pretty scary when your grade’s on the line! So maybe some of us did learn a valuable lesson by this, even though I think most people were just annoyed. My sister’s problem was resolved when her teacher sent out an e-mail saying she knew about Web Courses and would extend the deadline an extra day. The only problem I personally encountered was wanting to go onto myUCF to average out my grades and see what I need on my finals-no real urgency in that.
Technology, remarkably convenient, but terrifying-ly unpredictable!