What is the best way to deal with not being able to submit due to IT Issue?

[hamburger]

Hi, given that everything is online, there are students who claim that they could not submit tests or assignments due to IT issues. They demanded us to accommodate them. They did not study and did poorly. It is their problem. Yet, I waste my time to deal with them. What is the best way to deal with such requests? Can I just post to the entire class that given some students have abused the system, no excuse would be accepted?

[pigou]

Just let them submit the assignment a few hours extra. Who cares? Doubtful that IT issues persist for days.

[hamburger]

Just let them submit the assignment a few hours extra. Who cares? Doubtful that IT issues persist for days.

They have two weeks to submit!

What about online test then?

[spork]

Have you found another job yet?

[hamburger]

Hi spork, nice to hear from you. No. The current world situation makes it even more difficult since I cannot join events to meet people.

I applied for intern positions (aiming for PhD students) in my area in one big company. They rejected my applications saying that my skill sets do not fit. What does that really mean? Are they kidding me? I applied for the lowest positions in my research area! I have more research experience and publications than students.

The guy who said that he paid for my salary sent an email to several faculty members few days ago complaining that he cannot do his assignments nor take the tests due to IT issues. He put all the blame on us and said that we are causing students troubles. Nobody responds to him so far.

I guess since people are asked to stay home. Some students abuse the situation and they also want to get faculty members into arguments with them.

We are doing the society a disservice by passing these people.

[Ruralguy]

Just be lenient.  Say to him that you'll get the test to him electronically, by mail, by message in a bottle, by smoke signal or whatever and that he should get it back by date  and time X. Don't tell him this, but tack on a week or so to that deadline for good measure. Then, so long as it comes in during the semester, just grade it, and be done with it. if he cheated, then he cheated. There's almost no way to enforce such things, save for blatant plagiarism.
Just pretend not to care for the next couple of months.

[polly_mer]

Ask your chair regarding the rules for applying for a hardship late withdrawal and have the chair deal with it.  This can't be the only student who signed up for an in-person course who now can't finish.

[hamburger]

Ask your chair regarding the rules for applying for a hardship late withdrawal and have the chair deal with it.  This can't be the only student who signed up for an in-person course who now can't finish.

Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, the school already sent out an email to all students saying that they have extended the deadline to withdraw without penalty. In the past I heard that it means it won't show up on their transcript that they are taking this course this semester. Given that they can cheat easily, it is stupid to withdraw.

[dr_codex]

Ask your chair regarding the rules for applying for a hardship late withdrawal and have the chair deal with it.  This can't be the only student who signed up for an in-person course who now can't finish.

Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, the school already sent out an email to all students saying that they have extended the deadline to withdraw without penalty. In the past I heard that it means it won't show up on their transcript that they are taking this course this semester. Given that they can cheat easily, it is stupid to withdraw.

Dude.

I'm not even in your classes, and I want to complain to your Chair and Dean.

You clearly don't want advice. What would be helpful?

dc

[hamburger]

I spent the entire yesterday to deal with things related to my students. I also had a meeting with administrator. There was an assignment due yesterday but nobody submitted to the online system by the deadline.  I opened the submission system few days in advance and asked them to contact IT in case of IT issues. They had two weeks to do the simple assignment. I actually posted all assignments on the first day of class. Again, people made all sorts of excuses including not having the software (which is available to all students for free) installed on their computer, computer suddenly failed to work, etc.There were a few students sending me files via emails after the deadline. Even so, they did not send me all the things that I asked them to submit. The rest just did not bother to do anything.

The conclusion is that I have been wasting my time. I try hard to educate them but they don't care about their own education. Better to give them up or I will get crazy.

[backatit]

Our IT system is overloaded right now with students unused to the LMS having issues. For my already fully-online students who are having issues, I'm just dealing with them (can't submit? E-mail me your paper or submit it when you can; heck, upload a video of yourself doing an interpretive dance explaining the gist of your paper - we'll all enjoy that!).

My students are losing JOBS and a couple are on the verge of being homeless right now. Some are food insecure for the first time in their lives because of a lack of income, and some of your students may not have internet access or the equipment to move seamlessly online. I have them crying in Zoom to me because they don't have a paycheck coming in - not all of our students are as pampered as you seem to imagine them to be, and I have scant patience for this right now.

ALL of my own children are out of work and having trouble filing for unemployment because they can't get through because the filing system is so clogged, so I'm supporting FOUR KIDS as well as my sister in law, all of whom are out of work. I have students sick right now, too, with this thing. One of them was REALLY sick, and I haven't heard from them in a few days, and I don't know if they're ok or not.

Just...chill about the IT issues. Have students e-mail you stuff or change what you're doing so they can complete it. Try to be more flexible. Find out if your students are having issues or are stressed or are struggling with very real issues like job loss or structural changes to their lives. They're not babies because of it.

[tuxthepenguin]

The conclusion is that I have been wasting my time. I try hard to educate them but they don't care about their own education. Better to give them up or I will get crazy.

Focus on finishing the semester. Don't worry about cheating or lazy students. These are unusual circumstances. Nobody cares what happens in the last few weeks of the semester.

[Ruralguy]

I'm with Tux:

-post videos, power points, or whatever you do to convey some sort of on-line lecture.

-remind about the assignments via LMS and normal email

-individually contact students who are an issue and remind that they can submit in other ways if they have issues

By the way, do you realize what it sounds like to people in other professions when a professor complains that "I was spending all day working on stuff related to students." ?
At a CC or SLAC, what else would you be doing? Sure, there are varying degrees of service and research even at such places, but especially these days, you have to expect that students will have issues, other faculty and staff will have issues, etc, etc..

There's nothing like a crisis to show who really hates their job.

[polly_mer]

My current employer is making managers call everyone to ensure their direct reports have technology or get the charge codes for being unable to work.

Every day, the current status of networks and best practices for access to them are updated.  We're a company with real resources and a tech culture in our division.  Yet, we're still overwhelmed in getting people up and going at home.  These are professionals who want to work and are highly cooperative; it's still just hard converting from a few hundred sometimes remote workers to more than 10k simultaneous remote users, many of them novices to their systems and/or networks.

There's no reason to believe that a community college with underprepared students would be doing lots better.

[the_geneticist]

The big state school I'm at is scrambling to fix IT issues, build backups of backups, and bring services back online.
All of our classes are online and Spring term starts in 4 days. 
They are buying laptops & prepaid hotspots for students, getting cameras & tablets for instructors, upgrading everyone's Zoom account.
No one knows what policies apply anymore or who is in charge of anything.  It's chaos.

Extend the deadlines, tell your students WHERE and HOW to submit trouble tickets for IT issues, and just record the grades they earned.
Is everything now collaborative and open book?   Yes it is.  Can students copy each other?  Yep.  Can we still create authentic assessments that show what our students learned? YES
Asking students to do tasks like "In your own words, describe how X influences Y."  Or "What are two questions you still have about Topic 1?"  Or have them DRAW a diagram by hand, write their name on it and upload a picture.  It's not hard to create tasks that they have to do themselves.