Asshole University Policy: Shutting students out of the LMS until they pay

[Danny]

Just this semester I found myself in a strange position with a student.  They were a veteran with veteran loans that were delayed disbursement.  I know that they were actively trying to get the issue sorted.  They could not pay for the online homework platform which would give a 2-week free trial before locking students out.  Because of COVID, all quizzes and tests are on the platform this semester.  So the student got further and further behind after the first two weeks.  I could not manually add them and by the time I was aware of the issue, they had already missed quite a bit of work which would have been very difficult to makeup.  In the end they dropped the class.

Being able to pay for a class is one thing, but I don't like that students have to pay for online homework programs.  Some financial aid can only be used for tuition and can't be used for this, so students have to come up with it out of pocket for each class.  Either the homework platform should be free or the cost should be bundled into their tuition so the financial aid will cover it.

[Aster]

We have lots of (shortsighted or noob) professors who have added in weird textbooks and e-resource packages this term to cope with remote learning. Unfortunately, a lot of these newly added thingies were not formally ordered through campus bookstores and were thus not configured for being covered easily by our financial aid system. So, the stuff that costs money, the students usually have to pay directly.

[downer]

Last Spring I used an e-resource package from a publisher as an experiment. It created confusion for some of the students but it did have the advantage of being independent of Blackboard. It wasn't that expensive and could be bought as part of the cost of a textbook though that also caused some confusion for students. It was not that great and I wasn't much tempted to use it again, unless the publisher improves it significantly.

If the issue of students being dropped from the LMS and then later reinstated becomes worse I will be more tempted to use publisher e-resources so I am less inconvenienced by those issues.

[mythbuster]

Danny, I would have harassed the Publishing rep for the platform to let the kid in the back door. I did just that with a few of my students this semester. Our rep is currently (and rightly) terrified that we are on the verge of dropping them as the main resources for our intro courses. So he's very hop to. Especially if the financial aid office could verify that the money will be coming eventually.