HERE'S A STORY:
My son was taking a high-school, online classes. Each week, the students were to complete an assignment at a website unaffiliated with their school learning platform. The assignments were automatically graded upon completion. The teacher instructed the students to send a short note, e.g. "Assignment 1 complete," through the learning platform to inform her that the work was done. She would then go to the website to retrieve and record the grade.My son, unfortunately, missed the notification instruction. He had been completing the assignments for several weeks, receiving 100% grades and thinking that all was going well. Suddenly, he woke up one morning to see that he had five 0's in the class. He tried working with the teacher, but she would not budge, stating the policy, "Late assignments will lose 10 points each day after the assignment was due." After taking the issue all the way up to the Headmaster, my son ended up having to switch classes mid-term.
From that point on, my son could not sleep and was literally sick with worry wondering if he would wake up again, unbeknownst to him, that, "All's not well." Since this experience, we have never enrolled in online schooling again.
The problem I see is that the school assumed that "brick-and-mortar" policies easily transfer to online environments. If my son had been attending school in person and submitting assignments in class, he would have known the first day that his assignment was late, and he could have recognized and rectified and the problem immediately.
In the world of online learning and submissions, I would contend that a more appropriate policy should read, "Late assignments will lose 10 points each day from the time the student knows an assignment is late," or perhaps, "Late assignments will lose 10 points each from the time the student is notified by the instructor that an assignment is late."
Have you experienced similar challenges with online learning policies or do you know of policies that should be adjusted for online environments? If so, please share and let me know how you would change the policy!
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ReplyDeleteI agree with you that the teacher should have been more flexible. Another thing he/she could have done was to somehow ensure the students had somehow received the notification about how to alert the teacher. I know in email there is a "read receipt requested" feature - something like that to ensure the policy has been read and understood
ReplyDeleteI agree that the teacher should have been more flexible. Some of the responsibility fell on the instructor. She hadn't graded the assignments for several weeks, which allowed the problem to snowball. She should have also noticed that a student hadn't sent the notification for several weeks and followed up. Placing this stress on students interferes with learning--the opposite of what a teacher should be supporting.
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