Friday Fragments: October 23rd
Midnight deadlines, the "college experience," thinking about the strengths of online learning & attending to mental health.
What I’m reading…
Cinderella Deadlines asks us to reconsider defaulting to midnight deadlines for assignments. The author, Susan Spangler, argues:
[R]egardless of the reason they came into fashion, it’s time to rethink these Cinderella deadlines, which are not based on convenience for either professors or students, and do not promote a professional awareness of business hours or reasonable working conditions. On the contrary, they seem instead to signal to students that burning the midnight oil is an acceptable model of time management and an ethical boundary to allow in future work settings, even though most professors would not welcome similar parameters on their own working hours.
This semester I’m experimenting with 12 p.m. (noon) deadlines that fall on Tuesday and Friday, and explicitly state that I do so to encourage students to (a) have resources - me, LMS help, IT help - available to them at assignment submission time, and (b) not work over the weekend or late at night. I struggled with the decision to change to noon deadlines, knowing that no matter when a deadline is set, there will be students who need just a little more time, and knowing that consistency within but also across courses is important.
From the Atlantic: America will sacrifice anything for the college experience
The pandemic has made college frail, but it has strengthened Americans’ awareness of their attachment to the college experience. It has shown the whole nation, all at once, how invested they are in going away to school or dreaming about doing so. Facing that revelation might be the most important outcome of the pandemic for higher ed: An education may take place at college, but that’s not what colleges principally provide…The pandemic offered an invitation to construe college as an education alone, because it was too dangerous to embrace it as an experience. Nobody was interested. They probably never will be.
Why My Students Like Online Learning, Association of American Colleges & Universities
As many faculty across the country noticed this spring, trying to replicate the experience of on-campus classrooms does not work. Success in online course delivery requires that a college or university value online teaching for its pedagogical strengths and be willing to continually invest and improve.
Why we’re going dark, by the Univ. of South Carolina student paper, The Daily Gamecock, powerfully expresses how these students are not alright:
We hope this decision will set an example for other organizations and students in general: It is OK to not be OK…We are not going to apologize for going dark. We are each struggling in different ways but are reminding ourselves to fight the guilt and comparison that tell us to invalidate ourselves and each other.
Happy reading!