Note to Self: Find Ways to Share What You Learn from Unintended Consequences

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > Note to Self: Find Ways to Share What You Learn from Unintended Consequences

Current News

Note to Self: Find Ways to Share What You Learn from Unintended Consequences

1/14/2004

By Terry Calhoun

We've modified their behavior by providing the kind of state of the art services we provide, and I'm not sure that anyone was noticing - before now - that most of them weren't clutching printed out schedules in their hands, or didn't have copies tucked away in their backpack.

One student said that he had "[A]sked my roommate why he hadn't left for class, and he said he couldn't because he had been trying to access his schedule for the past 6 hours." Another was quoted as saying that she missed the first day of an important class because her backup way of discovering what her schedule was, was to go through her archived e-mails and see what she had received from graduate student instructors and course Web sites. One of my work-study students, Hedy Chang, had a smug smile on her face when she told me that she hadn't had any problems because "actually. I printed mine out early." Her boyfriend, who shall remain nameless here, had left his printout at her place, so before he had time to go over Monday morning and get his copy, he had already missed his first class.

For enterprising students who had not previously printed out their schedule, or who has lost their printouts, there is also, of course, a Web-based online catalog where they could have looked up their class locations, if they remembered 3 weeks later what classes they had registered for. But the fact remains that many didn't and many didn't make it to class.

So what's the answer? Do we need to build in a feature that e-mails every student their class schedule five days before the beginning of a new semester? Maybe. The University of Michigan staff made it very clear that they welcome suggestions from students.

But one thing is for sure, every new tool and feature for a tool that we produce, changes student behaviors and expectations, sometimes in ways we can't predict. We can only hope that the folks at Michigan and other schools which experienced similar first-day-of-class issues, have dedicated staff who will not only fix the problem on their own campus, but who will use their memberships in professional associations to share the problems and the fixes with others. Most of the people who read this don't read the Michigan Daily, but none of us have the time to be reinventing wheels.

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

Cite this Site

Terry Calhoun, "Note to Self: Find Ways to Share What You Learn from Unintended Consequences," Campus Technology, 1/14/2004, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=39647

copy text (above) for proper citation