Note to Self: Find Ways to Share What You Learn from Unintended Consequences
When you bring the students something that's state of the art, you also have to
think about (a) what's being left behind, (b) how what you bring them is going
to change their expectations and behavior, and (c) what's going to happen when
they can't use what you created for them.
Wolverine Access is the name University of Michigan students know for the interface
where they go to register for classes, check their schedule, drop and add, and
so forth. It's a slick system, and replaces a series of systems that go back
(for old-timers) to when students waited - in all sorts of weather - to get
inside Waterman Gym, in lines that sometimes stretched across the Diag onto
State Street, and down past Angel Hall all the way to the Michigan Union.
Wolverine Access is a better system. But problems with it a week ago, on and
before the first day of classes, impacted the student body in ways that seem
not to have been anticipated. You
can read about them here. I hope that the problems and possible solutions
are being shared widely.
The predictable calls by students for change, resulted. Here's
one, and it contains useful suggestions. And the folks responsible for Wolverine
Access are about to upgrade it, so they were able to explain quickly the
improvements that are on the way.
What happened? Well, I haven't had a chance to talk to the folks directly involved
yet, but according to a Michigan Daily article from January 7, there was a problem
with the connection between the the students' online connection to Wolverine
Access and the primary database in which their registration information is stored.
Apparently, there is a limit to the number of active connections the site can
make with that database, and there was a problem that was causing the database
not to recognize when students were finished and had logged out. Therefore,
it thought all the connections were being used, or at least nearly all.
As of Monday afternoon, January 6, only 800 students had dropped classes, compared
with around 6,000 drops during the first day of the previous semester. The problem
was fixed within 24 hours, of course, but lots of students felt frustrated in
dropping and adding classes, often changes in their schedule that they had spent
a great deal of time thinking about during the winter break.
If that was the end of it, then this would be simply a homily about how when
things are so important, they simply have to work and there have to be backups
in place. You know, kind of a "now that they use our technology in such
important ways, we need to realize our responsibility to make sure it works"
thing.
But there is actually more, from an unintended and unexpected consequence.
Many students did not know their schedule, or where their classes were. Three
decades ago, those students would have a hand written schedule they'd used when
they visited Waterman Gym. In 2004, with ubiquitous connectivity and a Wolverine
Connection resource that they had come to expect to always be working, hundreds,
probably thousands of students met Monday morning expecting to log in, find
out where they were supposed to be, and then go . . . only they couldn't.
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.
