“Well, now this is novel. A student emailed me yesterday asking for advice on how to study for his final exam. I gave him a few pointers and told him to go back through the course material paying particular attention to the lesson quizzes and the self study questions. A few hours later he emailed me again, this time in a complete flap. The course had gone missing from his course menu. he said he had sent a message to IT Services but wondered if I could still see it.
Thinking he had done something silly, like hide the course from himself on the menu, I took a look, only to discover that I too couldn’t see the course on my menu. Hmmm, as an instructor it’s particularly bad when your course and all the students go missing….. more so when they have an assignment due tomorrow and their exam is a little more than a week away.
A response from IT Services informed us both that the course was still there, but all of the students and the instructor (me) had been deleted from it. COOL! Now what?
Well, at this point I am getting all the panicked emails from the other students and I am just telling them to stay calm, it will all be fine I am sure. Of course, at the same time I am wondering about all of their marks. I still have all of the assignments that I marked on my hard drive, so I know what they received on those. But they have a self marking lesson quiz at the end of each lesson and I don’t collate those until the course ends….in other words I have no idea who has done what or what they received for a mark. This is not such a good thing. Everyone may be getting an automatic 20% bonus mark if those numbers are lost. Not sure what else to do, I can’t exactly make them go back and redo all 26 quizzes…although arguably it would be a good way for them to study.
So how did it happen? It’s a mystery, but I suspect it had something to do with a new course shell that my IT guy set up for me. A few days ago I noticed some links and things were not working properly in the course and rather than fix it at this point, and run the risk of messing anything up, I asked if he could build me a new shell so I could make the changes in a course that no students currently populated. He did so, and I saw it there on Wednesday, although I thought it odd that he had numbered the course wrong, but figured it was by design since it is not scheduled to run until September. I updated a few typographical errors in the existing course, and only glanced in the new shell, thinking I would work on it in the next few weeks while the things were still fresh in my memory.
And now BOTH iterations of the course are MIA!
Well, not much to do but sit back and wait. And feel sorry for the poor students who are having anxiety attacks now….. I am really, really glad I am at this end of the issue and not the other.
Is it a crisis? Not really. Is it funny? Well…not really. Am I laughing? You bet!