The last two weeks of the semester are filled with strenuous projects, papers, presentations and exams. As if that was not enough, University Technology planned an internet outage in the second-to-last week of the semester, causing more than just a few problems for students and faculty looking to do their work during finals.
University Technology issued notice via email on Nov. 17 that on Nov. 28 they would be implementing a new firewall starting at 9:30 p.m. However, internet connectivity on campus, and therefore access to services like Google, Moodle and so much more, was unavailable to students for six hours.
This prevented students from working on finals-related material, especially students who do not start working on coursework until late at night. Student athletes, leaders and staff have packed schedules. Attending class, going to practice, hosting and planning events and going to work can often keep a student away from their computer until 10 p.m. Then, when it came time to start their work that day, the lack of internet access prevented students from doing so.
Although University Technology informed students and staff via email that “If you are already logged in to Google or Moodle, your connection should continue,” this still left many students who needed to use other resources in the dark.
Conducting research for a presentation or research project was not an option, and students who needed to use other online resources for their classes, like specific study materials or online language courses, were unable to do so. Not to mention, if a student did not have the opportunity to log into Google and Moodle shortly before the outage, since these services automatically sign out after some time, there was no hope of working on assignments or submitting them.
To make matters worse, the following day, Nov. 29, University Technology issued a follow-up email, announcing that there had been a problem the night before that prevented them from implementing the firewall. The internet was offline again that day from 9:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. Many students, at this point planning to make up work they could not accomplish yesterday, had to halt their academic work for two nights in a row.
Although this is a necessary update, as the firewall is, according to University Technology’s Nov. 17 email, a “prerequisite step before the upgrade of Drew’s internet connections,” this could have been planned at a better time in the semester. This time of year is busy for students, professors and all staff and administrators. If the completion of tasks with normal internet connectivity was not stressful enough, this outage was another source of unnecessary stress.
The internet updates and outages could have been planned for earlier in the semester, when coursework was less strenuous and impactful on final grades. There were countless weekends when work could have been conducted on the system. Alternatively, updates could have been conducted at the end of the semester, once finals were done and after professors finished submitting grades.
