The beginning of the semester is a critical time for students to enroll in classes and get off to a good start for the rest of the year.
In this day and age, technology has taken over and the “best” way to reach anyone is through e-mail. During the end of first week and beginning of the second week on the Pierce campus, it was not.
Students couldn’t e-mail their professors or visa versa for six days. Not only did professors not receive e-mail from their students, but they also had no idea that their e-mails were not being sent outside the district.
It is the Information Technologies department’s job to fix any problem having to do with the computers, as it is also their job to notify the faculty when something is down. Especially when it is something as crucial as e-mail.
If they were graded like the students, we would give them an “F” for failing to notify the campus of the problem. The faculty and students had every right to be frustrated and upset about the whole situation, just as we were.
How is an instructor supposed to help a student, especially in the online classes, when they have no idea there is even a problem?
Angry students did Info Tech’s job by returning to class and telling their instructors about the e-mails. At least from an outside server, a response was returned stating that it could not be sent.
When we asked what caused the system to go down, there was not a specific answer as to why it all began.
Yes, it was in the midst of the problem, but there was still no viable explanation. We can understand that there are many possibilities, but it would have been nice to know what the suspected issue was and if it could have been prevented. We were left short of any explanation and most importantly, notification.
Maybe they thought that the problem would be fixed shortly. It wasn’t. It took six days for the system to get up and running again.
Maybe they thought it would go unnoticed. It didn’t. We started research before there was even and e-mail sent out to faculty members on Sept. 13.
We are all extremely dependant on technology to be the fast and easy way to communicate. It is inevitable that there will be aggravation when the system does not work.
There would have been less of a pressing matter if faculty were informed in the first place.