Oh dear, I almost forgot what initiative is, until the IT department again reminded me of what it’s NOT.
(Sarcasm)
We’re using a new printer (as in a commercial printery, not a little office printer) to print all our study materials. Being a commercial printery they have rigid rules and timeframes for orders – if you submit late, you get your printed product late. Having our own in-house printery spoiled us all for years in this regard, always making allowances to get material out the door on time – even if it was submitted at the last minute (good on em!).
Due to the new setup, late submissions and such, students for some courses don’t have their printed study materials, and the term started 6 days ago. Obviously they’re not too happy about it, and rightfully so.
As a solution, one would quickly reach the conclusion that the material could be online. But what if you didn’t have a course website set up in the new Learning Management System? Correction, what if the course website was there, but not activated, yes, a 1 minute task to put the site into a different system category?
The answer according to our IT division – No. We can’t activate your course website. Your students can sit and wait with no study materials, while we put this on hold until next week some time, to talk about it in a meeting and decide if we approve it or not.
No joke. If that’s not incompetent then I don’t know what is! (The lecturer just ended up sending the PDFs over email to all the students in the end..)
