While a three-day snow break may feel brief in retrospect, for classes planned months in advance, even one missed day can have a resounding impact for the rest of the semester.
Paul Parsons, dean of Elon University’s School of Communications, said at some point, too many missed classes can have a real impact when students lose face time with teachers. In the past, Elon has created make-up days for classes missed during Winter Term, when there is even less time with a professor.
But with new technology available for teaching, make-up days have become less necessary to keep students in a class.
“I’ve been teaching a long time now, and before the Internet, when you lost a day, you couldn’t do anything,” Parsons said.
Parsons said professors can use email and direct class tools like Moodle to engage with students to develop contingency plans, but other professors at Elon used new technology to bring classes into students’ rooms.
“Missing three days of class created many opportunities for faculty to be creative, not only with schedule adjustments, but also with uses of technology, including screen casting for teaching online when classes could not meet,” said Susan Manring, chair of the management department at Elon.
For students, the snow days do not impact what they think they will get out of class.
“My teachers still had the same assignments and were able to get them to us,” said Halley Gartner, a senior at Elon. “We missed three days. It’s not the end of the world.”
Sharon Eisner, an adjunct communications instructor at Elon who teaches two-credit hour classes like Public Speaking, said the impact of a missed day is intensified when it comes to half-semester courses.
“We have 12 to 14 classes, depending on the semester, and the students usually speak for half of them,” Eisner said. “So I have six or seven classes to do all my teaching and lecturing. Losing one of those classes is kind of a big deal.”
By shortening the length of the final speech or reducing lectures in other two-credit hour classes, Eisner said she is able to keep things moving.
“I appreciate that it happened in the beginning because I feel like it’s possible for us to get back in the rhythm. I think if it had happened at the end, it would have been a disaster,” shesaid.
When it comes to creating new syllabi with the remaining days, Parsons said most professors try to look at two main factors.
“There’s a balance of two concepts: What they consider to be essential content and what can be done off of campus,” Parsons said.
Eisner added that canceling class because of snow is a preferred reason for missing a day.
“It’s better than other reasons that classes could have been canceled. At least no one on campus got hurt,” she said. “But it does affect the class and we have to have changes.”