It has been a bit of a rough week and it shoudn’t of been. First week back at University is usually fairly easy. Lecturers mostly talk over the course outline and there’s really not that much ‘real’ work to be had.
And whilst this was, strictly speaking, the case I didn’t have the luxury of taking advantage of the reprieve. Instead, I find myself having to pull out of a paper and scramble around trying to find one suitable that would fit in with the creche times I have book (as it is too late to change them now).
The not so short summary of the situation is as follows:
I’m a single Mum in my third year studying towards a BSc majoring in Computer Science. I have currently an A+ average and intend to apply for a scholarship and hopefully do honours next year if I can keep up the grade.
I originally enrolled in computer science paper (algorthms), but unfortunately the lectures went from 4-6 and the absolute latest I would be able to stay so I could pick up my son from Creche is 5pm. Effectively I would be missing out on close to 50% of the material. I contacted the lecturer and asked about hand outs, notes, online slides, text book or really any other source of material so I could study it in my own time and make sure I covered all the examinable topics. Unfortunately he is of the old fashioned style of writing on the board and students taking notes. He does not use Moodle, or post any information on line. His only suggestion is I look up the posted topics on the internet but there would be no guarantee I’d cover the examinable material.
In the end, I’ve had to pull out of a paper which was important to my Software Dev specialisation and instead put in a change of enrollment to another. I contacted the lecturer of the new paper who was more than willing to help, did have slides online and did use Moodle and whose lectures didn’t go past 5pm! By the time the change of enrollment goes through, I’m going to be a week behind, but the lecturer has been more than helpful with providing links and advise to make sure I get caught up.
Ultimately I don’t think there could of been anything I could do to make the lecturer for the paper be a bit more flexible so that I, as a single Mum, could attend his class, but I guess I am very disappointed that this is the case. Especially with a computer science paper – with which, I would of thought, would of been most likely to make use of the new learning technologies available like Moodle which the majority of other lecturers all use.
The above is an adaption of some of an email I sent to relevant people within the University to raise the issue and although I cannot alter the situation for me, hopefully I can pave the way to make things easier for others.
Add to this further problems with my math paper (I had been given a waiver for a pre-requirement paper to get into this) and this week has been a bit of a nightmare. My enrolment has been set up for the new computer paper but I won’t be attending my first lecture till next week.. so I’m going to have a bit of catching up to do.
So, if I’m here and not responding to petitions, IMs, etc. That’s why.
There was an issue raised from a few players recently about us not responding to petitions/emails/etc as fast as they would like them to be. Please. PLEASE be patient. We could be dealing with another player, or in buffer, looking after a baby, studying for university or any one of a number of things and as a result could entirely miss it.
When a petition is sent it says, if you do not get a response, email. We try to reply as quick as we can, but sometimes life gets busy. Cut us some slack hmm?