Sleeping in, staying at home, having no teachers, and doing work at your own pace whenever you want seems like the perfect way to keep up with school work instead of making up days during the summer when going to school is not possible. Bartholomew County has an e-Learning day any time school is cancelled after spring break or on the 6th snow day of the year. On those days, students are expected to go onto the website itslearning and do the work assigned by teachers. Teachers were available online from 9am to 3pm to help answer any questions. The goal of having e-learning days is to continue learning even during bad weather without adding on more days to the school year. Because this was the first year BCSC has had e-Learning days, there are some improvements that can be made.

One of the major issues of e-learning days is that some students do not have access to the internet or are unable to go onto itslearning, where the work is assigned. There are some places around Columbus with free Wifi, but many students were not aware they were available. Also, in order to get access to the internet outside of home, students would have had to drive and get on the roads, a lot of which were blocked off because of the flooding, making the free wifi unaccessible.

Teachers were told to assign only the amount of work that could be completed in a regular class time. However, some students felt overwhelmed by how much work they had to do. In addition, a lot of students did not have all of the materials or resources usually available at school to help them complete assignments.

E-learning days also affected the teachers who had to come up with assignments for the very next day by 9am. They had to find work for students that could be done completely online, while still being relevant to what they had been working on recently and not just ‘busy work’.

To help the students who did not have access to internet during the e-learning days or were unable to work at home, all assignments were due on the Wednesday back, a week after the first day e-learning day. As a result, some teachers gave time on Monday and Tuesday during class to work on the assignments, making those days pointless. It also prevented other teachers from being able to move on to new topics until Wednesday because some students had not completed the work.

E-learning days are great ways continue learning outside of school when there are bad road conditions without extending the school year. However, because this was the first time, both teachers and students had trouble getting work done online and then going back to a regular schedule back at school. Hopefully, the next time we have an e-learning day, there will be less problems at home.