How Old Are We?

This time I refer not to students, but instructors.

This semester I am enrolled in a Teaching Methods course. This is a 10-week, on-line course and it will extend my technical college teaching certification for 2 more years (I'll be good through 2014). It only requires 4-5 hours of time a week, and because it's on-line, that time is at our pace, at our convenience. Sunday marks the beginning of each new week and we're given new learning and assessment activities. By Wednesday night at midnight we have to post these on our on-line interface. We then have until the following Sunday to participate in discussion about each other's activities. It's not too difficult and I have gotten some good ideas so far.

This week I posted my 4 page Word document regarding my classroom management strategies on Tuesday - I usually aim for Tuesday to give myself that one day buffer should something unforeseen occur. Today I was browsing the other posts to find ones I wanted to comment on and happened to look at my own - which had no comments yet. Instead of copying and pasting my document, I uploaded it as a link. I clicked on the link and to my horror found that it didn't work and just lead the clicker to an error page. S--t.

I quickly went to my Word document and fixed the problem by copying and pasting the paper and reposting. I wrote to my instructor and told her that I fully understood that this would be considered a late assignment, but did just want to let her know that I had fixed the issue if she wanted to look at my work.

None of this is what upsets me the most.

When you click on someone's post there's this little bar that shows you the view count. It give you an overall number of views and lets you know how many of those are your own. My post had a view count of 39 - 4 of which were mine. That meant that between Tuesday and today 35 people (or some combination of people adding up to 35) had viewed my post. That means that 35 times people saw that I had a non-functional link. Number of people who replied to my post to let me know that I had a non-functional link - ZERO. Come on people.

I forgive the instructor for this - she's the instructor and if one of her students was an idiot this week, it's not her job to save me. I do not forgive the other people taking this course for this. We're all instructors - we all know what it's like to teach and be taught. Not to mention the fact that it would take about 2 seconds to reply to my post and let me know.

Why would someone not take that time? I'm really struggling to understand. Did they also take the typical instructor point of view and figure that it was my problem to know whether or not my link worked (not necessarily wrong, but we're all in this together)? Did something like this happen to them, they weren't warned and so they are bitter and won't help others out anymore (because I'm going to be in this category from now on, believe me)? Is this schadenfreude - where they saw that I would get a lesser grade this week and that somehow made them feel better about how they did on their assignment?

Here's hoping that I don't fail this course by the one point I would have gotten by getting this assignment in on time......