Equity, One File at a Time

I have a website on Moodle where I post stuff that students might find useful: syllabi, assignments, writing guides, graphic organizers, reading recommendations, extra credit opportunities, useful links, and other fancy stuff. My students know that if they lose their handouts, or if they miss class, they can check Moodle and will find whatever they need. Moodle provides organizationally-challenged students with extra copies while keeping them more accountable and independent. You lose your stuff? Fine. Get a new copy. Just don’t come asking me for it, because you know what I’m going to tell you.

Whenever I make a new handout for class, I save it, print it, and upload it. Moodle has an absurdly clunky interface—it’s a 14-click process from login to uploaded document, and that’s not counting naming the file, writing an explanation of what it is, and all the scrolling it takes to get where you need to be—but it’s pretty easy once you’re used to it, and it saves stuff from year to year, so you don’t have to re-upload unless you make a lot of changes. I do make changes, so I do re-upload, but that’s my problem. Even with all of that, Moodle does save me the time of having to email students (or their parents) gazillions of attachments.

Here’s the problem, though: Henry doesn’t have Microsoft Office.

Henry is an awesome kid. He’s intellectually involved, he works hard, and he’s trying to understand himself as a learner. One thing he figured out about himself is that he’s not the most super-organized kid in the world. Sometimes, he loses stuff. When he does, he sometimes remembers to ask for a new copy. I give him the usual refrain: “Check Moodle.” But then he comes back with, “I did check Moodle. All the stuff is in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. I don’t have Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.”

And really, why should he? Microsoft Word, especially the most recent version, is not only counter-intuitively designed point that you need a gazillion hacks just to make it function acceptably, but it’s absurdly expensive. Why would anyone purchase a bad program for a lot of money when they can get a perfectly good one for free? Moreover, and more to the point, some students’ families don’t have the financial resources required to purchase Microsoft Office. If a student needs access to course documents, that access shouldn’t hinge on their parents being rich enough and/or dumb enough to buy Microsoft Office.

What I told Henry was, “Well, the school has Microsoft Office, so print it here.” That was a bad answer. It’s true that Henry could have—and sometimes did—print at school, but the whole point of Moodle is to give students access. Usually, the time when they need that access is when they’re at home, either doing homework or preparing for the next day’s class. Plus, when they’re at school, surrounded by their friends and rushing from one of their eight classes to another, the last thing on their minds is, “Oh yeah, I need a new copy of that essay organizer.”

So, what would have been a better answer for Henry, and all the other students who don’t have Microsoft’s family of products? PDFs. If you have a computer and internet access, you can download a PDF reader for free. And then, you can open any PDF. My problem was, I didn’t know how to make PDFs, but now I do. It’s easy, especially if you have a Mac, but even if you have a PC.

So now, I begin the process of saving all my files as PDFs, deleting the Word and PowerPoint versions from Moodle, and uploading the PDF versions. That’s a whole lotta clicks. All in the name of equity.