I'm getting ready to teach synchronously online this morning. Cable internet just went down & won't be back up for an estimated 6 hours. This is our second major outage in 2 weeks. The infrastructure just isn't up to the load it's under as schools & colleges reopen.

We now have two working adults + a kid going to school online sharing connections from a couple of tethered phones. We'll probably run through our entire data plan this morning. Which is OK for us. We can afford to upgrade data plans, but another phone, etc.

But this serves as an important reminder that we simply cannot assume stable internet access for our students. We spend a lot on internet to begin with and can fall back on tethered phones, but if you're just getting by that's not an option for you.

We need to ensure that our online course designs are robust to this, and that the rules we apply in our courses recognize that this will be an ongoing issue and that we have to be flexible in accommodating the reality of poor or unreliable internet connections.

This is super hard because a lot of the tools we rely on for teaching online require the internet. But we need to provide alternative/backup plans and flexibility to support everyone trying to learn right now.