Information Management Business Issues Hit Distance Learning

Like many other areas around the country and around the world, my daughter's school has joined the "learn from home" movement. I've been a teleworker for nearly 16 years, so we already have the technology infrastructure required, including an older but still useful laptop and fairly robust Wi-Fi. But it's come with more than a few challenges, some of which are the same types of information management challenges we all struggle with at times in the world of business.

The back story: On March 16th, my daughter's school made the decision to have all the kids work from home for at least the next two weeks. At least one parent for each family had to go into the school that day to get set up on Google Classroom, have expectations set about attendance and performance, clean out lockers so they could be deep-cleaned, and pick up homework.

3 Common Information Management Business Issues That Can Also Affect Distance Learning

What I found to be very interesting is the commonality between the issues businesses experience as they move to a remote working strategy and the issues my daughter and I have been having as we move to distance learning with her school. Let's take a look at how these issues come about and how they are related.

Issue #1: Paper-Based Assignments

A significant portion of the homework was in the form of paper worksheets that had to be completed and dropped off on March 30th. Some of the worksheets were single-sided, but most were double-sided, and many were multiple pages stapled together.

Then things changed, as the governor made the decision to close all schools in the state through April 17th. That meant two significant changes: we couldn't drop any assignments off on March 30th, and we couldn't pick up any new assignments for the remaining time. Now, the teachers did a fantastic job of making the new assignments available online – though some of them are still handouts.

Business Lesson: In business, paper plays this same dysfunctional role in our processes. Printing for a wet signature and other steps that require a hard copy will slow your processes down. At AIIM, we love to say "digitize anything that moves!"

Issue #2: Poorly Defined Processes

Because of these issues, the school indicated that we could submit the previous and future paper-based assignments by scanning them or taking a picture of them and then either emailing them directly to their teachers or uploading them to Google Classroom. Now, most students probably don't have scanners at home, but they all have access to a mobile phone camera. Some teachers acknowledged receipt, but most didn't, so we have no way of knowing if they got everything or if there were issues.

No, The Dog Did NOT Eat Your Homework!

The first set of assignments have now been graded, and one of my daughter's teachers indicated to us that she's missing nine (9) assignments. In the email, he also noted that "if you submitted a physical assignment last Monday and you do not have a grade for it, you probably didn't put your name on the paper, and we will have to deal with this matter later."

I checked and sent him an email confirming that that couldn't be the case, they were all turned in, and that I had taken the photos and emailed them to him myself. But I thought about it and realized that there was a third, even more significant problem that was exacerbated by the first two issues I identified.

Business Lesson: In business, process steps need to be clearly defined. There must also be review and approval steps included in the workflow. You could probably also add change management to this list, since, as of this writing, there are still students who have not turned in a single assignment.

Issue #3: Missing Metadata

So what was the issue? Recall my description of the assignments earlier: mostly double-sided, meaning that for any given assignment, I had to take two pictures, front and back, and email those to the teacher. And for the worksheet packets with multiple pages stapled together, it became an exercise in old-school document prep: remove staples, un-crease the dog-eared pages resulting from completing the packet while stapled, etc.

But whether single-sided, double-sided, or multiple pages, each assignment had exactly one spot for the student's name and date completed – aka metadata! So when I sent 9 images of her 9-page worksheet, 1 had a name, and the other 8 didn't. I certainly didn't think to have her put her name on every page - but she will be doing so moving forward. I'm guessing nobody ever thought of that because when you're submitting them in-person, they are all stapled together.

I suppose I could have used naming conventions, but it's already nearly a minute per page to get them sent over because of other process requirements – and I'm still not confident that that would have made up for the missing name.

I don't know how the teacher is grading these assignments, but I wouldn't be surprised if he is downloading all the images from a particular class into a single folder and then going through them page by page. 70 students x 50 images of pages of assignments = lots of room for mistakes, especially when around 2/3 of the images had no names on them because we were all following the paper-based process for submission.

Business Lesson: In business, metadata is important data about...well, data. Using metadata summarizes the basic information about your data which makes finding and working with particular instances of data easier.

Reworking the Homework Submission Process

I think we've gotten the assignments resubmitted, though we haven't received confirmation of that. And I do want to stress that, like so many other schools, our school, staff, and faculty have been absolutely amazing in terms of their commitment to keeping the kids learning. Communications have generally been very good, and they are going out of their way to keep us informed of things like missing assignments. In fact, the principal had to remind us parents that teachers have families and home requirements as well, so please don't email them at all hours of the evening and weekends!

Moving forward, at least in this household, both student and parent agree that we'll be putting her name on every single page of every single assignment. This is challenging because many of the worksheets take up pretty much all of the available space on the page. But it beats having assignments missing and potentially not getting credit for them. Longer-term, I'm hoping the school recognizes some of these challenges and is able to make some process changes such that all assignments are completed digitally. This should make it easier to track them, for them and for us, courtesy of automated metadata, audit trails, and everything else that goes along with effective information management.