Internet Parking: How College Students Use Campus Wifi To Stay Connected


Friday, May 8, 2020

Online college students with limited or no internet access are using Wi-Fi ready college parking lots to stay connected with their online college classes.



In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Savanna Navarro Kresse, a senior college student at Washington State University, Tri Cities, participated in a local Facebook Live broadcast about higher education in times of COVID-19. She spoke calmly, and masked her discomfort quite well. Where was Kresse? She was answering interview questions from her car, parked in a campus lot, with the sun overhead. She wanted to turn on her air-conditioning, but she needed to keep any ambient noise to a minimum.

Kresse has dealt with the conditions, as so many of her peers have. Once the coronavirus pandemic took hold and colleges closed campus dorms and switched to online college classes, she has been spending two or three hours a week in the same parking lot. She does classwork and takes tests online. Studying in her car is not ideal, but it is the only place she can access reliable Wi-Fi.

“It can be a little weird taking a test in your car,” said Kresse. “Looking at your books or notes while holding your laptop on your lap can be awkward, too. It can be worse when your tests have a time limit and you’re trying to hurry and look through notes.”

Higher academia has more than risen to the challenges posed by the rapid transition to remote instruction. The entire shift was predicated on the notion that all college students have access not only to a computer, but to reliable internet access when, in reality, many do not.

Some students report finishing the semester with only their cell phones. Many institutions have done their best to loan laptops to computerless students who, before, worked using in on-campus computer labs. Internet access, however, has been more complicated.

Many college students, especially in rural areas, have no broadband internet available. Other students have spotty Wi-Fi or experience router overload when there are multiple devices working at once within one home. Data plans run out eventually, too.

Those are just issues related to connectivity. Another issue is affordability, or whether or not students can pay for internet access where it is available. Many cannot.

All these concerns existed prior to COVID-19. But the pandemic has exposed them and exacerbated them in ways that only widen documented achievement gaps.

Karen Stout, president of Achieving the Dream, a nonprofit working to ensure community college student success, said that these inequities are why many community colleges were some of the last institutions to move to all-remote instruction.

“We [recognized that] we were putting some students at risk. We know that many community college students use [college campus] libraries to do their distance learning courses, for instance, taking courses online but using our libraries to do so,” shared Stout.

Stout said that the need is most acute among college students at rural and tribal colleges.

When the transition to remote online learning became inevitable, the “first wave”  of response was to get devices into students’ hands, she said. The next wave was about internet access, including “this very organized movement to make community college parking lots into Wi-Fi hotspots.”

Various institutions require student credentials to log in to the Wi-Fi, but many others have invited the greater community—including K-12 students—to share access.

Achieving the Dream is currently studying ways in which colleges and universities have responded to student needs during the pandemic, and how these students are engaging with the services offered.

Stout applauds colleges for their creativity in supporting students and noted that many have made Wi-Fi-ready parking lots access points to campus food pantries.

At the start of the pandemic, Tri Cities reached out to all students about Wi-Fi needs. Kresse thought she was good to go, as she had Wi-Fi at home. Since then, her connection has failed to support the schoolwork and that of her four children (she calls herself a post-traditional student). She bought a new router as soon as she received payment from federal economic stimulus funds, but it did very little good.

To limit her need for Wi-Fi, she generally reads transcripts and studies PowerPoints from her synchronous class meetings instead of tuning in live. There are times—including when she’s taking online tests and online exams—that she needs a strong signal. And for that she heads to her campus lot.

Kresse said it would help students like her if they could log in and out of tests multiple times, to take Wi-Fi challenges into account. But concerns about academic integrity are cause for not doing so. Wi-Fi hotspots devices and clear guidelines for who qualifies for them would also be helpful. (Washington State is in the process of providing more of these.)

“It would also be nice if the state or the federal government stepped in,” Kresse said. “What this is showing us is an infrastructure problem.”

Charles M. Roessel, Diné College President in the Navajo Nation, said students have used “parking lots, tops of hills and mesas and anywhere else where the signal is strong enough to access [online college] classes.”

The college purchased laptops and wireless hotspots for students and faculty members, but professors have had to be quite flexible. Some college professors have had to provide four different delivery methods for one class each and every week (Zoom, text, email and telephone). Some students drive up to 30 to 50 miles to get a signal.

Diné has received temporary federal approval to access an unused 2.5 GHZ spectrum, which will allow students to have full and free access internet access, Roessel said. “We are opening this up to all college students and not just Diné.”

Marta Yera Cronin, president of Columbia Gorge Community College in Oregon, said that the pandemic has shown, among other things, that “technology is not the great equalizer that some people think it is,” even in the U.S. in 2020.

Columbia Gorge’s Wi-Fi is always accessible in its parking lots. The institution has checked out dozens of hotspot devices to students so they wouldn’t have to visit campus. Many live as far as 90 minutes away.

“The messaging since day one on internet access is, ‘Anything you need, reach out to us, make a request. You don’t have to show any need specifically,’ because we don't want there to be any extra variables in getting those things to them.”




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