Running a compulsory ICT course for students on shared phones and prepaid data

Diagnosis: the binding constraint is not motivation but data, devices and time. Any rule that assumes a laptop or stable broadband selects on income, not on learning.

1. Post one downloadable low-bandwidth artefact per week (a PDF under 1 MB or a plain text post) so work can be done offline. Video becomes optional enrichment, never a requirement.
2. Replace the single Friday 23:59 deadline with a Sunday-to-Thursday window and cap each student at two forum posts. This spreads network load, removes the 23:59 scramble, and makes quality rather than timing the differentiator.
3. Offer an offline submission route: handwritten work photographed at low resolution, or submitted on paper in class, marked against the same rubric. Equity means equivalent evidence, not identical channels.
4. Give each student one 48-hour grace token for a single submission, no questions asked. Data packs expire and phones get shared; a token absorbs shocks without a queue of individual pleas and without discretionary favouritism.
5. Assess participation on a three-line rubric - claim, evidence, response to a peer - not on post counts. Post counts reward those with data.
6. Publish the whole schedule at the start so students on shared devices can plan access in advance.

Decision: remove the content immediately and treat the conduct, not the technology, as the issue.

1. Take down the screenshots from the group and say publicly that they were removed because they targeted a classmate - not because of the medium. Silent deletion leaves the class unsure whether the behaviour or its visibility was the offence.
2. Speak to the two trainees privately. Establish what they thought they were doing, name the effect (a classmate has stopped logging in), and impose a proportionate consequence: a written apology to her, and a repair contribution such as a constructive review of an anonymised draft.
3. Contact the classmate separately. Offer her the offline submission route and do not require her to return to the group to 'resolve' the matter. She has been harmed, not inconvenienced.
4. Publish a short netiquette and moderation policy to the whole class: what may be quoted, what requires consent, and the name of a moderator empowered to remove posts. This is the step that prevents recurrence; punishment alone does not.
5. Escalate only on repetition or if it becomes a harassment matter, in which case it goes to the institutional committee with the same documented record.

Accessibility. Scanned image PDFs are silent to a screen reader. Fix by running OCR and checking the reading order, uploading the source text where possible, adding alt text to diagrams and using real heading styles. This is a design fix that benefits everyone, not an accommodation for one student, and it takes a few hours once.

Plagiarism flags. Flags in 22 per cent of journals, mostly shared template sentences from a senior batch, point at task design as much as at students:

• Review the flagged scripts individually. A similarity report is evidence to be interpreted, not a verdict; template sentences and correctly cited common phrasing are not plagiarism.
• Change the prompt so the answer depends on each trainee's own classroom observation. Identical prompts and circulating templates invite identical text.
• Teach citation explicitly, and require at least one cited source per entry with a page number.
• Penalise only where unattributed copying of substantive content is established, and say so in writing.
• Record the moderation decision on file.

The common thread: a scanned PDF and a copied sentence both look like student failure, but both are often system failures - an inaccessible upload and an assessment that can be completed without understanding.