As a snowstorm ripped across the Midwest last week, many universities, including NIU, let professors decide whether or not their classes would be held online. So, as I sat in my dorm room to take a class through BlackBoard Collaborate, I kept wondering, “How come it took so long to have online class instead of snow days?” The short answer: All of us have been living through a massive pandemic.

For those who are newer to NIU, the 2019 spring semester had some of the worst winter weather in recent memory as a polar vortex barreled toward us from Canada and the Northern United States. Temperatures were consistently negative, there was a massive amount of precipitation (both snow and ice) and, on some days, the dorms didn’t even have hot water. 

Instead of having online classes as we are used to nowadays, NIU proclaimed that all classes were to be canceled for the day, giving students a “snow day” like the ones we had back in K-12. But, as the storms grew worse, the number of snow days piled up, resulting in many classes having to alter their syllabi. I remember taking an English class that met once a week and, due to the storms and class cancellations, I went two weeks without taking it. 

One pandemic later, and all of us now know how to use virtual meeting rooms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Blackboard Collaborate. With this technology, snow days will become a thing of the past and NIU no longer has to choose between depriving their students of classes and the safety of students and faculty. 

With the cost of college tuition racking up to thousands of dollars per semester, wasting a single day of class is not a good option. Fortunately, it seems that this problem has been solved. 

Living through COVID-19 has been terrible. We’ve all lost someone or something due to this virus: family, friends, jobs and opportunities. But it’s important to know what we’ve also learned and what we can take away from this time into the future. Using online classes to eliminate snow days is a worthwhile endeavor, one that I’m glad NIU is pursuing.