| | August - 20219Have you ever been away from your home or office and needed to do something on the internet only from your phone? If you have a high-limit or unlimited data plan, you may not have thought twice about what you were doing when you video chatted, watched a video or were actively using data for a long time. Chances are, you only thought about your battery life and whether you had a way to charge your phone if it died.Imagine for a moment that you are now a student and this same cell phone is the only way to access your online courses. Can you now reasonably write an essay, read a PDF scan of a journal article, or take a timed quiz or exam using only your phone? Of course, you probably all compose and read emails, look at documents, and watch videos on your phoneregularly, but have you done that all while worried about being charged for data overages because you are not tethered to reliable and free WiFi; not to mention that you don't have the safety net of a computer to which you can later turn to complete what you started?You may be saying, "but there is free WiFi all over the place: McDonald's, a public library, or anywhere on campus." Because of COVID, all those places to access a reliable internet connect became scarce if nonexistent. There's another issue at play here: in many rural areas of North America cell data is at best 3Gand internet access at home may be barely qualified to be called high speed.What I'm saying can be boiled down to this: technology is fantastic when it works, but we as administrators and educators probably haven't thought through how it doesn't work for people who are not in our shoes. We need to and can do better. My hope from sharing my thoughts on this issue is that we educators should ardently advocate for those who don't have access to technology and internet in the ways that we may. In the 21st Century, especially in the post-COVID-19 world, access to these things are a necessity, not a want.It is imperative that everyone have equal access to education regardless of their race, social-economic status, living conditions, means, etc. We need to get internet into the homes of our students, and we need to get them reliable devices on which they can adequately learn. By this, I don't mean light-weight computers with mobile operating systems, instead they need computers that can run the full-suite of programs that they need to learn equally with their classmates who already have access.Online learning has worked for some, but it still isn't working for all, and COVID has laid that bare. You may be saying, "but there is free WiFi all over the place: McDonald's, a public library, or anywhere on campus." Because of COVID, all those places to access a reliable
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