As I’ve previously posted, I have been taking several MOOCs in an effort to keep my skills sharp and also learn new things. I just had two MOOCs end, one successfully and the other not so successfully. By that I mean I will earn a certificate of completion for one and not for the other. Seems I have to learn something else I have been procrastinating about learning – UTC. I don’t know where I have been keeping my head but I remained thinking that all time worldwide was referenced from GMT – Greenwich Mean Time. When I was in the military, we use Zulu time to reference our 24-hour clock and Z or zero time was GMT.
Well, my recent MOOCs stated that due dates were in UTC time and I just passed that off thinking I would as usual finish early and not have to worry about due dates/times. That held true for one course but yesterday when I was entering the last of links to my course artifacts, the LMS closed me off abruptly and told me the due date/time had expired. I thought I had six hours to go but I was thinking midnight local time having never followed up checking out what UTC was. It turns out that sometimes in the 70’s after I had gotten out of the military, the powers at be decided that GMT was not appropriate anymore since Britain had daylight savings time which of course impacted the time in Greenwich. So they came up with temps universel coordonné, UTC. UTC turns out is essentially the same as the old GMT or Zulu time. If I had just taken the time 🙂 to check, I could have quickly adapted back to thinking Zulu time for the MOOCs and I would have had no problem with due dates/times. 🙁