I'm so tired of articles like this that never enumerate solutions. Anyone can enumerate the bad things about something. You don't need to know anything about the situation to do that, so why leave the analysis at the minimally-developed step?
Analyzing the situation before schools ever used cloud platforms and why these platforms are alluring to begin with should be a big part of this discussion, because you must understand how you got here to ever understand where to go.
For example, when I was high school in the early 2000s, the most advanced setup my high school had was for students to use USB sticks or email the teachers assignments, and it sucked for everyone. The teachers each came up with their own effort to track files. And there was a lot of work for teachers, e.g. students forgetting to attach the file. Or, a clever hackerman such as myself, deleting a couple bytes in the file before attaching it to buy myself an extra day.
In university, the school used Blackboard which is apparently very expensive and definitely very underwhelming.
After those two experiences, I'm not surprised that Google suite is a true breath of fresh air for schools and students alike. I know nothing about the education system beyond this post, so I would love to hear something more informative about the situation than "capitalism bad".
I just accidentally got a hackerman like you expelled from my daughter's uni. They sent a peer review for a doc but sent it 3 minutes before deadline and was corrupt. Being helpful programmer and teaching daughter I opened it with a hex editor. Top of file referenced /var/www/corruptmyfilecom. Which seems suspicious. It's a also a website for exactly what you suspect. This was for 5% of grade on assignment and meant to boost your grade by rewarding engagement and peer review.
Daughter dug further and found the doc text (so proud) and it was a outline with loren ipsum in it. Dated 3 minutes before the corruption.
This started the chain of events where one student was no longer in class, teacher was flabbergasted at stupidity for zero gain, and then kid not being in school anymore (I guess was not first issue). Uni it department also checked and verified and added to autoscans in monopoly software. Daughter got full credit for assignment since she had noting to peer review.
I should of been suspicious, I haven't seen a corrupted small file in years.
Hackerman is there but so is overly qualified accidental white hat
My high school they made me the IT tech support. I ran between two campuses and was called out of class regularly. Novell Netware, Windows 3.11, some BBS stuff? The only thing I didn't do was AV work.
I took my "job" very seriously. Started though because I was absolute always playing around on every system, which meant admin / root access, from the big local educational BBS to the library systems to the academic support stuff (I never played around with the grading system at all thankfully because most of the time it was just because I was blocked from doing something like use a disk in a drive or whatever).
Whoever setup these systems did things like whitelist apps, so if you wanted to use windows calculator it was blocked. So I'd jump into admin and run it from there. Nothing malicious. But I think they did have a bit of a debate (in hindsight) about which way to go, discipline or rope me in. I think the librarians carried the day actually because I'd been helping them with the netware stuff when I was in library hour (printers not printing / computers not working right / whatever).
Blackboard is terrible software. I have a feeling it's the most classic example of "design by committee" where all decisions lie with admin staff who never ever have to use the software. They just approve whatever has the biggest list of features. They earn so much money from tuition fees and care so little for usability of basic tools its astounding.
I'm not in education software myself but it seems to me a solution of sorts would be to push for standardization:
- open data exchange formats
- open communication protocols
- open social identity platforms
This doesn't fix the problem but at least it gives power to the people to do so. However, it won't happen on its own because it's not in the best interest of anyone currently in position to do anything about it.
Yes blackboard is absolutely horrible. One of (many) experiences I had, was a course coordinator for a project course where students submitted a research report at the end. We needed to get the reports uploaded to turnitin through the platform, the interface for doing this was horrible enough, you essentially needed to check the reports in a big table and press upload selected to turnitin. The thing would just randomly fail and no reports would be generated. After much fiddling I found that the process failed likely (I don't quite remember how I found this) because in the background blackboard would generate a zip or tarfile and then upload that to turnitin. The thing was the VMs they seemed used were horribly under provisioned, so the zip or tar process would run out of memory and be killed. The thing was, there was no easy way of knowing how many reports reliably worked, so the solution (proposed by blackboard support) was I should just go to every report individually and upload. A process that took about 3 h because the interface was so horribly slow. Considering that I was already completely overworked (80h weeks) not a suitable solution.
Fortunately, many universities are moving to other platforms. Where I am now we use canvas, which is open source and really like night and day compared to blackboard. I also heard good things about moodle (another OSS solution).
I've used Moodle a couple of times, including building a course from scratch three months ago. It has a good feature set out of the box, has plenty of plug-ins for add-on functionality and - for me, the best thing - a really helpful and responsive user community. (See the forums [1])
Documentation is also refreshingly comprehensive and up to date.
So you are aware your dislike of Blackboard for reasons above are misplaced:
- TurnItIn is a 3rd party Blackboard extension and the school selected to use this.
- The school was also likely self hosting an under provisioned system.
I'm sure there are plenty of valid reasons for you to dislike Blackboard, but above cases are the school in question and TurnItIn.
- I know that turnitin is a 3rd party extension, however it was failing on the blackboard side if I recall correctly.
- The university was not self-hosting as far as I know. I was not in the IT department, so would not know 100%, but in my interactions with IT they said that the service was hosted by blackboard and we had limited control over the system, e.g. pretty much every issue had to be escalated to blackboard.
Do you have any experience with EdX[1], out of interest?
While I can't speak for the specific formats and protocols they use, they're a non-profit, are founded & governed by educational institutions, and develop their service using an open source software model.
Those aren't guaranteed to result in a better result for users and institutions of course, but they would seem to avoid some of the worst-case scenarios that fee-based for-profit platforms might find themselves developing into.
EdX was trying to create a community around their software as well. Although the person I know who was there working on that left and I don't know the current status.
That's only part of the solution though. Even if EdX, as far as it goes, is an open platform, someone needs to run and support it for schools, you need email and doc sharing, etc. etc. It's fine to say that everyone should just run Linux, OpenOffice, and so forth and just shrug if that's too complicated for a lot of students and teachers. But that's not an actual solution.
In principle, the government at some level could do its own collaborative/learning software and host it but people would perhaps rightly then ask why the government isn't using readily available commercial off the shelf software like most companies do.
I felt like edx squandered a bit of their value by being so harvard focused. Like, they built a search engine so that instructors could search through all the course materials created across all edx courses. But then it was only available at Harvard. And there lacked a connection or understanding that edx could be very useful for traditional courses as much as moocs and could have benefited from user interaction studies there. Oh well. All that is still doable. But apparently education is happy with blackboard and zoom.
I never really felt the Harvard focus. I've taken at least MIT and Harvard courses on it. Maybe others (not really sure what has been Coursera and which EdX). Probably the biggest issue for me is a general one with MOOCs. They mostly solve for something which really isn't that much of a problem (broadcasting a video). Other things not so much.
My experience over the past nine months is that there are a lot of platforms with work pretty well with experience facilitators for a modest-sized group. And nothing that is really very satisfactory for interactivity at scale, especially with a heterogeneous audience (except in the most glancing way like poll questions).
I used to do research on how students use educational technology, like video lectures, in moocs. So I guess I'm probably biased because I know a lot of the edx people and some of the behind the scenes stuff.
I agree that interactivity at scale is super difficult. The problem is that in a course you are teaching more or less solved problems to bring students up to speed to where the field is. So the same questions get asked from class to class and group to group. There's the idea that you can compile all this knowledge and questions and then provide that as a resource to students. But actually the hardship of getting through those questions, even though they are the same, is how they learn. So the resources are nice for instructors but not as useful for students directly. There's definitely a lot of space for innovation but most of the people doing that either lack the technical expertise of developers etc because they come from education departments or they lack the ___domain knowledge of education research. There's a somewhat large space to fill with people who are good at both.
This already somewhat exists in the form of LTIs[0] and the Common Cartridge format[1], which are standards for application interoperability (i.e, how an app exchanges data with an LMS) and data exchange (export course content from one LMS and bring it into another), respectively. Social identity isn't really used, instead most institutions use Shibboleth/Gsuite/Azure AD as a SAML Auth gateway that authenticates users to services. All of these standards are supported by Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle and pretty much every other LMS that wants to get traction now (since all your other software expects it).
Jira is another good example. Or enterprise software like oracle or salesforce to a degree.
When the response to your question to the customer of "what features do you want" is "every part of my job I don't like" it's going to end up that way. Or you'll loose the bullet list bingo during aquisition.
Enumerating problems is the first step toward a solution. It's also valuable in making people aware of the problems. If you feel like you have read enough about the problems already, congrats, you're informed enough that you're not the intended audience.
And if someone's tiredness is, as you apparently believe, the most important criterion for whether something gets written, allow me to point out that I'm tired of the "don't bring me problems, bring me solutions" routine. I associate it with bad, authoritarian managers. And I think it's even less justifiable when the complainer a) isn't who the article was addressed to, and b) is complaining about a problem without offering a solution.
Yeah but this space/topic is FULL of people enumerating problems. The parent comment isn't saying that enumerating problems isn't useful, they are pointing out the lack of any actionable next steps being provided is the problem.
I think we still need to reach the step of enumerating why the problems are problems before it will be clear to people why and how they can be addressed.
Because corporations have become extensively global they now have extensively more reach than individual governments.
I find it is whether this is concerning to a person that typically indicates how they feel about things like in the article.
So the “solutions” are about dealing with a large quantity of multinational corporations as opposed to education or other things.
Do we continue to try to unify governments globally as was done with the EU?
Do we’re work towards international trade agreements to standardize the rules for these corporations such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership?
Do we limit the size vertical integration of corporations via anti-trust regulations?
There are also other potential tools, but in reality this is a difficult modern problem that will likely define the direction of the next hundred years of human history. Personally that feels important enough to me to keep an open dialogue as we search for solutions and identify specific issues to the current situation.
This is illogical to say that you cannot criticize something if you don't offer a solution. Why don't you put in the work to find a solution instead of demanding others do it for you?
Besides, plenty of work has already gone into proposing solutions to monopolies, it's more likely that you just don't like any of them. What must be done now? To me it seems the best thing is for you to come up with a solution you like, since only you know best.
“Why don't you put in the work to find a solution instead of demanding others do it for you?”
I think that’s what OP is criticizing the author for. It’s far easier to point out problems (especially when lots of other people have already written about them) than it is to suggest a solution.
Why should pointing out problems come with solutions? If some corporation causes me or my community harm, I'm gonna point it out. If they pay me to, I'll come up with solutions.
There are issues with remote interaction which are pretty well understood, including by companies and other organizations spending a heck of a lot more money and tech resources than secondary schools have available. I'm in meetings at least once a month that relate to these topics. Some things are working pretty well. Others not.
The whole article complains that 1) corporations give users everything they could ever want, 2) making it an "impossible dream" to build public cooperative platforms.
They already know what the solution is, but they pretend it's impossible in the premise of their argument, so they don't have to face reality and actually start building it.
> Anyone can enumerate the bad things about something.
Similarly, anyone could enumerate the good, right?
Let's start here.
I've gone searching for solutions (in the specific field of dyslexia education) but haven't been able to find much, or vet what I found. But I found two things. If you can find more, let's start a public list.
A Digital App to Aid Detection, Monitoring, and Management of Dyslexia in Young Children (DIMMAND): Protocol for a Digital Health and Education Solution
> I'm so tired of articles like this that never enumerate solutions. Anyone can enumerate the bad things about something. You don't need to know anything about the situation to do that, so why leave the analysis at the minimally-developed step?
Amen. It seems like 99.9% of all online content that address already well-known problems are like this. I find myself increasingly tuning out, no matter how well-written, if there isn't a good portion dedicated to actual solutions.
The primary problem from my perspective, as a parent, is that there is no standardization in how teachers set up their classes on these platforms. Assignments and instructions are scattered across different platforms, it would be nice to just have a syllabus for each class with information on assignments and tests.
Too bad the capitalists came in and locked schools into pricey purchase agreements that required slick new books to be re-purchased every couple of years and started to drain our school budgets.
Analyzing the situation before schools ever used cloud platforms and why these platforms are alluring to begin with should be a big part of this discussion, because you must understand how you got here to ever understand where to go.
For example, when I was high school in the early 2000s, the most advanced setup my high school had was for students to use USB sticks or email the teachers assignments, and it sucked for everyone. The teachers each came up with their own effort to track files. And there was a lot of work for teachers, e.g. students forgetting to attach the file. Or, a clever hackerman such as myself, deleting a couple bytes in the file before attaching it to buy myself an extra day.
In university, the school used Blackboard which is apparently very expensive and definitely very underwhelming.
After those two experiences, I'm not surprised that Google suite is a true breath of fresh air for schools and students alike. I know nothing about the education system beyond this post, so I would love to hear something more informative about the situation than "capitalism bad".