Universities used to do this sort of stuff themselves. Then it became a business handled by purchasing rather than needs met by the department themselves.

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afavour 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In fairness in the era where universities did it themselves the tech requirements and expectations were dramatically lower.

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asdff 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Tech requirements are the same as they always were. One needs to ask whether they need so many frameworks to host some files on the internet and submit some files and perform spreadsheet calculations. We still used one of those First Age 1990s websites for sort of pre lab quizzes this one class when I was going through it, and it might have looked a little "old" but I mean it did the thing and worked for years and will continue to do the thing and work for years.

	▲	internetter 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're being deliberately obtuse. Canvas has many many features. Wikis and discussion boards and quizzes (with some anticheat) and groups and the list goes on and on. Furthermore, while it was never the flashiest thing, it did it better than many of its predecessors. Yes, an individual class may not use all of these features, and yes canvas has suffered feature creep even over my time as a student and yes canvas is not doing anything technically challenging, but there is enough of it that each school rolling their own everything would be a drastic waste of everybody's time and money.

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clipsy 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Have these dramatically higher tech requirements and expectations improved the quality of education whatsoever?

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avs733 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because faculty didn’t want to do it anymore. They want it handled by others but also they want oversight and veto power but also they don’t want to be bothered. But it better always work, and if they make a mistake the software is broken because don’t tell them it’s a user error they used to write Fortran.

As a faculty member at a large university…I have a deep respect for the impossible job of university IT departments.

We originally rolled our on LMS decades ago. When we switched to canvas we kept the home brew running for five years past its expiration date because faculty refused to remove their files. Finally each one was manually moved by IT for the recalcitrant old faculty.

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asdff 9 hours ago | parent [-]

It is kind of funny when these LMS tools with 100+ functions are being used for little more than what email, a grades spreadsheet, and maybe a shared drive would do. University might even ask for the final grades in spreadsheet format by the end of the term anyhow, so data goes into the LMS just to come back out again.

	▲	avs733 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In a sense you aren’t wrong but those analogies fail at scale. It’s like saying you could replace all hr functions with a spreadsheet. They are large databases yes but they do a lot of small and large things that that analogy glosses over