| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 7 hours ago |
| > the students themselves don't have the artifacts to resubmit via email because they were done in Canvas It’s so simple to send an e-mail to the student with relevant records on completion of a quiz or whatnot. They don’t do it, because they want to control the data. (And universities don’t insist on it for who knows what reason.) |
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| ▲ | gucci-on-fleek 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I've never used Canvas before, but all the LMSes that I've used allow students to enable emails whenever anything is updated, including when grades are posted. This is off by default because it's often 10+ emails a day, because many teachers post notes once a day, and with 5 classes, that adds up pretty quick. I personally have it enabled because it's pretty manageable with some custom Outlook rules, but setting this up is well beyond the capabilities of most students. |
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| ▲ | dotancohen 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > setting this up is well beyond the capabilities of most students.
Setting up custom email filters is beyond the capabilities of most students? What are they learning? Where will they be qualified to work? | | |
| ▲ | weird-eye-issue 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Most graduates aren't really qualified to work anywhere that they couldn't have worked before going to college in the first place. | | |
| ▲ | smcin 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | You mean graduates of US colleges? Not colleges in general. Or non-technical graduates of US colleges? |
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| ▲ | metaengies 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Where will they be qualified to work? Going by a certain story 2 years ago, their concern should be that they're overqualified for Meta. It doesn't help that gmail, which is the only serious direct competition to outlook, straight up doesn't do "folders" and instead goes with markers. So you can't really just put a filter that drags all the 100 low-priority alerts in what would count as a first degree abstraction of "place where things are sorted into". No, there are two layers of abstraction between point A and B of things, sorter and sorted things. The result? Muggles can't recognize the heck you're describing and refuse to even acknowledge the possibility. | | |
| ▲ | user_7832 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > It doesn't help that gmail, which is the only serious direct competition to outlook, straight up doesn't do "folders" and instead goes with markers. While true, unless I'm mistaken, markers (I assume you're referring to tags) can be nested to provide a pseudo-folder hierarchy, and with proper filters you can remove the "inbox" tag and have the mail only show up under the specific tag. TBH I don't fully mind it, it lets you classify an email in multiple ways (eg "See Later" as well as "Work related"). | |
| ▲ | GTP an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I partially solve this by using Thunderbird on my laptop. When I get emails on my smartphone (on the Gmail app), they unfortunately all go to the inbox. But the moment I open Thunderbird, it nicely organizes them for me. | | |
| ▲ | dotancohen an hour ago | parent [-] | | I use Thunderbird on both the desktop and Android. Love it. Perhaps Outlook is difficult to configure. Thunderbird is intuitive. |
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| ▲ | teiferer 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If a CS graduate can't figure out some simple gmail labels and filters then they should not be awarded that degree. Plain and simple. It's not rocket science. | | |
| ▲ | Poacher5 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | And there are no other students at any college other than CS students? I'm not sure why a biologist or a literature student would need to be au fait with Google's admittedly fairly unfriendly email management setup. | | |
| ▲ | denkmoon 37 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Digital literacy is important to every field. Email filters are not some arcane computer science concept, they are the modern equivalent of filing physical mail into the right folder/pidgeon hole/inbox/whatever. Biology is a great example because of just how important digital record management is to experimentation in the field. |
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| ▲ | fooker 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I have been using email for as long as email was a thing and I still managed to blackhole important emails with filters not too long ago. | |
| ▲ | setopt 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In my experience, it’s hard enough to make students check their school email in the first place. Let alone filter it. | |
| ▲ | gucci-on-fleek 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'd hope/assume that any Computer Science students would be able to do this, but most Biology/Education/English/Art students probably couldn't. I mean, anyone smart enough to attend university could probably figure it out if they really wanted to, but there are hundreds of other useful things that they could learn too. There are only so many hours in the day, and given that most students don't get that many emails, I can hardly blame them for not wanting to prioritize learning how to filter emails. (I personally have over a hundred lines of Sieve filters, but I'm definitely not a typical student) | |
| ▲ | throawayonthe 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | it's MS software, i think it's inanely difficult | |
| ▲ | shakna 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Most managers I've met, struggle with setting up email filters, and have to ask tech support to do it for them. These students will be qualified just fine. | |
| ▲ | emodendroket 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Most people who have office jobs don't know how to do this either | |
| ▲ | Scroll_Swe an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >Setting up custom email filters is beyond the capabilities of most students? Yes. And most of the general population. They can do it once they know it exists, most people just are not aware it is a thing at all. >What are they learning? Here, their "major" as you say in the US. Someone in econ, biology or even CS is not going to learn Outlook rules. Maybe IT or business will have a sentence on it. >Where will they be qualified to work? Any office job. Any job really. | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > What are they learning? Exactly what is in their field of study, nothing more. That's a huge part of the problems created by treating academia as a degree mill mandatory to get a job able to feed yourself instead of a place only for those truly interested in actually studying a subject. |
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| ▲ | e28eta 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Students having records of what their score was doesn't prove to the professor / university what score they received. "FWD: Exam 1 Results" is not especially auditable. |
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| ▲ | lacunary 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If only we had some way of signing messages | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Students having records of what their score was doesn't prove to the professor / university what score they received It's better than nothing. (And good training for the real world.) Also, most universities (and many schools now) issue academic e-mail addresses to students. In those cases, the email is definitive proof. | |
| ▲ | AmblingAvocado 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | DKIM signature could be used to verify that Canvas' server sent the email with the given content | | | |
| ▲ | gruez 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As opposed to a screenshot of a website? Presumably the professor has a spreadsheet of all assignment grades that is submitted to the school? | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Presumably the professor has a spreadsheet of all assignment grades that is submitted to the school? This would undermine Canvas's lock-in. | | |
| ▲ | freeopinion 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Canvas is built to automatically export its gradebook to an external system. It will do that automatically every day if you want it to. Teachers or others can manually export to the configured foreign system on demand. So if you grade something and want it to show up in the foreign gradebook without waiting for the daily export, you can just press the button to make it happen right away. | |
| ▲ | doctorpangloss 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | i cannot believe how much benefit of the doubt people are giving canvas ed tech is the WORST performing VC sector the ONLY game in that town is vendor lock-in! are people joking? c'mon, canvas is a huge piece of shit. the SaaSpocalypse is coming for them - it seems it is simply that LLMs will be used to exploit it first, rather than universities writing an open alternative they share with each other for free. | | |
| ▲ | freeopinion 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Canvas is AGPL licensed. Moodle is GPL. Universities or anyone else can already contribute to big name LMS. Canvas is used by Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, CalTech, etc. If they each paid 10 FTE, they could set up a foundation that could govern the development of a top-tier LMS. Every tier-1 state institution could contribute 5 FTE. Even little JuCos could chip in an employee here and there. You'd pick up hundreds of capable employees at a fraction of what those schools currently pay to Instructure. | | |
| ▲ | freeopinion 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How well has this worked for Open edX? | |
| ▲ | gizajob 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why do they all pay for it then? Seems pretty universal in the UK too. Is it having the benefit of someone to blame when things go wrong? |
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| ▲ | freeopinion 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | On paper your idea seems obvious. You take a bunch of institutions that actually teach students how to program and have them cooperate to build an open LMS that benefits them all. In reality, universities always spin off anything that looks like it could generate revenue. It is very telling that you can't even get your college transcript from your college. You have to go to (and pay) some third party to get it. Some universities even outsource their "classes" like elderhostel to cruise lines and travel companies. | |
| ▲ | gucci-on-fleek 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > rather than universities writing an open alternative they share with each other for free That already exists [0], and is actually reasonably popular. > the SaaSpocalypse is coming for them - it seems it is simply that LLMs will be used to exploit it first I doubt it, because enterprise sales has nothing to do with how good your product is, how expensive it is, how easy it is to administer, how secure it is, etc.; it only depends on how good you are at enterprise sales. I mean, my university is Oracle-based, and I'm pretty sure that you could get 3 random undergraduates to write something better, so I don't think that LLMs writing better/cheaper software will make any difference here. [0]: https://moodle.org/ |
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| ▲ | blahedo 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nope! We're encouraged to keep all that exclusively in canvas. (As noted, I have my own spreadsheet. But I'm an outlier.) |
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| ▲ | gucci-on-fleek 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Presumably the system will be back up eventually, so there's not much benefit to lying here, since at best you'll raise your grade in a few classes for a couple months, while taking on a pretty big risk of getting caught. | |
| ▲ | pishpash 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You forget things can be signed, with the key owned by the school. It can be done. | | |
| ▲ | SlightlyLeftPad 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Does signing really make this easily auditable from the professor’s perspective? | | |
| ▲ | DaSHacka 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Exactly this, when was the last time a HN user had to interact with the prototypical 60-year-old set-in-their-ways professor? Extremely non-tech savvy, hates computers, and is gonna grumble "What the hell is a PGP? Better not be another one of those phone code things." as you try to pitch this highly-technological solution to a largely niche problem domain. | | |
| ▲ | jazzyjackson 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I mean a cloud based learning management system also seems to be a very technological solution to the very old problem of checks notes grading quizzes? | |
| ▲ | Forgeties79 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They don’t even need to not be tech savvy. This stuff just registers as “hassle” to most people so they do the bare minimum or search for ways to not deal with it at all. It’s easy to “tut tut” at them but ultimately we need to accept reality: privacy, security, these things take extra effort that isn’t strictly necessary for people to go about their daily lives even though the stakes can be super high. It’s not a problem until it is, so they aren’t really barriers that require people to do the work. It’s like convincing someone who just simply doesn’t want to go out and buy/install a lock on their door to go do it, except it’s not even a one-time thing. Their door works fine. They can come and go as they please. It’s not until something happens that they maybe change their tune (and even then!) Hell just getting people to do secure passwords is a whole thing. |
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| ▲ | MarsIronPI 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Makes me glad I've always avoided doing my work on web platforms. When we used to have to make presentations in Google Slides I used to do them in Org-mode, then export to Sheets. I still have all those assignments sitting on my disk. Sure, there's versions of them on Google Drive, but I always make sure that the canonical version is the one on my disk. |
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| ▲ | moralestapia 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| >It’s so simple to send an e-mail to the student ... What seems easy on hobby projects gets way more difficult at scale. Source: experience. |