> 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?

▲

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/