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I teach at a world ranking university in the UK which has decided that in order to have a 'standardised student experience' teachers are prohibited from running

by nanna 6y ago

I teach at a world ranking university in the UK which has decided that in order to have a 'standardised student experience' teachers are prohibited from running their own FLOSS setup when there are proprietary contracts in place. Sorry but MS Teams is not designed with teaching in mind. I've been advocating for Big Blue Button and Jitsi but effectively told to shut up. It's infuriating.

vhakulinen 6y ago
You could try to calculate some numbers on savings or "wasted hours because the corporate support is slow and wont fix our problems fast enough" to turn their heads around. Another pointer could be that the students could be involved in running some of the systems. Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot.
- nanna 6y ago
  The problem is that Microsoft are good at selling a product which just works out of the box and is just about sufficient, even if it's not tailored to your use-case. Plus there's so little transparency as to how much they're charging my university, or how many hours wasted there are, so it's hard to make a price-comparison. Student participation in some of the projects could work for certain modules, but only as experiments -- again we've been specifically prohibited from spinning up our own solutions. > Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot. I agree that ultimately what needs to happen is that those of us who care about FLOSS need to organise and try to chip away at the corporate one-size-fits-all dependency syndrome at the university. The kinds of data ownership debates happening in Germany seem very far off here. The British university is in retreat. [1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/10/uk-universities-suffer-worst-ever-rankings-in-world-league-table https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/10/uk-univers...
- brodouevencode 6y ago
  > You could try to calculate some numbers on savings or "wasted hours because the corporate support is slow and wont fix our problems fast enough" to turn their heads around. If the UK universities are anything like the US universities this is near impossible to do. Maybe COVID has changed some things but when I worked in the university system (state run) it was more about who could woo what administrator. The amount of waste and nepotism would make your head spin.
neilv 6y ago
If some of the faculty researched the relevance of FLOSS to university missions, and then made a good argument for it, do you think the university would change this IT policy?
- nanna 6y ago
  Senior management are the ones making these calls about enforcing standardised systems, and they do not take advice from us pipsqueaks below. Right now everythings in emergency mode anyway so as far as they're concerned outsourcing everything to Microsoft is one less problem. Everything can be justified by the state of exception. Kudos to MIT for leaving their staff to make such calls for themselves. I know Sussman is a superstar but still. I'm sure a culture like that helps contribute to MIT being the world's most highly ranked university.
frabbit 6y ago
Keep advocating :) One thing about Big Blue Button though: a friend teaches in a smallish university and has been trying to find out how to get simple, turnkey hosted installations of it (the IT department is not interested). It seems inordinately difficult to simply create an account with one of the listed hosters on the page and start paying. The big draw of BBB is the whiteboarding feature. The alternative is Jisti Meet with the "Presenter" mode sharing a LibreOffice window, which actually works pretty well, but would be better if it were possible to toggle on/off the thumbnail of the presenter (it currently occupies about the lower right ninth of the screen). Jitsi Meet is so far (out of Teams, BlueJeans (no linux desktop client and therefore no whiteboard), BBB) the best.
dreamcompiler 6y ago
You bring up a fascinating point. In many large enterprises -- even those that make money in some aspect of computing -- the centralized IT organization controls everything related to computers. I think we would find it odd if, say, the John Deere Corporation was forced by their "Transportation Support" organization to use Honda ATVs for moving people and goods around their factory campus. Or if Yale Law School was not allowed to purchase books written by their faculty. Or if the Stanford EE department was not allowed to equip their buildings with low-voltage LED lighting they had invented. And yet we just accept that a leading computer science department at a major university can be forced to use crap enterprise software that's vastly inferior to anything they themselves could have written. Some of my examples might be hyperbolic. But the power of IT departments to mandate a dumbed-down status quo still seems very weird to me. I believe it's one of the factors that keeps computer science and engineering from making more forward progress.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  ‘The tail wagging the dog’ is what I think when I read your comment. Thanks for writing this.
- bberenberg 6y ago
  I think your examples actually show exactly why IT controls everything, and not people who want to do stuff because they feel like it that day. John Deere does not make ATVs, they don't make any tier of people moving equipment. The idea that they should use their own is ridiculous. If they didn't enforce the Honda rule, people would be riding around in the front of dozers. Much in the same way that if Stanford invented new bulbs, they would be used in a lab. With safety standards applied. Why don't you want these newly invented bulbs used all over your building? Well, what happens when they burn your building down? What happens if the people in the lab who invented them decide to make a company selling them, and are busy with that, and now you need to pay your maintenance people to deal with these new bulbs they don't know how to use. Being slow to change in a larger organization is a feature, not a bug.
  - dreamcompiler 6y ago

by nanna 6y ago

vhakulinen 6y ago

You could try to calculate some numbers on savings or "wasted hours because the corporate support is slow and wont fix our problems fast enough" to turn their heads around. Another pointer could be that the students could be involved in running some of the systems. Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot.

nanna 6y ago
The problem is that Microsoft are good at selling a product which just works out of the box and is just about sufficient, even if it's not tailored to your use-case. Plus there's so little transparency as to how much they're charging my university, or how many hours wasted there are, so it's hard to make a price-comparison. Student participation in some of the projects could work for certain modules, but only as experiments -- again we've been specifically prohibited from spinning up our own solutions. > Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot. I agree that ultimately what needs to happen is that those of us who care about FLOSS need to organise and try to chip away at the corporate one-size-fits-all dependency syndrome at the university. The kinds of data ownership debates happening in Germany seem very far off here. The British university is in retreat. [1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/10/uk-universities-suffer-worst-ever-rankings-in-world-league-table https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/10/uk-univers...
brodouevencode 6y ago
> You could try to calculate some numbers on savings or "wasted hours because the corporate support is slow and wont fix our problems fast enough" to turn their heads around. If the UK universities are anything like the US universities this is near impossible to do. Maybe COVID has changed some things but when I worked in the university system (state run) it was more about who could woo what administrator. The amount of waste and nepotism would make your head spin.

neilv 6y ago

If some of the faculty researched the relevance of FLOSS to university missions, and then made a good argument for it, do you think the university would change this IT policy?

nanna 6y ago
Senior management are the ones making these calls about enforcing standardised systems, and they do not take advice from us pipsqueaks below. Right now everythings in emergency mode anyway so as far as they're concerned outsourcing everything to Microsoft is one less problem. Everything can be justified by the state of exception. Kudos to MIT for leaving their staff to make such calls for themselves. I know Sussman is a superstar but still. I'm sure a culture like that helps contribute to MIT being the world's most highly ranked university.

frabbit 6y ago

Keep advocating :) One thing about Big Blue Button though: a friend teaches in a smallish university and has been trying to find out how to get simple, turnkey hosted installations of it (the IT department is not interested). It seems inordinately difficult to simply create an account with one of the listed hosters on the page and start paying. The big draw of BBB is the whiteboarding feature. The alternative is Jisti Meet with the "Presenter" mode sharing a LibreOffice window, which actually works pretty well, but would be better if it were possible to toggle on/off the thumbnail of the presenter (it currently occupies about the lower right ninth of the screen). Jitsi Meet is so far (out of Teams, BlueJeans (no linux desktop client and therefore no whiteboard), BBB) the best.

dreamcompiler 6y ago

You bring up a fascinating point. In many large enterprises -- even those that make money in some aspect of computing -- the centralized IT organization controls everything related to computers. I think we would find it odd if, say, the John Deere Corporation was forced by their "Transportation Support" organization to use Honda ATVs for moving people and goods around their factory campus. Or if Yale Law School was not allowed to purchase books written by their faculty. Or if the Stanford EE department was not allowed to equip their buildings with low-voltage LED lighting they had invented. And yet we just accept that a leading computer science department at a major university can be forced to use crap enterprise software that's vastly inferior to anything they themselves could have written. Some of my examples might be hyperbolic. But the power of IT departments to mandate a dumbed-down status quo still seems very weird to me. I believe it's one of the factors that keeps computer science and engineering from making more forward progress.

lostlogin 6y ago
‘The tail wagging the dog’ is what I think when I read your comment. Thanks for writing this.
bberenberg 6y ago
I think your examples actually show exactly why IT controls everything, and not people who want to do stuff because they feel like it that day. John Deere does not make ATVs, they don't make any tier of people moving equipment. The idea that they should use their own is ridiculous. If they didn't enforce the Honda rule, people would be riding around in the front of dozers. Much in the same way that if Stanford invented new bulbs, they would be used in a lab. With safety standards applied. Why don't you want these newly invented bulbs used all over your building? Well, what happens when they burn your building down? What happens if the people in the lab who invented them decide to make a company selling them, and are busy with that, and now you need to pay your maintenance people to deal with these new bulbs they don't know how to use. Being slow to change in a larger organization is a feature, not a bug.
- dreamcompiler 6y ago