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The world of school software and educational materials is a dystopian and dysfunctional nightmare. Nearly all a re badly designed, sloe, confusing and built wit

The world of school software and educational materials is a dystopian and dysfunctional nightmare. Nearly all a re badly designed, sloe, confusing and built with accidental and intentional backdoors, spyware and software sxpliciftly intended to cripple your PC (no screenshots, no copying, phone home functions)... And all of them are deeply designed for 'lock in' - nothing more profitable than a guaranteed multi year contract with tens of thousands of unwilling students. 98% of features are broken and just exist on fancy marketing documents to make sure some lying middleman can push them through a procurement process. I remember being at an EdTech conference ~ 7 years ago and even then i was not just stunned by the amount of false claims (AI, ...) but also generally where the focus lay (anti-fraud, student control, web filters...). The whole ecosystem is just massively broken with students and teachers at most as an afterthought. Neither the entrenched companies nor startups seem to understand concepts like PEDAGOGY, TRUST or student-teacher RELATIONSHIP and instead consider students somewhere akin to criminals to be monitored, controlled and indoctrinated and teachers as nothing more than passive vessels that need ready made solutions and no freedom whatsoever. In the end your average functional school probably gets some of this software but most likely would fate best with its own install of Moodle (for all its flaws - reliable, lots of community support, and cheap) and then various web apps. With the current ecosystem most students and teachers fare best with just nothing than with any of this. School districts/owners should invest into teacher training and maybe generic moodle instances, and to get laptops near the classrooms. But please don't buy any of this evil crap.

coldcode 6y ago
Most school software of this type are designed to profit the companies and lose the students forever.
senko 6y ago
EdTech is "enterprise software" in the sense that the people controlling the purse strings are very removed from the actual users. In education, the decision makers are the school district leadership team, while the actual users are twice removed - students. This scenario encourages focus on features that are important for the decision makers and less focus on the features (or usability) important for the actual users - exactly as you describe. A bottom-up approach where students and teachers would identify what works best for them and push for it is extremely hard. Teachers try the best but are limited by their budgets (many pay out of their own purse for tools and equipment!) and students have basically no say. This leads to the situation where most successful (profitable, largest) edtech software has no relation to what actually might be the best tool.
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  Even in the private sector (my school is independent, with 600 pupils, 200 staff, $20M revenue) things are as bad. Technical decision making is by an IT department that reports through the bursar (head of all non academic staff) to the head. There’s no accountability to core competency: teaching and learning. We are merely stakeholders at an equal level on the org chart. Contrast this to when I was a FAANG SWE, when every function at the company — including IT — was subordinate to those who built the actual tech: Engineering. The flip side is that as a teacher I have complete autonomy over anything that does fall to me; namely the bulk of the CS curriculum and the way it is taught. (Tools like repl.it are wonderful for completely side stepping any involvement with bureaucracy. Invite the kids to sign up and just get stuff done.)
chongli 6y ago
The entire situation you described is perfectly relatable if you’ve read The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan [1]. In it, Caplan argues that the true purpose of education is not to improve students but for students to signal their worth as employees to their future employers. He backs up this argument with a bibliography of studies many pages long. I read the book as part of a philosophy course I took in university and as a decidedly non-libertarian person (Caplan is a libertarian economist), I found it a very challenging argument to confront. What was so vexing was how much his points seemed to agree with my experiences. My peers and fellow classmates were doing exactly as he described in the book: taking “bird courses” instead of challenging ones, only taking the minimum requirements for their degree and avoiding the optional challenging electives, memorizing / begging / borrowing / stealing / cheating their way to the best grades possible in their classes at the expense of actual learning. In the COVID era of online classes, class averages have gone way up. The academic integrity offices of most faculties have been overwhelmed with cheating cases. If the true purpose of education is to better oneself, why are so many people taking the opportunity to cheat at a time when schools have less ability to monitor for it? This is a question that vexes me endlessly, as a student trying to get the most out of his education. I have been taking as many challenging courses as I can, and plan to continue doing so for the remainder of my degree. I don’t cheat and consequently I find myself well below the high class averages. It leaves me wondering: am I the naïve one? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
- _jal 6y ago
  The US is a culture that has been repeating things like 'winning isn't everything, it is the only thing' from TVs, books, role models and T-shirts since before you could read. We have a president (for a bit longer) that celebrates not paying taxes. Many forms of white-collar crime are profitable after penalties. Culturally, you're being told you're a sucker if you don't cheat. Is it any surprise that an unmotivated person, (or a motivated one feeling pressure) will then turn around and cheat?
  - chongli 6y ago
    The US is a culture that has been repeating things like 'winning isn't everything, it is the only thing' A large proportion of the students we've caught cheating in our course (I'm a full-time assistant for a first-year CS course) are international students. This is a global phenomenon, not a US-specific one.
the_snooze 6y ago
Edtech is one of those cases where the product is designed for the decision-makers, not for the people who actually end up using it. https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776
- anamexis 6y ago
  I think that's true for the big players, like the Learning Management Systems (like Blackboard in your linked tweet.) For everyone else, their problem is that they have to integrate with the big players.
Robin_Message 6y ago
If anyone is involved in choosing software for schools, I used to work at Firefly Learning which had an excellent attitude towards actually serving our users (students, teachers, parents, generally in that order) rather than the decision makers. It showed. For example, an independent satisfaction survey in the UK gave them twice the user approval of the next best platform. (No current affiliation but they are a nice bunch and do a great job.)
Solocomplex 6y ago
It seems general-purpose computers are unfit for the task.
908B64B197 6y ago
It's one of the reasons I'm really happy with Windows S and ARM machines getting on the market. Want to install your special snowflake driver to take screenshots and do some tampering monitoring? Not allowed! You just detected a VM? Of course you did, every app runs in a sandbox now!

coldcode 6y ago

Most school software of this type are designed to profit the companies and lose the students forever.

senko 6y ago

EdTech is "enterprise software" in the sense that the people controlling the purse strings are very removed from the actual users. In education, the decision makers are the school district leadership team, while the actual users are twice removed - students. This scenario encourages focus on features that are important for the decision makers and less focus on the features (or usability) important for the actual users - exactly as you describe. A bottom-up approach where students and teachers would identify what works best for them and push for it is extremely hard. Teachers try the best but are limited by their budgets (many pay out of their own purse for tools and equipment!) and students have basically no say. This leads to the situation where most successful (profitable, largest) edtech software has no relation to what actually might be the best tool.

gorgoiler 6y ago
Even in the private sector (my school is independent, with 600 pupils, 200 staff, $20M revenue) things are as bad. Technical decision making is by an IT department that reports through the bursar (head of all non academic staff) to the head. There’s no accountability to core competency: teaching and learning. We are merely stakeholders at an equal level on the org chart. Contrast this to when I was a FAANG SWE, when every function at the company — including IT — was subordinate to those who built the actual tech: Engineering. The flip side is that as a teacher I have complete autonomy over anything that does fall to me; namely the bulk of the CS curriculum and the way it is taught. (Tools like repl.it are wonderful for completely side stepping any involvement with bureaucracy. Invite the kids to sign up and just get stuff done.)

chongli 6y ago

The entire situation you described is perfectly relatable if you’ve read The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan [1]. In it, Caplan argues that the true purpose of education is not to improve students but for students to signal their worth as employees to their future employers. He backs up this argument with a bibliography of studies many pages long. I read the book as part of a philosophy course I took in university and as a decidedly non-libertarian person (Caplan is a libertarian economist), I found it a very challenging argument to confront. What was so vexing was how much his points seemed to agree with my experiences. My peers and fellow classmates were doing exactly as he described in the book: taking “bird courses” instead of challenging ones, only taking the minimum requirements for their degree and avoiding the optional challenging electives, memorizing / begging / borrowing / stealing / cheating their way to the best grades possible in their classes at the expense of actual learning. In the COVID era of online classes, class averages have gone way up. The academic integrity offices of most faculties have been overwhelmed with cheating cases. If the true purpose of education is to better oneself, why are so many people taking the opportunity to cheat at a time when schools have less ability to monitor for it? This is a question that vexes me endlessly, as a student trying to get the most out of his education. I have been taking as many challenging courses as I can, and plan to continue doing so for the remainder of my degree. I don’t cheat and consequently I find myself well below the high class averages. It leaves me wondering: am I the naïve one? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education

_jal 6y ago
The US is a culture that has been repeating things like 'winning isn't everything, it is the only thing' from TVs, books, role models and T-shirts since before you could read. We have a president (for a bit longer) that celebrates not paying taxes. Many forms of white-collar crime are profitable after penalties. Culturally, you're being told you're a sucker if you don't cheat. Is it any surprise that an unmotivated person, (or a motivated one feeling pressure) will then turn around and cheat?
- chongli 6y ago
  The US is a culture that has been repeating things like 'winning isn't everything, it is the only thing' A large proportion of the students we've caught cheating in our course (I'm a full-time assistant for a first-year CS course) are international students. This is a global phenomenon, not a US-specific one.

the_snooze 6y ago

Edtech is one of those cases where the product is designed for the decision-makers, not for the people who actually end up using it. https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776

anamexis 6y ago
I think that's true for the big players, like the Learning Management Systems (like Blackboard in your linked tweet.) For everyone else, their problem is that they have to integrate with the big players.

Robin_Message 6y ago

If anyone is involved in choosing software for schools, I used to work at Firefly Learning which had an excellent attitude towards actually serving our users (students, teachers, parents, generally in that order) rather than the decision makers. It showed. For example, an independent satisfaction survey in the UK gave them twice the user approval of the next best platform. (No current affiliation but they are a nice bunch and do a great job.)

Solocomplex 6y ago

It seems general-purpose computers are unfit for the task.

908B64B197 6y ago

It's one of the reasons I'm really happy with Windows S and ARM machines getting on the market. Want to install your special snowflake driver to take screenshots and do some tampering monitoring? Not allowed! You just detected a VM? Of course you did, every app runs in a sandbox now!