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I saw in your HN profile that you teach math. Is that why you prefer hard copy submissions? Must be hard to deal with sheaves of paper. My wife is a assistant

I saw in your HN profile that you teach math. Is that why you prefer hard copy submissions? Must be hard to deal with sheaves of paper. My wife is a assistant prof as well. I built her an e-mail bucketing system where her students email assignments to different email addresses (like assignment1@her-domain.com OR mid-term@her-domain.com) and it sits inside different buckets with the same name as the email address. That’s why I was curious about how other profs handle this situation. Edit_1: what’s the issue with Blackboard?

impendia 4y ago
I do teach math. If the exams are given in class, then I don't have any choice but hard copy. Exams are free-response, where showing your work matters, and these are difficult to pigeonhole into any particular format. As for Blackboard, I find it obtuse, slow, and painful to use. Anything you want to do requires multiple clicks, each of which takes a noticeable amount of time. Not that much, but after a lot of clicks my patience quickly runs thin. It is also a very elaborate piece of software, which has a very particular idea of what a course should look like -- and this idea is based on conversations with senior administrators, not with faculty or students. It is after all the former who are making the purchasing decisions. You can read this famous Twitter thread on Blackboard and baby clothes: https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 I have no desire to adapt my course to anyone else's workflow, let alone to one I find obtuse. That said, I am unusually stubborn in this regard, even by the standards of math departments. For example I still prefer to keep my schedule as a .txt file, rather than using Google Calendar/Outlook/etc., which pretty well marks me as a luddite. Not everyone hates BB.

impendia 4y ago

I do teach math. If the exams are given in class, then I don't have any choice but hard copy. Exams are free-response, where showing your work matters, and these are difficult to pigeonhole into any particular format. As for Blackboard, I find it obtuse, slow, and painful to use. Anything you want to do requires multiple clicks, each of which takes a noticeable amount of time. Not that much, but after a lot of clicks my patience quickly runs thin. It is also a very elaborate piece of software, which has a very particular idea of what a course should look like -- and this idea is based on conversations with senior administrators, not with faculty or students. It is after all the former who are making the purchasing decisions. You can read this famous Twitter thread on Blackboard and baby clothes: https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 I have no desire to adapt my course to anyone else's workflow, let alone to one I find obtuse. That said, I am unusually stubborn in this regard, even by the standards of math departments. For example I still prefer to keep my schedule as a .txt file, rather than using Google Calendar/Outlook/etc., which pretty well marks me as a luddite. Not everyone hates BB.