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> 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
by JumpCrisscross 6mo 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.)
- e28eta 6mo agoStudents 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.
- lacunary 6mo agoIf only we had some way of signing messages
- pishpash 6mo agoYou forget things can be signed, with the key owned by the school. It can be done.
- SlightlyLeftPad 6mo agoDoes signing really make this easily auditable from the professor’s perspective?
- DaSHacka 6mo agoExactly 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.
- Forgeties79 6mo agoThey 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.
- jazzyjackson 6mo agoI 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?
- gruez 6mo agoAs opposed to a screenshot of a website? Presumably the professor has a spreadsheet of all assignment grades that is submitted to the school?
- blahedo 6mo agoNope! We're encouraged to keep all that exclusively in canvas. (As noted, I have my own spreadsheet. But I'm an outlier.)
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> Presumably the professor has a spreadsheet of all assignment grades that is submitted to the school? This would undermine Canvas's lock-in.
- doctorpangloss 6mo agoi 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 6mo agoOn 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 6mo ago> 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/ https://moodle.org/
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> 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 6mo agoDKIM signature could be used to verify that Canvas' server sent the email with the given content
- tempaccount5050 6mo agoAnd who exactly do you think is going to verify 100s of thousands of emails this way dude?
- bravura 6mo agoA computer?
- nbernard 6mo agoGood luck having people forward an email a) with headers and b) in a way that doesn't break the signature...
- gucci-on-fleek 6mo agoPresumably 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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- hoppyhoppy2 6mo agoEmails from Canvas saying a grade is available do not currently include the actual grade in the email, so that would have to be implemented first. And it's probably not implemented quite intentionally because of FERPA.
- MarsIronPI 6mo agoMakes 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.
- moralestapia 6mo ago>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.
- gucci-on-fleek 6mo agoI'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.
- dotancohen 6mo ago> 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?
- shakna 6mo agoMost 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.
- weird-eye-issue 6mo agoMost graduates aren't really qualified to work anywhere that they couldn't have worked before going to college in the first place.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- bartread 6mo ago> They don’t do it, because they want to control the data. Ironically, this incident shows they don’t have control of anything.