5 ms·
I'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.
by gucci-on-fleek 6mo ago
I'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.
- smcin 6mo agoYou mean graduates of US colleges? Not colleges in general. Or non-technical graduates of US colleges?
- J-Kuhn 6mo agoI think they point weird-eye-issue wants to make is: Students attend college to become qualified to work.
- weird-eye-issue 6mo agoI think you completely misread my comment.
- smcin 6mo agoI understood your comment perfectly fine. I'm asking which graduates of which colleges you were referring to. It looked like you were generalizing about US HS and colleges. If so, plenty of other countries' HS and college education systems work better, so your comment doesn't extend.
- weird-eye-issue 6mo agoI didn't even reply to you.
- smcin 6mo agoI'm not confused. Your comment stated that college doesn't add much to a person's employability. (If you had wanted to be less obfuscatory, you could simply have said "a [HS] education is already adequate qualification for many jobs; college doesn't add much"). That was your claim. (I don't think your claim is correct of many OECD countries' colleges, but it was the claim you made.) You then replied to J-Kuhn to say that they had misunderstood your comment by (mis)paraphrasing it as "Students attend college to become qualified to work."
- weird-eye-issue 6mo agoIt's a little weird how I ignored your comment and replied to somebody else and then you felt the need to reply to me again and again
- smcin 5mo agoNot really. The comment of yours that started the lack of clarity is this double-negative, and 0/2 of us who responded to you here found it useful: > Most graduates aren't really qualified to work anywhere that they couldn't have worked before going to college in the first place. The double-negative could be read both ways: "Most HS grads aren't really qualified to work anywhere and college doesn't add much" or "a [HS] education is already adequate qualification for many jobs; college doesn't add much". So we apply Occam's razor and since the [U-5] unemployment rate for [US] HS grads is << 50%, conclude you meant the former. But the comment was still needlessly obfuscation. Even if we assume which country and education system you were talking about. Conversely, it's a little weird how I ignored your lack of clarity and didn't point it out so starkly, then you reduce the interaction to this ping-pong. I don't intend to overflow the stack on this.
- lokar 6mo agoI used LaTeX as a ugrad, it’s not that hard
- recursive 6mo agoCongratulations on your competence.
- skeeter2020 6mo agoyou're at the other end of the spectrum; unless you get work in academia this is not an advantange.
- lokar 6mo agoI use it to filter recruiters, if they can’t accept (a well typeset) PDF résumé, and insist on Word I know to skip them.
- trollbridge 6mo agoThey only ask for Word because they plan to edit it to remove your contact info. Or worse.
- recursive 6mo agoSo are you getting a lot of offers this way? Anyway, I admire your dogma.
- lokar 6mo agoWell, I’m retired now. I only had 4 jobs after finishing my BS.
- sillywabbit 6mo agoIt's not even standard in academia.
- poopmonster 6mo ago
- gucci-on-fleek 6mo agoI'd hope/assume that any Computer Science students would be able to do this, but most Biology/Education/English/Art students probably couldn't. I mean, anyone smart enough to attend university could probably figure it out if they really wanted to, but there are hundreds of other useful things that they could learn too. There are only so many hours in the day, and given that most students don't get that many emails, I can hardly blame them for not wanting to prioritize learning how to filter emails. (I personally have over a hundred lines of Sieve filters, but I'm definitely not a typical student)
- jameshart 6mo agoBiologists should be more qualified than most to classify and tag email specimens.
- fooker 6mo agoI have been using email for as long as email was a thing and I still managed to blackhole important emails with filters not too long ago.
- mschuster91 6mo ago> What are they learning? Exactly what is in their field of study, nothing more. That's a huge part of the problems created by treating academia as a degree mill mandatory to get a job able to feed yourself instead of a place only for those truly interested in actually studying a subject.
- emodendroket 6mo agoMost people who have office jobs don't know how to do this either
- metaengies 6mo ago> Where will they be qualified to work? Going by a certain story 2 years ago, their concern should be that they're overqualified for Meta. It doesn't help that gmail, which is the only serious direct competition to outlook, straight up doesn't do "folders" and instead goes with markers. So you can't really just put a filter that drags all the 100 low-priority alerts in what would count as a first degree abstraction of "place where things are sorted into". No, there are two layers of abstraction between point A and B of things, sorter and sorted things. The result? Muggles can't recognize the heck you're describing and refuse to even acknowledge the possibility.
- teiferer 6mo agoIf a CS graduate can't figure out some simple gmail labels and filters then they should not be awarded that degree. Plain and simple. It's not rocket science.
- Poacher5 6mo agoAnd there are no other students at any college other than CS students? I'm not sure why a biologist or a literature student would need to be au fait with Google's admittedly fairly unfriendly email management setup.
- denkmoon 6mo agoDigital literacy is important to every field. Email filters are not some arcane computer science concept, they are the modern equivalent of filing physical mail into the right folder/pidgeon hole/inbox/whatever. Biology is a great example because of just how important digital record management is to experimentation in the field.
- sillywabbit 6mo agoI don't think you've seen many biology field data sets.
- throawayonthe 6mo agoit's MS software, i think it's inanely difficult
- setopt 6mo agoIn my experience, it’s hard enough to make students check their school email in the first place. Let alone filter it.
- lokar 6mo agoAs a ugrad, and later a PhD student teaching, everything is explained the first day. If you can figure it out you just fail the class (or go to office hrs to get help, etc).
- setopt 6mo agoAs an associate professor, I do explain things the first day, but I am certainly not permitted to fail students as a consequence of not checking their email daily. Even if they didn’t hand in an assignment at all, without any reason provided, I’m required by regulation to offer them a second chance to pass that assignment. The students’ rights are quite strong here (Northern Europe), which I generally support, but it has some downsides.
- lokar 6mo agoInteresting. I remember very strict rules on turning in programming assignments (as a student, and later TA). On time, printed properly, in a specific envelope, labeled as specified in the right location.
- Scroll_Swe 6mo ago>Setting up custom email filters is beyond the capabilities of most students? Yes. And most of the general population. They can do it once they know it exists, most people just are not aware it is a thing at all. >What are they learning? Here, their "major" as you say in the US. Someone in econ, biology or even CS is not going to learn Outlook rules. Maybe IT or business will have a sentence on it. >Where will they be qualified to work? Any office job. Any job really.
- mold_aid 6mo agoMost of my students, across all disciplines, don't have basic competence in Word or GDocs, software they've been using for years. It's weeks to teach them how to appy headings
- Daub 6mo agoI feel your pain, and my students are design students
- BigTTYGothGF 6mo ago> What are they learning? Are you suggesting that outlook wrangling be explicitly taught at the college level?
- u_fucking_dork 6mo agoAnywhere. I straight up don’t check my email at work. If people need me they have to teams message me to tell me they emailed me. Don’t have time to sift through all the bullshit generated emails. Jira, GitHub, confluence, servicenow, workday, etc. amounts to an incredible amount of junk I just can’t be bothered with.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- butlike 6mo agoDidn't you hear? Chat apps and iMessage (SMS included) is the new email. Delete Delete and Report Spam
- throwaway2037 6mo agoThis is a brilliant reply. I shook my head at the original and laughed hard at your perfectly reasonable question. It reminds me of an old joke my father used to say about jobs with virtually no interview (fast food, etc). He called it "The Mirror Test", as in if you hold a mirror up to the person, does it fog up? If yes, you are hired!
- crazygringo 6mo agoYou know that most students aren't computer science majors? Have you met the average community college student who doesn't even own a laptop but does all of their work on their phone? Gmail doesn't even allow you to create or manage filters from their phone app or mobile web interface.
- mbreese 6mo agoCanvas will send emails when grades are posted, but not what the grade is. Or at least that’s the way in the configurations I’ve seen. So, that wouldn’t help in a case where no one can access the canvas gradebook.
- trillic 6mo agoyup you just get an email saying "A new grade has been posted for EECS 420"
- skeeter2020 6mo ago...then all those clicks juice engagement and utilization numbers; why would someone want to just know their grade when they can use more clicks and custom apps to get the same info? </s> The party line is probably something about "a lack of data security" with email, which would almost be funny given the current situation if it wasn't so stressful for those impacted...
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- crazygringo 6mo agoNo, students are already forced to use Canvas enough as is. This is enterprise software, it's not a consumer phone app. This is nothing to do with "engagement". This is to do with FERPA which requires that student grades be kept private. There is a small but still a significant legal risk that someone else such as a parent or roommate could have access to a student's email. And so to avoid even the possibility of a court case, schools prefer to play it safe and display grades only to a user they can authenticate directly. This doesn't have anything to do with common sense, it's simply about legal risk. And it's not about security in a broader sense, it's specifically about privacy FERPA legislation.
- trollbridge 6mo agoFERPA allows emailing confidential information to a student email on record if the university controls the email account. Most universities offer their own email service (and require using it) for this exact reason. There is no more risk of access to email than there is to Canvas. They are usually secured by the same SSO, too. However, congratulations for finding the exact dodge around implementing a useful feature. Back when I worked at a university, it was apparent we had a “toolbox” of reasons to deny requests we didn’t want to do: HIPAA, FERPA, ERISA, PCI, GLBA, Title IX, ADA. “We can’t do that integration with student health services due to HIPAA concerns.” “We can’t implement that sign up form due to FERPA.” “We can’t update that site because we’d have to do so and be ADA compliant and that would cost too much.” “Due to Dining Services’ server being in scope for PCI, we can’t run reports off of it.” “Adding that ability to Student Affairs’ portfolio app would raise Title IX concerns.” It was great. You had endless excuses to say why you can’t email a student their grade.