8 ms·

I think the public educational IT system should not be outsourced to the private sector, where schools completely lose control of the data and depend more or le

• FD3SA 12y ago
  Cannot agree more with this. Open source software is a perfect fit with public institutions. I don't understand why any government uses proprietary platforms. It would be cheaper and far more effective to hire a dozen open source devs to cater a particular platform to the public's needs, and have it be open and free to use forever. Developers aren't that expensive compared to software licenses for thousands of machines. As I understand, Germany and many European countries are heading in this direction.
  • stephenr 12y ago
    While I agree that Open Source can form part of a good solution I think there needs to be a distinction made between proprietary software that the institution controls, and proprietary SaaS solutions like Google offers. E.g., In the 90s and early 2000's Novell had a big presence in Universities/etc, providing network systems such as eDirectory (their Directory Services stack) Groupwise (email) etc. Yes these were proprietary, but they were also controlled by the customer - if you wanted to switch to OpenLDAP or AD or whatever, you could dump your whole Directory Services tree to LDIF file(s) and import them elsewhere. If you wanted to migrate from Groupwise to something using MBOX or even to Exchange, there were tools to do so, and there was never any need to worry about "well what happens with the data?" I have no problem with a school or government using proprietary software, so long as the data created remains in the institution's hands, and is in a format that can be easily read by or exported to alternative formats. I absolutely have a problem when educational institutions say "yeah we're going to use this solution for email because it's free" - the students have no fucking choice, and there is little or no consideration given to how the company uses the data.
  • Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
    I've been working on KnightOS [1], which is like Unix for calculators. I'm hoping to use it as a platform upon which to evangelize open source software with students. Maybe we should have more open-source investment in more parts of the student life? You just have to pick something to improve and get started. [1] http://www.knightos.org http://www.knightos.org
  • rattray 12y ago
    Coming from recent experience in EdTech, and also as a recent grad, this is a little idealistic. > It would be cheaper and far more effective to hire a dozen open source devs to cater a particular platform to the public's needs, and have it be open and free to use forever. Unfortunately, not many people in Higher Ed are technologists. Even hiring devs to work on open source tools isn't a good solution since most are inept at managing technology. The result of this kind of thinking is Moodle and Sakai, LMS's that have faded and failed. They're terrible to use and incredibly outdated. Horses, Camels, Committees, and all that. On the other hand, Instructure makes a LMS called Canvas, which is open-sourced under a restrictive license. It's a Rails app on github. The tech is as much of a joy to use as anything in EdTech. They also have an impressive salesforce and have grown remarkably fast. They're due for an IPO soon.
  • mattzito 12y ago
    Oh man - government agencies, in many cases, the least equipped to "hire a dozen open source devs". Think about how many local governments and school districts they are - they couldn't possibly hire developers and manage the development and customization of open source platforms when they can barely keep their own IT running correctly. In fact, that's a huge driver for the adoption of SaaS in local government - IT is such a scare resource. School districts often have only a handful of IT people for thousands or tens of thousands of students - they certainly couldn't afford to hire developers to customize, nor do they have the skills to manage them. I understand the open-vs-closed concerns, and agree that open source is better, but SaaS is a godsend for local government.
  • silvestrov 12y ago
    Experience from Denmark: when public institutions make it-systems they almost always fail. The "exam submission system" for primary schools failed completely the first two times when the pupils was sitting the exam. The police completely cancelled their new it-system after spending $90 million. etc. So when the (Danish) public sector makes stuff that's worse than BLACKBOARD, it might for the time being be the least of the evils to outsource it to the private sector.
  • jrells 12y ago
    I agree too but there are non-technical problems. Educational institutions regularly spend money on software when some CS students could do it better and cheaper over a summer. The people making these decisions are non-technical and risk averse.
    • ChicagoBoy11 12y ago
      This times one billion.
    • curun1r 12y ago
      > when some CS students could do it better and cheaper over a summer And then move on, leaving an unmaintained chunk of code that, while possibly better than the third-party software, instantly becomes a liability of unmaintained code. There's a reason why contractors have a bad reputation in the industry for the code they deliver. It's only developers that know they'll have to live with their work for the foreseeable future that put thought and effort into maintainability. The only way that your "CS students over the summer" plan could work is if the University put a ton of effort into bootstrapping an open source community. Even then, it's doubtful they could create something that would be appealing enough to work on. Academia has a contractor-like reputation for producing code bases that are mostly only intelligible to the sole developer that worked on it. Personally, I'd put my money on a non-profit third-party organization like Khan Academy to be able to design something that gets traction. They know the space, have world-class engineers and would be able to generate enough PR to start a community around a tool that they open source.
• yincrash 12y ago
  Many Universities already use stuff like Blackboard[1] which for the most part is TERRIBLE (at least how I remember it in school.) These pieces of software are already around, and if anything competition in the space will hopefully make things better. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.
  • Steuard 12y ago
    But as far as I know, Blackboard (or Moodle or Sakai or...) data is stored locally at your institution, not housed on a Google server somewhere. I think the data mining possibilities are much lower in that case. I'm all in favor of disruptive competition in that market, mind you! But I don't think it's easy.
    • cbhl 12y ago
      Not true. Blackboard has a cloud offering. Plus, many competing products also rely on centralized servers.
      • stephenr 12y ago
        What little information I can find, indicates that Blackboard is self-hostable, and that the "hosted" option they provide is actually an extra service. The argument is against a solution that has no possibility for self-hosting and maintaining control of data. That they offer a hosted/SaaS option is irrelevant, because they also offer a regular self-hosted solution.
  • jrells 12y ago
    My University uses Moodle, which is also TERRIBLE. I do all my grades and such in Google Docs, since Moodle is a UX nightmare. Something as simple as entering grades in Moodle requires a lot of clicking around for each grade. We have multi-page documents describing how to perform even the most basic tasks, they require constantly clicking and going to new pages of indiscernible icons. Menus are impossible to navigate without help.
• pfortuny 12y ago
  In my country (Spain) it is most likely illegal to store the students' assignments on a server which does not belong to the University. Then again, the Univ. at which I teach outsources the e-mail to Microsoft. I tend to not understand. And I agree: students data belongs to the University, not to google.
  • maccard 12y ago
    My university outsources the email to Google apps for Education.
• on_and_off 12y ago
  If I remember correctly, Google does not use its classroom clients data for profiling purposes. Even in that case, I think that education should not be locked down to a particular vendor and that it would be a very good use-case for open source solutions. I fear that it is not realistic in the near future though.
• nacho2sweet 12y ago
  I work in IT at a major Canadian University. I hear what you are saying, but the solutions provided by universities IT departments are usually sub-par to completely not useful. There have been attempts in the past to partner with other schools and develop solutions jointly but are often cost over run disasters. It is really hard to attract any top development talent, or even try and convince current employees to stay up to date with current trends. Lots of development teams are stuck in old waterfall mentalities on huge java stacks. We have laws that protects students data and doesn't allow us to host student or even employee information on U.S. servers. Provincial laws and mandates handed down from deans because of the Homeland Security Act hinder the use of any sort of SaaS's. It makes it really hard and disheartening to provide and develop good solutions. I can't suggest someone go use certain survey tools, or use mailchimp to handle a small campaign for example. I am not supposed to promote the use of Google Drive or Dropbox for day to day use with other staff because of fear they will start storing data they aren't supposed to on it. We often end up with sub-par self hosted copies of great applications, but no one wants to use them. Google classroom looks really cool but there is no way any schools in this province would be allowed to use it.
  • yeukhon 12y ago
    > We have laws that protects students data and doesn't allow us to host student or even employee information on U.S. servers. Provincial laws and mandates handed down from deans because of the Homeland Security Act hinder the use of any sort of SaaS's. Well there is openstack which you can roll your own IaaS after a lot of serious effort. Where I studied in the past would use VMWare heavily to deploy hundreds of OS install. The only reason (people I spoke to since I was sort of involved in that) they couldn't do it was they did not have the incentive to do it. Learning a new technology (rolling OpenStack is not that simple, actually) is very very time-consuming and without the welcome from the top, most people won't even bother to try different technology.
  • judk 12y ago
    Google Classroom runs on a huge Java stack.
  • ticviking 12y ago
• Balgair 12y ago
  Not a lawyer, but the Google privacy policy does seem very nice to the student here: http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#nosharing http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#nosharing This is to contrast it with the privacy policy of other systems like Canvas: http://www.canvaslms.com/policies/privacy-policy http://www.canvaslms.com/policies/privacy-policy Selected out of context quote from the Terms of Use: "You warrant that the holder of any worldwide intellectual property right, including MORAL rights, in Your Content, has completely and effectively waived all such rights and validly and irrevocably granted to you the right to grant the license stated above." Caps to add emphasis.
  • GeneralMayhem 12y ago
    That sounds like a pretty standard and necessary clause; it's not assigning "moral" right to Google, it's asserting that you have the right to be controlling the content's licensing in the first place.
    • Balgair 12y ago
      It wasn't to Google, it was to another company: Canvas. Also, what the hell is a moral right anyway? How is it different than any other? It just seems really scammy to me.
      • judk 12y ago
        Look it up and post back. It's not a weird scam, it is standard copyright law regarding who can claim authorship of content. The section you quoted just means that the user is promising not to post pirated content to Canvas
      • dragonwriter 12y ago
        > Also, what the hell is a moral right anyway? In the context at issue (copyright law): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
• kbenson 12y ago
  Non-trustworthy seems a fairly harsh assessment. I've not seen evidence to ever make me think Google isn't trustworthy. I may not be happy with what they do with my data, but it's not like they've somehow broken their promise to me in any way, we have an understanding. I get use of their services, they get information about me. Why the distinction is important is because if they stated publicly that they weren't gathering a specific type of data (and I felt they weren't legally compelled to lie by a government), I would trust that statement.
  • oscargrouch 12y ago
    But you are talking about your personal social contract with Google, and looking over this perspective you are right; but in the end you can choose; The problem is when we take that to education, its a collective social contract, intermediated by a third-party, not a personal student choice. The OP is right to be concerned; once we are ok with intermediation of the social contract; we are no longer in control; we loose power, and even of we dont agree or dont trust the provider of goods or services; we cant do anything to stop them, and thats whats wrong. Its a small detail, but a very important one! Dont accept intermediated social contracts anymore, in digital age, we can all have our own private, self-determined social contract, and that can be enforced even on our democracies and fundamental rights
    • kbenson 12y ago
      You seem to implying some position of mine towards the larger discussion based on my statement, which wasn't my intent. Whether I trust Google to do what they say and whether I think they are appropriate for the task being discussed, are not necessarily the same thing. There are other factors of importance, as you pointed out.
  • newuser88273 12y ago
    Do you trust Google to remain just an adware company forever? Or will they (a) sit on your children's data for all of their life and (b) within a decade or two break out of the adware niche with Google Services for Health and Life Insurance, Google Services for Banking and Credit, Google Services for Human Ressources, and Google Services for Law Enforcement?
• patcon 12y ago
  If Google offers the sort of export tools that they've offered for other services, then I can feel a bit better about their creating critical tools for public education. I think of Google's place here like I thoughts of Apple's in the world of smartphones -- they are in the position to normalize a new way of learning, which is the largest hurdle that perhaps only a powerful private company can accomplish these days. We can worry about the need to depose them with better tools if/when the need arises :)
• prostoalex 12y ago
  Data and interface to that data are two different things. Requiring that data be open and standardized (as far as import-export is concerned) makes sense, requiring that UI to manipulate that data is built by a government-affiliated entity is questionable. Even if you love government-designed Web sites, there might be someone somewhere capable of building faster, more intuitive, mobile-friendlier front-end.
• dkarapetyan 12y ago
  Came to say pretty much the same thing. This is extremely creepy given the nature of Google as a data munging operation that converts data to ad revenue. On the other hand mikeleeorg makes a good point. In the past competitors where sued out of the water by Blackboard. If Google puts some pressure on them and makes the data easy enough export then a more agile company can have a shot at improving things. That's a pretty long chain of extremely happy accidents though.
• danellis 12y ago
  Are you suggesting that schools develop their own solutions, over and over again? Some school districts centralize their IT solutions provision, but that's nothing compared to a private company providing a solution nationwide.
• pelasaco 12y ago
  ah, as german, searching always for people here, i can say. we form good computer scientists, but most of them unfortunately cannot work as software developers.
• dubya 12y ago
  The reality is that this data is already out there. Faculty will us whatever is most convenient, and that's never been BlackBoard or whatever the official IT service is. Student grades will end up in DropBox or in a Google doc, FERPA or not, unless there's some sort of auditing.