Google has captured a large segment of the education market with Google Classroom and it's the most primitive software I use every single day.
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Hehe, I work at Blackboard now (as a datascientist), and I am always happy to find random conversations like this in the wild, so I can find out what people actually think of it
I haven't used it actively for like 6 years. So I don't know about any recent developments.
My students really liked being able to see their assignments on their phone. All of the teachers hated it for some reason. That was the newest feature the last time I used it... the little phone app.
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The urge to just make something better myself washes over me like some kind of hot flash every day. I know it's a bigger project than it looks, but I swear to god I had palm OS software made with more consideration and care than this.
I don't get how people think the future is coming and just around the corner when most software is like this.
Classroom feels like it's from 2002
i will bet you money that the PMs and devs for this never talked to teachers, nor can teachers get directly to them for feedback. it's one of the trends in software that drives me most crazy, from both sides. when i was doing SME/PM on a dev team, it was a fight to ever get to talk to the actual users and as a user, i have mostly had zero luck getting feedback and bug reports to the folks actually building it.
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@futurebird Having an issue right now with two students with the same name in the same classroom. And the only way to distinguish them is via the linked guardians.
@futurebird Also no way to see the guardian email addresses except to click the link to send them an email.
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@futurebird
The competition is probably just as bad if not worse, but also Google gets market share because everyone already uses it?As for why it's poorly designed, it was probably slopped (and here I don't actually mean "AI" shockingly) together by committee. It probably had no user testing, no real design phase, and the people who designed it were software engineers, not learning systems experts. Learning systems are hard problems, and I can practically guarantee that Google didn't even try to solve them.
It'd be almost reassuring to learn that there was some nefarious reason for the shitty design, but sadly it was probably just incompetence. And again, I speak from experience as an incompetent programmer who was often asked to make decisions about systems which should have been made by learning systems experts.
@intransitivelie @futurebird @paul_ipv6 one of the benefits of software development teams is supposed to be developers becoming knowledgeable about the problem so that they can craft software that is worthwhile, but severing communication between users, subject matter experts and developers makes useless software in all the ways ypu describe. While some pompous devs think that their specific expertise is all that matters, I don't believe most are like that and are desperate for solid actionable feedback, so why do orgs baany communication between devs and experts/users? Is it to protect the authority of know-nothing VPs who dont want to be told their ideas are stupid or that the problems might be more difficult than they can imagine, they just want to sell the demo mockup and be done?
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The desire to just "quit and make my own" can be very dangerous.
I've used obscure minecraft mods with better features and UI than google classroom.
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Google has captured a large segment of the education market with Google Classroom and it's the most primitive software I use every single day.
On the one hand adding too much stuff annoys edu customers. On the other hand, it just has NO FEATURES, nothing you expect from "classroom" software.
For example, do you want to show an answer key to students after they post their homework?
Gotta do that by hand. Like a cave person.
@futurebird i haven't used google classroom in many years, but i remember it was pretty much just a frontend to google drive. it basically existed to simplify sharing documents and that's it. compared to other learning management software it's incredibly barebones, i don't even remember if you could share grades with it -
Google has captured a large segment of the education market with Google Classroom and it's the most primitive software I use every single day.
On the one hand adding too much stuff annoys edu customers. On the other hand, it just has NO FEATURES, nothing you expect from "classroom" software.
For example, do you want to show an answer key to students after they post their homework?
Gotta do that by hand. Like a cave person.
@futurebird I don't think I've ever encountered a good educational "platform" tool. They're all just... bad.
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@intransitivelie @futurebird @paul_ipv6 one of the benefits of software development teams is supposed to be developers becoming knowledgeable about the problem so that they can craft software that is worthwhile, but severing communication between users, subject matter experts and developers makes useless software in all the ways ypu describe. While some pompous devs think that their specific expertise is all that matters, I don't believe most are like that and are desperate for solid actionable feedback, so why do orgs baany communication between devs and experts/users? Is it to protect the authority of know-nothing VPs who dont want to be told their ideas are stupid or that the problems might be more difficult than they can imagine, they just want to sell the demo mockup and be done?
@raven667 @intransitivelie @futurebird
i've never understood how it's good for anyone. happy customers buy more/renew. unhappy customers look at competitors. unhappy devs find jobs elsewhere and you have to spend on recruiting and training. yes, sometimes a PM or VP needs to sooth some customers whose feathers were ruffled by a less than tactful dev but that's an easy problem to solve.
scarily, there is now a generation of devs who are used to never talking to customers and making up features based on a lack of domain expertise. many of them work for the usual suspects, like amazon, microsoft, apple, salesforce, etc.
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@intransitivelie @futurebird @paul_ipv6 one of the benefits of software development teams is supposed to be developers becoming knowledgeable about the problem so that they can craft software that is worthwhile, but severing communication between users, subject matter experts and developers makes useless software in all the ways ypu describe. While some pompous devs think that their specific expertise is all that matters, I don't believe most are like that and are desperate for solid actionable feedback, so why do orgs baany communication between devs and experts/users? Is it to protect the authority of know-nothing VPs who dont want to be told their ideas are stupid or that the problems might be more difficult than they can imagine, they just want to sell the demo mockup and be done?
@raven667 @futurebird @paul_ipv6
When it comes to pedagogy, I'm pretty sure being a subject matter expert in learning means you don't have the brain space to be a subject matter expert in software. And unlike a lot of software, where being loosely acquainted with the subject is enough to be able to craft the software as long as subject matter experts and users are consulted... except they aren't... anyway, unlike most software, learning management systems are quite literally pedagogy.I think some of it is C-suite desire to sell product, and some of it is, I'm afraid, programmers having an inflated sense of their own knowledge. But I think a major component is that no one treats education as valuable in and of itself. We're terrible at training teachers too. We're awful at designing schools. We're bad at education in general. Which means that there aren't that many subject matter experts who could be consulted. How many experts in digital learning management systems are there, and are they any good?
One could say that the horrible state of LMS design is merely a symptom of the appalling state of the learning those systems are designed to manage? I think that's part of it too.
And let's not overlook the fact that no one does UI/UX design well. No one. Apple used to, maybe, a little, but I would argue that they got most of what they got right right by accident. Corpo UX is garbage and FOSS UX is a tragic joke. There's no money in it, to coin a tired phrase.
And lastly, let's not overlook that all of these systems are less than a decade old and have been pressed more and more into service in spite of their failings.
Sorry, I could go on and on about this, but I won't beat the dead horse.
As for devs desperate for feedback, yes, absolutely. I certainly was. Hell, I would have accepted a design document from the person who originally designed the system. There's certainly no money in that though.
What can we do about it? Unfortunately, it's really up to users to complain, and they have to complain at levels previously unknown. Google isn't going to listen until it hurts them *a lot* not to. Ditto all the other major players. And the complaints can't come from end users. They have to come from institutions with enough clout to say, "Google, this is shit. We won't be renewing our contract." And even then, Google has deep enough pockets that for them, Classroom is a loss leader. It gets more people to sign up for a Google account. That's all it is. Google is in the data business, and any way it can get data is fine.
If I sound like I'm blaming anyone, I'm sorry. It's not the end users' fault that they have to put up with a shitty product. They have no choice in the matter. It's not really the devs' fault they have to build this shitty product either. People gotta eat. It's not really even the institutions' fault that they have to pick a shitty product to go with when all of them are garbage. It's the fault of the companies making these shitty products I guess, but it's easy to point blame at a faceless corporation and do nothing else
My hat is off to all the educators who make the shitty system work enough so that they can educate in spite of it. My hat is off to the devs who try their best to make pedagogical decisions with no training or feedback. I left that career on my ass, but I suspect that even had outside circumstances conspired to get rid of me, I would have had to leave at a certain point anyway because I couldn't face that test.
And to end on as positive a note as possible, we haven't seen the full impact of "AI" on LMSes yet. I shudder to imagine what will happen once we do.
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Google has captured a large segment of the education market with Google Classroom and it's the most primitive software I use every single day.
On the one hand adding too much stuff annoys edu customers. On the other hand, it just has NO FEATURES, nothing you expect from "classroom" software.
For example, do you want to show an answer key to students after they post their homework?
Gotta do that by hand. Like a cave person.
The only one easily hosted on Yunohost is Moodle. Do you have any experience with that one? ive heard of it but never had to use it.
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@futurebird Maybe I can help with that urge.
The problem is NOT that we are incapable of makikg better software. It's that you have to be really good at marketing to a select group of people who do not use or understand the software.
That, and specifically that, is why our software is shit.
@Epic_Null @futurebird
All the selling points are for pencil pushers and bean counters - it does user sync and ticketing and billing integration and monitoring and moderation and it works with your existing calendar and can use your existing email and it has ios + android apps and works with all types of rostering software and honours your quotas and you can import and sync this and that and the price on the site includes 40 hours of support a month so no extra costs to worry about and there is a small formality at the end where the software also lets students and teachers join video calls and share documents and maybe do a quiz. Oh and check this out! Dark mode! -
@raven667 @intransitivelie @futurebird
i've never understood how it's good for anyone. happy customers buy more/renew. unhappy customers look at competitors. unhappy devs find jobs elsewhere and you have to spend on recruiting and training. yes, sometimes a PM or VP needs to sooth some customers whose feathers were ruffled by a less than tactful dev but that's an easy problem to solve.
scarily, there is now a generation of devs who are used to never talking to customers and making up features based on a lack of domain expertise. many of them work for the usual suspects, like amazon, microsoft, apple, salesforce, etc.
@paul_ipv6 @raven667 @futurebird
There's a whole systemic rot which means that the laws of supply and demand and so forth don't actually work here, which is why seemingly illogical things like utter lack of consumer satisfaction not resulting in consumer revolt happen. Consumers can't look at competitors because there aren't really any. Sure, you can switch to a different product, but it's just as broken and terrible.I do think that there's a cultural problem where devs have been encouraged to prioritize the wrong things in feedback and testing. And even devs who seek feedback are often seeking it incorrectly because they haven't been trained to. Humans are bad at statistics and good at anecdote, so feedback tends to reflect that, rather than mass A/B testing.
Honestly, software as an industry is rotten. I know that's a controversial thing to say, and you don't have to take my word for it or anything, but that's my bottom line: software is bad because the methods of its production are bad.
Industry is kind of not good at doing things in general, largely because it's existed for a metaphorical eye-blink, a saccade even, of human history, let alone human existence. It took thousands of years for humans to "get good" at a lot of things, and we're expecting software to get good at a rate which is ludicrous. Developmentally, we haven't gotten good at formal education yet. Why should we expect the software we use in education, a thing which didn't exist 100 years ago, to be worth a damn?
Sorry, got very big-picture there.
Anyway, my answer for why it's good for anyone is that it's good for stock line go up brrrp, and that's really the only thing that matters anymore. End users have no options and therefore no power, the levels of hierarchy insulate those at the top from end-user complaints, and thus decisions are made which seem farcical on the ground but whose impacts are never felt by the decision-makers. Not consulting the experts saves time, but really, time isn't valuable anymore either. I could tell horror stories about consultants but I won't. Suffice to say that many times the experts have no idea what they're doing either.
Plus, at least in Google's case, Classroom is just a means of user capture. They don't care if it makes a profit. Why is it bad? No one cares.
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I've used obscure minecraft mods with better features and UI than google classroom.
I’m reminded of the old faux Bell slogan: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”
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I’m reminded of the old faux Bell slogan: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”
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I've used obscure minecraft mods with better features and UI than google classroom.
@futurebird People choose to use Minecraft mods, based on utility & convenience.
Nobody chooses a Google or Microsoft product, it's forced by IT.
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@petrillic @rk @futurebird YESSSSSS
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@raven667 @futurebird @paul_ipv6
When it comes to pedagogy, I'm pretty sure being a subject matter expert in learning means you don't have the brain space to be a subject matter expert in software. And unlike a lot of software, where being loosely acquainted with the subject is enough to be able to craft the software as long as subject matter experts and users are consulted... except they aren't... anyway, unlike most software, learning management systems are quite literally pedagogy.I think some of it is C-suite desire to sell product, and some of it is, I'm afraid, programmers having an inflated sense of their own knowledge. But I think a major component is that no one treats education as valuable in and of itself. We're terrible at training teachers too. We're awful at designing schools. We're bad at education in general. Which means that there aren't that many subject matter experts who could be consulted. How many experts in digital learning management systems are there, and are they any good?
One could say that the horrible state of LMS design is merely a symptom of the appalling state of the learning those systems are designed to manage? I think that's part of it too.
And let's not overlook the fact that no one does UI/UX design well. No one. Apple used to, maybe, a little, but I would argue that they got most of what they got right right by accident. Corpo UX is garbage and FOSS UX is a tragic joke. There's no money in it, to coin a tired phrase.
And lastly, let's not overlook that all of these systems are less than a decade old and have been pressed more and more into service in spite of their failings.
Sorry, I could go on and on about this, but I won't beat the dead horse.
As for devs desperate for feedback, yes, absolutely. I certainly was. Hell, I would have accepted a design document from the person who originally designed the system. There's certainly no money in that though.
What can we do about it? Unfortunately, it's really up to users to complain, and they have to complain at levels previously unknown. Google isn't going to listen until it hurts them *a lot* not to. Ditto all the other major players. And the complaints can't come from end users. They have to come from institutions with enough clout to say, "Google, this is shit. We won't be renewing our contract." And even then, Google has deep enough pockets that for them, Classroom is a loss leader. It gets more people to sign up for a Google account. That's all it is. Google is in the data business, and any way it can get data is fine.
If I sound like I'm blaming anyone, I'm sorry. It's not the end users' fault that they have to put up with a shitty product. They have no choice in the matter. It's not really the devs' fault they have to build this shitty product either. People gotta eat. It's not really even the institutions' fault that they have to pick a shitty product to go with when all of them are garbage. It's the fault of the companies making these shitty products I guess, but it's easy to point blame at a faceless corporation and do nothing else
My hat is off to all the educators who make the shitty system work enough so that they can educate in spite of it. My hat is off to the devs who try their best to make pedagogical decisions with no training or feedback. I left that career on my ass, but I suspect that even had outside circumstances conspired to get rid of me, I would have had to leave at a certain point anyway because I couldn't face that test.
And to end on as positive a note as possible, we haven't seen the full impact of "AI" on LMSes yet. I shudder to imagine what will happen once we do.
@intransitivelie @futurebird @paul_ipv6 I'm sure this is dumb because their budget is already committed to the status quo, but I believe the OP works in the NYC school system, they have a $45B budget, how much learning management could they develop in-house if that was a priority? An org of 100 devs could do a fair bit, and that's a fraction of their headcount, even in expensive NYC.
That should be a credible threat to Google. How big a headcount is necessary for Classroom anyway, and how much are they paying for this service?
https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/funding/funding-our-schools
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@intransitivelie @futurebird @paul_ipv6 I'm sure this is dumb because their budget is already committed to the status quo, but I believe the OP works in the NYC school system, they have a $45B budget, how much learning management could they develop in-house if that was a priority? An org of 100 devs could do a fair bit, and that's a fraction of their headcount, even in expensive NYC.
That should be a credible threat to Google. How big a headcount is necessary for Classroom anyway, and how much are they paying for this service?
https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/funding/funding-our-schools
@raven667 @futurebird @paul_ipv6
Orgs don't develop in-house at that price, they hire Deloitte to develop for them, which leads to nightmare scenarios where you pray for the quiet dignity of death by Google
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I've used obscure minecraft mods with better features and UI than google classroom.
@futurebird Have you considered holding class in Minecraft?
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The urge to just make something better myself washes over me like some kind of hot flash every day. I know it's a bigger project than it looks, but I swear to god I had palm OS software made with more consideration and care than this.
I don't get how people think the future is coming and just around the corner when most software is like this.
Classroom feels like it's from 2002
@futurebird in my senior year of high school (which happend to be in 2002), the relatively young, ambitious physics/calculus teacher learned enough MySQL and PHP to be dangerous (after iterating through Flash and various other client-side approaches which I gleefully showed him it was trivial to crack open to extract the quiz answers). This turned into a classroom CMS which, fortunately for all involved, never really took off.
