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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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.
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@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.
@futurebird I later went on to a job where I was sysadmin for WebCT and Blackboard deployments at a publisher who developed content for those platforms to sell with their textbooks.
These platforms were a miserable pile of Perl scripts and Java servlets.
It's always been like 2002 out there. I can only shudder at the thought of what Google has built in the past 10 years.
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@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@intransitivelie @futurebird @paul_ipv6 I know thats a common failure mode now, but a large generation of the standard on the internet, pre-web2.0, was tools and protocols developed in-house by Universities mostly to handle their large user populations. Kerberos and IMAP and even HTTP was made in-house so CERN could have a proto-wiki, they were not products from companies, that came later. On a related note, Sun Microsystems bought and open-sourced StarOffice (now LibreOffice) because they did the math and found that adopting the struggling StarDivison was cheaper than paying for MS Office and Windows Terminal Servers for the whole company.
We have so many tools for cheap rapid development, why dont more orgs just in-house or set up consortiums to split costs? I know its because no one gets fired for choosing MS or Google, but thats not the path to effectiveness or a way to do better than average, its a desperate cling to mediocrity out of some fear of failure if they actually try to be excellent.
Seems sad though.
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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.”
@rk @futurebird From last week’s Monsterdon, Night of the Comet (1984): “I’m not the phone company. Nobody’s the phone company anymore!”
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I've used obscure minecraft mods with better features and UI than google classroom.
@futurebird
The shade... -
I wouldn't be shocked if someone at google was shocked to find out that they still were running Classroom... although they did try to put "AI" into it for a moment and the schools lost their mind so they made it possible to turn it off for a whole school.
And I suspect that sort of reaction makes them say "these users don't like change, they don't want improvements and new features"
But that is NOT true. I'm miserable.
@futurebird yeah, if it was about keeping us in the ecosystem it wouldn't be so bad we had to export & import docs to submit homework.
It really does feel like they got halfway to linking up a bunch of separate products (Drive, Gmail, Meet, etc) and then got bored and wandered off. Given Google's long and storied history of closing down services they've lost interest in, I could well believe Classroom just got forgotten. -
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 my first tech job was back in 1998 working on education software where the frontend was in the little known macromedia director, i was an idiot 18 year old who had no idea what she was doing, and we still did a better job than this. honestly the state of tech has been in a downward spiral since the 2000s, and it's appalling what we all put up with because some billionaire forced it on us.
anyway, commiseration that you have to deal with this slop.
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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 i so miss palm os. Sigh.
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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
*panting holing on to the arms of the chair*
"I could make a better LMS than this! It's just a database pointing to a file storage system with a calendar! I could do it!"
I wait for the feeling to pass, but it has been happening more frequently. In the corner of the room a little demon whispers "do it, do it on apache and use PHP and mySQL, you know the way"
I shake my head holding back the tears. I do not practice those dark arts any longer...
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@futurebird i so miss palm os. Sigh.
So much of it was made by people doing their very best, pushing the hardware to the limit. It was really elegant in many ways.
It occurs to me that we have never or maybe only rarely seen what it'd mean for modern hardware to be "pushed to its limits" like that.
Think of what might be possible.
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*panting holing on to the arms of the chair*
"I could make a better LMS than this! It's just a database pointing to a file storage system with a calendar! I could do it!"
I wait for the feeling to pass, but it has been happening more frequently. In the corner of the room a little demon whispers "do it, do it on apache and use PHP and mySQL, you know the way"
I shake my head holding back the tears. I do not practice those dark arts any longer...
@futurebird Squint a little, and that “demon” starts looking like your better angel instead…
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So much of it was made by people doing their very best, pushing the hardware to the limit. It was really elegant in many ways.
It occurs to me that we have never or maybe only rarely seen what it'd mean for modern hardware to be "pushed to its limits" like that.
Think of what might be possible.
A more extreme example of "pushing the hardware" is some of the programming for N64 games of all things.
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So much of it was made by people doing their very best, pushing the hardware to the limit. It was really elegant in many ways.
It occurs to me that we have never or maybe only rarely seen what it'd mean for modern hardware to be "pushed to its limits" like that.
Think of what might be possible.
@futurebird i ran my entire physical therapy practice on it and a folding keyboard. I created a custom database for my patient data, visit notes, & billing using a palm os relational database program called handbase. It seamlessly integrated with MS Access when i docked my palm pilot with my computer and created all the mail merge documents i needed to run my practice.
This was in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Nothing since has been as elegant and as useful.
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*panting holing on to the arms of the chair*
"I could make a better LMS than this! It's just a database pointing to a file storage system with a calendar! I could do it!"
I wait for the feeling to pass, but it has been happening more frequently. In the corner of the room a little demon whispers "do it, do it on apache and use PHP and mySQL, you know the way"
I shake my head holding back the tears. I do not practice those dark arts any longer...
@futurebird So, so many applications give me this itch, particularity business-related applications. "This is literally just the front end on a database. How did they screw this up so badly?" And it's not even that I don't understand the process well enough because I've been steeped in it for years. I know what it needs to do, I know the edge cases, etc. Give me a few months and I could do this!
But then I withdraw for a time, and leave Middle-Earth to its fate.
