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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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 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.
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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 my son has used it a fair amount and from the student side it's also awful.
His tutor would set homework for everyone in the group. If you opened it, did it, submitted it all in one sitting it was fine. If you did some and came back to it later, your work was gone. Because every time you open the homework doc, it creates a new copy somewhere in your files and opens that.
Eventually we found where, but we couldn't figure out how to submit a file stored in Google. So we had to download it (itself a pain), save it locally, then attach it from the local drive to the homework assignment, then submit it.
Some of the ugliest workflows I've ever encountered! -
@futurebird my son has used it a fair amount and from the student side it's also awful.
His tutor would set homework for everyone in the group. If you opened it, did it, submitted it all in one sitting it was fine. If you did some and came back to it later, your work was gone. Because every time you open the homework doc, it creates a new copy somewhere in your files and opens that.
Eventually we found where, but we couldn't figure out how to submit a file stored in Google. So we had to download it (itself a pain), save it locally, then attach it from the local drive to the homework assignment, then submit it.
Some of the ugliest workflows I've ever encountered!Even when I use "Google Drive" as they obviously want, it's still a big ugly mess. So it's not like it's terrible just to get you to use their other products. It's just like they... forgot or something.
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canva, blackboard, and a host of tiny ones that can be very nice.
canva is terrible in its own way (I'm told)
Blackboard is bloatware made by committee and very janky, but also kind of feature rich in a way?
@futurebird @faithisleaping Canva is terrible, Canvas is…fine but often unintuitive and sometimes really frustrating. I think I'd have more gripes with it if I was still actively in the classroom teaching, though.
I can't even remember what the LMS was that I used back then (e something I'm sure (edit: EdLine?? maybe??? I only ever used it for entering grades, I was too cantankerous even then to do much else with it)), although I for some reason remember using Blackboard as a college student.
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@futurebird I remember taking some of those tests (though I don’t think it was that advanced back then). I don’t know how teachers had the patience for that shit.
It's kind of fun to play with equation editors, even bad ones and see if you can get them to do what you want... and when I found out I could make dynamic content I messed with THAT for hours.
But, I love finding all of the little unexplored features in software like that. The other teachers thought there was something wrong with me.
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just to give you an idea of how bloated blackboard is... it has a built in equation editor. (why not just LaTeX?) it's like the one in Microsoft word... but somehow ... WORSE.
BUT it can also generate and populate custom random matrices for your linear algebra students and give them a dynamic answer key. If you are willing to suffer to make it happen.
@futurebird @faithisleaping I had to look it up on a hunch... yup, Blackboard uses Wiris MathType. I know it all too well, alas (embedded in a different app)
For what it's worth, if enabled, you can insert LaTeX into it by holding Ctrl+Shift+L.
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The desire to just "quit and make my own" can be very dangerous.
@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.
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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.
Yeah.
I might try to start my "faculty meditations on quality software" group again. It was interesting to learn about the things that other teachers found hard to use or annoying about software.
Only a few of them were just... wrong, most of it was interesting.
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It's kind of fun to play with equation editors, even bad ones and see if you can get them to do what you want... and when I found out I could make dynamic content I messed with THAT for hours.
But, I love finding all of the little unexplored features in software like that. The other teachers thought there was something wrong with me.
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
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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
Blackboard is like the only general store on a remote island. It has everything! Good luck finding it.
Classroom is like ... soylent green nutrient paste. You will live, there are no options. You don't want to know too much about what's really inside.
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Even when I use "Google Drive" as they obviously want, it's still a big ugly mess. So it's not like it's terrible just to get you to use their other products. It's just like they... forgot or something.
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.
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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.
