Comment by sharkweek
13 hours ago
My wife is in grad school at a major university and is dealing with this right now the week of midterms for spring quarter.
I totally understand why a university wouldn’t want to bake their own learning portals but just feels like such a single point of risk to use third party solutions for something like this.
Back in my day… all we had was a school email via on-premise services. I guess we registered for classes in a web portal but that’s about it. The idea of online class was entirely foreign at the time. Ain’t nobody hacking a blue book.
It’s wild to me that people in this comment section are suggesting that schools should improve their security by rolling their own platform, which is bound to be filled with security holes, instead of using a popular, maintained, open source option.
To be fair to the idea, though, while this would make individual instances less secure, it would drastically decrease the leverage for the work bad actors put in.
There is a saying in the software security industry that (I'm paraphrasing from rusty memories) a system is secure if the cost of hacking it is higher than the value it protects.
Each system being completely distinct from another means that the cost of hacking the average student goes up by 9000 (from the article, Canvas is used by 9000 schools).
Still not saying that rolling out your own is the preferred solution, but the idea is not as ludicrous as it would seem, and should definitely be entertained and discussed, at least.
Maybe. I still remember the Drupal community sneering at the New York Times when they unveiled their homegrown online news platform bitd. After 15 years of recursively scraping ad-hoc porn sites off of server hard drives when clients dragged their feet on migrating to latest versions I 'm less certain the assumption that homegrown == less secure is as valid as it sounds.
Could you explain the last sentence a bit more? I don’t follow
1 reply →
Universities used to do this sort of stuff themselves. Then it became a business handled by purchasing rather than needs met by the department themselves.
In fairness in the era where universities did it themselves the tech requirements and expectations were dramatically lower.
Tech requirements are the same as they always were. One needs to ask whether they need so many frameworks to host some files on the internet and submit some files and perform spreadsheet calculations. We still used one of those First Age 1990s websites for sort of pre lab quizzes this one class when I was going through it, and it might have looked a little "old" but I mean it did the thing and worked for years and will continue to do the thing and work for years.
1 reply →
Have these dramatically higher tech requirements and expectations improved the quality of education whatsoever?
Because faculty didn’t want to do it anymore. They want it handled by others but also they want oversight and veto power but also they don’t want to be bothered. But it better always work, and if they make a mistake the software is broken because don’t tell them it’s a user error they used to write Fortran.
As a faculty member at a large university…I have a deep respect for the impossible job of university IT departments.
We originally rolled our on LMS decades ago. When we switched to canvas we kept the home brew running for five years past its expiration date because faculty refused to remove their files. Finally each one was manually moved by IT for the recalcitrant old faculty.
It is kind of funny when these LMS tools with 100+ functions are being used for little more than what email, a grades spreadsheet, and maybe a shared drive would do. University might even ask for the final grades in spreadsheet format by the end of the term anyhow, so data goes into the LMS just to come back out again.
1 reply →
> Ain’t nobody hacking a blue book.
Well not with that attitude
A university doesn't need to bake its own learning portal, Moodle exists and is used by a lot of large schools.
Moodle is an open-source LMS that can be self-hosted.
https://moodle.org/
Another open-source LMS that can be self-hosted is... Canvas.
Almost no one does
Didn't realize that. Thanks for the info!
I totally understand why a university wouldn’t want to bake their own learning portals
They used to, in the pre-cloud/SaaS era; and they were much simpler and better UX than the slop that they're renting today, because the actual users were not far from the developers.
Counterpoint: I was a PhD student in 2004 and on the universities board* which oversaw the roll-out of the campus management system. It cost > 10m EUR to implement a shitty system with the worst UX and years of stabilizing to make it somewhat work.
The amount of corner cases and performance requirements during rush times (semester start) made it really infeasible for a university to roll their own.
* German universities have this funny system where 51% of such boards are controlled by the professors and the rest is made up of other employees/staff and students. They call it academic participation.