Comment by JumpCrisscross
13 hours ago
> the students themselves don't have the artifacts to resubmit via email because they were done in Canvas
It’s so simple to send an e-mail to the student with relevant records on completion of a quiz or whatnot. They don’t do it, because they want to control the data. (And universities don’t insist on it for who knows what reason.)
I've never used Canvas before, but all the LMSes that I've used allow students to enable emails whenever anything is updated, including when grades are posted. This is off by default because it's often 10+ emails a day, because many teachers post notes once a day, and with 5 classes, that adds up pretty quick. I personally have it enabled because it's pretty manageable with some custom Outlook rules, but setting this up is well beyond the capabilities of most students.
Canvas will send emails when grades are posted, but not what the grade is. Or at least that’s the way in the configurations I’ve seen. So, that wouldn’t help in a case where no one can access the canvas gradebook.
Isn't that due to FERPA related concerns?
yup you just get an email saying "A new grade has been posted for EECS 420"
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Setting up custom email filters is beyond the capabilities of most students? What are they learning? Where will they be qualified to work?
You know that most students aren't computer science majors?
Have you met the average community college student who doesn't even own a laptop but does all of their work on their phone? Gmail doesn't even allow you to create or manage filters from their phone app or mobile web interface.
Most of my students, across all disciplines, don't have basic competence in Word or GDocs, software they've been using for years. It's weeks to teach them how to appy headings
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> Where will they be qualified to work?
Going by a certain story 2 years ago, their concern should be that they're overqualified for Meta.
It doesn't help that gmail, which is the only serious direct competition to outlook, straight up doesn't do "folders" and instead goes with markers. So you can't really just put a filter that drags all the 100 low-priority alerts in what would count as a first degree abstraction of "place where things are sorted into". No, there are two layers of abstraction between point A and B of things, sorter and sorted things. The result? Muggles can't recognize the heck you're describing and refuse to even acknowledge the possibility.
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Most graduates aren't really qualified to work anywhere that they couldn't have worked before going to college in the first place.
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This is a brilliant reply. I shook my head at the original and laughed hard at your perfectly reasonable question.
It reminds me of an old joke my father used to say about jobs with virtually no interview (fast food, etc). He called it "The Mirror Test", as in if you hold a mirror up to the person, does it fog up? If yes, you are hired!
I have been using email for as long as email was a thing and I still managed to blackhole important emails with filters not too long ago.
Most people who have office jobs don't know how to do this either
Anywhere. I straight up don’t check my email at work. If people need me they have to teams message me to tell me they emailed me. Don’t have time to sift through all the bullshit generated emails. Jira, GitHub, confluence, servicenow, workday, etc. amounts to an incredible amount of junk I just can’t be bothered with.
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> What are they learning?
Are you suggesting that outlook wrangling be explicitly taught at the college level?
Most managers I've met, struggle with setting up email filters, and have to ask tech support to do it for them. These students will be qualified just fine.
I'd hope/assume that any Computer Science students would be able to do this, but most Biology/Education/English/Art students probably couldn't.
I mean, anyone smart enough to attend university could probably figure it out if they really wanted to, but there are hundreds of other useful things that they could learn too. There are only so many hours in the day, and given that most students don't get that many emails, I can hardly blame them for not wanting to prioritize learning how to filter emails.
(I personally have over a hundred lines of Sieve filters, but I'm definitely not a typical student)
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In my experience, it’s hard enough to make students check their school email in the first place. Let alone filter it.
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Didn't you hear? Chat apps and iMessage (SMS included) is the new email.
Delete
Delete and Report Spam
>Setting up custom email filters is beyond the capabilities of most students?
Yes. And most of the general population. They can do it once they know it exists, most people just are not aware it is a thing at all.
>What are they learning?
Here, their "major" as you say in the US. Someone in econ, biology or even CS is not going to learn Outlook rules. Maybe IT or business will have a sentence on it.
>Where will they be qualified to work?
Any office job. Any job really.
it's MS software, i think it's inanely difficult
> What are they learning?
Exactly what is in their field of study, nothing more. That's a huge part of the problems created by treating academia as a degree mill mandatory to get a job able to feed yourself instead of a place only for those truly interested in actually studying a subject.
Students having records of what their score was doesn't prove to the professor / university what score they received. "FWD: Exam 1 Results" is not especially auditable.
If only we had some way of signing messages
Though in a case like this attackers would likely revoke (or publish) the private key.
The technology isn't there yet (｡•́︿•̀｡)
Ah, perhaps we could put it on the blockchain! /s
> Students having records of what their score was doesn't prove to the professor / university what score they received
It's better than nothing. (And good training for the real world.)
Also, most universities (and many schools now) issue academic e-mail addresses to students. In those cases, the email is definitive proof.
DKIM signature could be used to verify that Canvas' server sent the email with the given content
Good luck having people forward an email a) with headers and b) in a way that doesn't break the signature...
And who exactly do you think is going to verify 100s of thousands of emails this way dude?
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Emails from Canvas saying a grade is available do not currently include the actual grade in the email, so that would have to be implemented first. And it's probably not implemented quite intentionally because of FERPA.
As opposed to a screenshot of a website? Presumably the professor has a spreadsheet of all assignment grades that is submitted to the school?
> Presumably the professor has a spreadsheet of all assignment grades that is submitted to the school?
This would undermine Canvas's lock-in.
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Nope! We're encouraged to keep all that exclusively in canvas. (As noted, I have my own spreadsheet. But I'm an outlier.)
Presumably the system will be back up eventually, so there's not much benefit to lying here, since at best you'll raise your grade in a few classes for a couple months, while taking on a pretty big risk of getting caught.
You forget things can be signed, with the key owned by the school. It can be done.
Does signing really make this easily auditable from the professor’s perspective?
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Makes me glad I've always avoided doing my work on web platforms. When we used to have to make presentations in Google Slides I used to do them in Org-mode, then export to Sheets. I still have all those assignments sitting on my disk. Sure, there's versions of them on Google Drive, but I always make sure that the canonical version is the one on my disk.
>It’s so simple to send an e-mail to the student ...
What seems easy on hobby projects gets way more difficult at scale. Source: experience.
For what they charge for these LMSs, they should definitely be able to sent some emails.
No concerns about privacy or regulatory considerations that might vary by jurisdiction? Just yolo it and deal with breech later?