← Back to context

Comment by matsemann

4 hours ago

The alternative would be that each school develop their own platform for this, which also isn't very good use of their time and money?

Edit: No idea why this was down voted so much. I'm not defending Canvas, just wondering what the alternative would be.

7 comments

matsemann

Reply
lol768  1 hour ago

> The alternative would be that each school develop their own platform for this

I worked at a university which did exactly this, in the UK.

It was a bespoke platform which integrated incredibly well with the rest of the systems the university used because it was designed from the ground-up to meet the institution's needs, there were regular user groups involving academics to understand what features needed to be built/worked on etc. At one point it was all OSS on GitHub too, in case other universities could've found it useful. It handled plagiarism detection (integrating with Turnitin), marking, exam grids, coursework submissions and feedback, seminar allocations, personalised timetables & mitigating circumstances.

The in-house dev team was vastly cheaper than anything SaaS would've cost, as well. It also maintained software for on-campus parcel deliveries, online exams, opinion surveys, a mobile app for students/staff, the SSO system, the course catalogue, car parking permits, a content management system and more.

  • akpa1  7 minutes ago

    That sounds like a dream.

    My (also UK-based) university has been working on a new student records management project for years that's been incredibly ill-fated. It's destined to replace all their current systems and the first module module was meant to launch last year, except it thoroughly failed testing and nobody has heard anything about it since.

    No idea how long it'll take to pull through. I don't believe it's an in-house effort.