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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

I think one piece in federal scope would be school courseware. How many poor schools fork out for something to do forums, grades, homework submission, lesson notes. There's a ton of duplication and there's no point. Get one decent cloud implementation, host it, and scale for several million users. Then give all schools and students free access.

It's no-brainer infrastructure, like highways.

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Moodle is GPL. The expensive part is training, not the license fees. Lots of teachers really need extreme amounts of hand-holding, even younger ones who have been using websites for their entire lives. (And you can replace "teacher" there with any other profession, including "programmer".)

This is just an indication that the design and concepts of Moodle do not match the mental model commonly used by teachers.

Let's call it clearly, all educational software is badly designed. Moodle is no exception. It's not only different from the teachers mental model, it's also different from the students mental models, and administrators mental models, besides it imposes complex and low productivity workflows.

The newer proprietary educational portals are usually designed after Moodle, so it's not only bad, it's also trend setting. The good news is that this means they are better than the old ones from before people had something to copy.

I'm a professor. Our department has run its own Moodle for years, despite the university switching to Canvas. The university has exerted lots of pressure and this is the first semester in which all classes are primarily on Canvas. There has been no end to complaints about pedagogy that isn't expressible in Canvas, resulting in bad compromises or huge amounts of labor for large classes.

Bottom line: if universities could contract for support and pay developers a fraction of what they currently pay for proprietary LMS, Moodle (or another open source platform currently starved for resources) would have much better usability and student data wouldn't be in the hands of private equity firms.

Can you give an example? I’ve seen some teachers/dev teams build some wild stuff in Canvas, which worked just fine.

And Canvas is GPL 2 as well, so it’s licensed a heck of a lot better than Blackboard.

CodeRunner, group scheduling features for interview grading, batch capabilities with mastery grading, and customizable grade aggregation, to name a few.

Canvas core is AGPLv3, but many important plugins are proprietary so I'm not aware of universities self-hosting.

I disagree. I use Canvas to teach, and while I could write a 100 bug reports, I wouldn't classify it as badly designed. There are many features I do want, and I hope they get implemented at some point, but it's definitely over the threshold of good software.

As a student on Canvas this year and Sakai last year (and Blackboard before that), I can tell you that Canvas is atrocious and easily the worst of the bunch.

Just so I'm not making an empty comment, here are a few quick complaints:

- Confusing differences between calendar vs module views that differ from class to class depending on where the professor tries to put things

- Zoom is shunned to its own tab rather than integrated with the calendar, causing students to constantly ask each other for the password for every session

- Everything (tests, midterms, homework assignments) is called a quiz, and it's often unclear what is going to be graded or what allows multiple submissions until it's too late

- Notification settings are terrible and most people stick with the settings they set in the first week, meaning some of my classmates are just now realizing they've been missing announcements or grade postings

- If I get an email that a teacher has released grades, I have to go to Canvas to open it - and sometimes it's not even true

- Notification counts are ignored because they appear even on things I've already seen but just not clicked on from the "home" view

- Replies to my own discussion posts are mixed in with replies to everyone else's posts, meaning no real discussion is had

Interesting.

> - Confusing differences between calendar vs module views that differ from class to class depending on where the professor tries to put things

This is actually a feature, not a bug. Courses are wildly different, professors think wildly different. I would not want the software to shoehorn everyone into the same schematic. After all, in-person courses are organized in wildly different ways. You just have learn and communicate.

> Zoom is shunned to its own tab rather than integrated with the calendar, causing students to constantly ask each other for the password for every session

That is a misconfiguration on your uni/prof's part. If they do it right, every calendar entry should a zoom link with the password included, resulting in one-click joining of class.

> Everything (tests, midterms, homework assignments) is called a quiz, and it's often unclear what is going to be graded or what allows multiple submissions until it's too late

Are we using the same software? If you click on any assignment it clearly shows every one of these things at the top. I just checked in student view.

-- I completely agree with your comments about notification settings. Also, the email system within Canvas is atrocious.

The calendar entries for the professors who use the Canvas Zoom feature don't have Zoom links (I assume it should be in the location?) - the only classes in my schedule that have working Zoom links have them copy/pasted into the event description, where the password has been embedded in the link.

And this is what I see at the top of two of my next submissions:

Due Monday by 11pm / Points 30 / Submitting: a file upload / File Types: pdf, doc, and docx / Available until Oct 20 at 12pm

Due No due date / Points 1 / Questions 1 / Time Limit None

Neither says how many attempts I have. I believe the file upload has unlimited re-uploads and the latter only allows for one submission, but I really have no idea how to confirm that without risking it.

Are they using the Zoom LTI or doing something themselves? The Zoom LTI automatically adds links to the calendar and the front page schedule view (I can see them right now).

Also, if you click on an assignment you should be able to see attempts allowed in the top view. If you can’t then your teacher may be hiding it (or you only get one). If they are hiding it, you can still see it through graphiql if you feel like looking (your-institution.instructure.com/graphiql)

If they use Canvas Zoom to schedule all classes, if you hover over a calendar entry, this box pops up https://imgur.com/lIQk5am and you can just click the Zoom link in description. The prof does not have to manually copy-paste anything anywhere.

If there is still trouble in your courses, ask your prof to paste the Zoom link with password on the hompage of your Canvas course (they can add it as first module item if using Modules as homepage)

As for the submission issue, I think Canvas will only tell you about multiple or unlimited attempts on an assignment if you have them. If only one attempt is allowed, then it says nothing. I agree that this is a bug.

I guess that further bolsters the point that FOSS isn't a cure-all for ed tech. A for-profit company that can reduce training costs by half would be much cheaper than a FOSS solution that requires more training.

Training is expensive.

FOSS movement is dominated by geeks. Fine with me, I am one as well. But the relative dearth of artists and UX designers results in very well written software that users struggle to use.

And hosting, and support?

Sure, but training (and, I guess, support, but in the "helping users" sense not in the "installing patches/upgrades" sense) is the vast majority of the expense.

I remember talking to the whoever was developing moodle at the time about 10 years ago and he didn't like the "MVC" pattern because it had too many files.

It took forever to implement at our organisation (it was a non-profit) and was generally a waste of time.

I'm not saying that yours is a bad idea, but the lobby for companies who make the existing software in that space would likely disagree with that position.

Big time.

In the 00's I was part of an effort to merely get the State government to consider OSS.

The lobby was powerful and effective.

Despite broad bipartisan support (we did a great job educating legislators on open software and open data and how that resonates with the work of the public) our house speaker blocked it solid.

Had there been a vote, it would have passed.

Tons of people lobbied that speaker for literally months. Fax, phone calls, visits to her office, the works.

4 guys in expensive, black suits, and some number of zeroes to the right of a donation got it done.

For what it's worth, the same group was successful in part of removing that speaker from office.

The damage had been done. It was hard to even bring the matter up in committee going forward.

wasnt there a similar effort to convert all govt docs to the ODF or something like that. IIRC it was met with an overwhelming opposition from MSFT.

I too was involved in OSS wrt Government in the early 2000s and Office file formats were a huge moat that prevented a lot of adoption of OSS within government.

MS did a really good job of pushing off web technologies as threat to their platform. We are only now getting to where we should have been. Netscape was way too naive and MS saw two or three steps ahead and blocked their move.

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