My girlfriend started taking a Masters in a college this year. In her course the faculty have shown some disorganization and computer illiteracy since day one but the latest one…completely killed me.
Besides their personal college e-mail, they wanted a platform to make announcements for all the course (20 students). I can think of a thousand ways to do this. Hell, even a Facebook group would be better. But no…
They have an e-mail address (like Masters_name@college.duh) where all the info is sent and EVERYBODY has the password to enter the e-mail and check the inbox.
That is it. I have no words. I think this is the most idiotic and dumb thing I’ve ever seen in IT.
It’s like someone explained the idea of a mailing list but they didn’t quite get it.
my wife is a university senior lecturer — it’s likely they already have a system that can do this, that they have access to, works, and is non-technical; all they need to do is ask where it is.
I went back to university last year and exactly this. They have Microsoft subscription with all the bells and whistles, classroom, work material, homework, etc.
I think it was blackboard that was used when I went to a further education college years ago. It supported announcements on it. I would imagine a university having similarly software as one of the reasons for blackboard was so we uploaded our assignments to it.
I don’t know if it’s any better than it used to be, but Blackboard was pretty universally loathed by the faculty when I was in college.
Dude I hated it as a student too. The only benefit it provided was a one time get out of jail free card per class. Intentionally corrupt a word doc and upload it. You just bought yourself at least a day to continue finishing your paper.
Simple. Elegant. Perfect.
10/10
“Hey all, I wanted to say that class is cancelled today b/c of severe weather - PLEASE do not try to come in, it really is quite dangerous outside!”
Got it, message received, [delete message]. Cleaned out my inbox today, guess I can
gostay home! :-P@college.duh
chefs kiss
A very poor attempt at a mail-list. I wonder when someone’s going to change the password.
Or delete all messages and trash.
Plot twist: the MA program is in Ethics and Morality and they’re in the middle of a live experiment.
Moodle is free and open source and exactly for this (along with hosting course material as well).
Well, can’t say I’m surprised. I had something like that in pretty much every school I was in, just that ours were actually Gmail accounts. For non-technical folks it’s an easy and obvious solution. And to be honest, it works…
It “works” if everybody is well behaved and you don’t care about niceties like seeing which messages have been read.
Would expect nothing less from an MA program.
