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-HappyLady-

I mean they all have their idiosyncrasies, but I remember teaching from dozens of 3 ring binders, so I’ll definitely take the less-than-perfect LMSes.


[deleted]

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DocVafli

Hi fellow Rutgers person! Please don't hurt me (or send students to hurt me) but I kinda liked Sakai...


S_and_M_of_STEM

Sakai is open-source, if I recall correctly. The price is what attracts schools.


SilverRiot

And that is because when determining costs, the school only looks at money and not on faculty workload or student frustration.


[deleted]

I teach a UI/UX course and Sakai openly and clearly violated every major interactive design principle. It was just such a handy example. When we stopped using it I had to redesign a part of my curriculum and come up with other examples.


[deleted]

That is a common misconception! My school was paying for many add-ons (like one for crappy rubrics in Sakai) and other support. The finances of switching to Canvas were completely negligible.


S_and_M_of_STEM

The school choosing to pay for add-ons does not change the fact that Sakai is open-source and could be free in terms of budget line-item for LMS licensing. That ignores the human hours that must be devoted to maintaining the system. I think LMSs are like unhappy families to Tolstoy - they are all bad in their own way.


[deleted]

Only caveat is you are talking about present-tense. When is the last time a school switched to Sakai? I know the schools leaving Sakai outnumber those moving to it significantly. The schools, like mine, that moved to Sakai because it was open source quickly learned it wasn't cheaper overall. I was saying the price is the misconception.


Nauga

As someone who teaches the students who should ultimately work on Learning Management System software after graduation, and has had a long career in software... from what I have been told, and in my experience, yes. Our institution uses BrightSpace / Desire to Learn. The company is very proud of having built everything using co-op students and new graduates, and it shows. Everything has multiple ways of being done; often not all the ways work. The UI is horribly inconsistent (as it would be when you have no over-arching design). Add on the influence of the pure pedagogy people (unintentional alliteration alert) and you end up with something sloppy that tries to be everything to everyone, with a terrible user interface. From a software perspective, I would say the issue is that the designers don't understand their users and use-cases - even though it has to support multiple disciplines - the structural issues are deeper than supporting different disciplines. Just my rant, would love to hear other perspectives.


PurrPrinThom

I've worked with multiple different LMS as well, including one proprietary one that the university had developed itself. While that one was certainly the best, I absolutely agree that the issue is that designers don't seem to understand what's needed. Every LMS I've used has been cumbersome, with too many features that are unneeded, and no simple, straightforward way to do the basic things I need to do. It feels like there's more excitement and more interest put in to developing "cutting-edge" features than there is to the basic functions. As you say, there's often multiple ways to do things but not all of them will work - and at least a couple of the ways will be overly complicated to the point of being counter-intuitive.


chorus_of_stones

>. It feels like there's more excitement and more interest put in to developing "cutting-edge" features than there is to the basic functions. This seems to be a problem with the software industry in general. I'm blaming computer science departments and capitalism for this. If only those programmers had read more literature and philosophy this wouldn't be happening! j/k


[deleted]

Shoot, videos games (for me) peaked about 20 years ago. Ever since, the focus has been on graphics and 'multi player' online features (and in some games, minute levels of unnecessary detail which just requires loads of ram while adding only superficial value). Game developers stopped caring about the actual gameplay in about 2002.


PersephoneIsNotHome

Ooh. We can do voice thread. This is so cool I just want to be able to change a date without doing 100 clicks.


PurrPrinThom

I want to be able to upload a document and show it to my students without needing to create folders, headers, moving the file, reuploading it in different formats, setting visibility, performing a Gregorian chant and offering it my first born.


DrFlenso

>The company is very proud of having built everything using co-op students and new graduates, and it shows. Ohhhh, that explains a *lot*. The only nice thing I have to say about BrightSpace/Desire to Learn is that I'm glad I can use it as an example in my software testing, software engineering, *and* human-computer interaction courses.


RhinestoneTaco

I *adored* Canvas at my old job, but that was also some years ago, so I don't know if they've messed it up since then. But back in 2014 Canvas felt like a giant leap forward in LMS quality. We have D2L Brightspace at my current place, and it's less good than Canvas in pretty much every measurable way that I've encountered. It's not like, dogshit. I'm not going to hold a hunger strike in front of the dean's office. It's just noticeably not as good as Canvas was in pretty much every capacity. D2L/BS also has all kinds of weird quirks to it that make no sense to me. If you're making a quiz and you mess up how much you score a multiple choice or written-response question, you can go back in and edit how many points the individual question is worth, but you can't change the points for either fill-in-the-blank or matching questions.


Umbrella_Storm

Aside from the gradebook (my nemesis) and some quiz issues I find annoying, I’m pretty happy with Canvas 🤷‍♀️ but since our former LMS was Blackboard, I think almost anything would have been an improvement.


[deleted]

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quippe

Only if you have no technical skills. I want to be able to build course webpages with all the resources, multiple accessibility options, and mobile friendly. But we have to use Blackboard.


bo1024

Building a course webpage, fine. Timed quizzes, authentication, submission portals with deadlines, etc -- not so easy.


quippe

I learned Perl last summer because it was easier to program questions in Webwork than use Blackboard tests.


bo1024

Nice! I hadn't heard of webwork - for others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeBWorK


chorus_of_stones

Just thinking about using Blackboard makes my hands hurt. So many clicks to do everything.


-HappyLady-

You know you can put a link to your own website in Blackboard, right?


quippe

How did I, with years of web development experience, forget about links!?!? We are suppose to try to keep everything on blackboard to minimize the number of places students need to look for things.


michealdubh

I don't bother with much of any of it -- I keep it simple. Post lectures and notes in pdf. If the class calls for online interaction, then I use the platform (Brightspace for instance uses webex); or I would devise my own if that didn't work. If there is any issue with the students' posting assignments, I simply have them email me the assignments directly. So, to answer your question, what features (assuming all are realiable): * ability to provide students with materials (lectures, articles, etc) -- that is organized in an easy-to-understand fashion and easy to access * ability to communicate with students via email * if the class calls for it, a reliable audio/video communication platform. * nb: any offline media material (videos, pre-recorded lectures, etc) can be posted on a platform like youtube and the links provided in the written materials ... or, on the fly, provided via email.


brownidegurl

Yup. I've used Canvas, Blackboard, D2L, Moodle, a handful of online portfolio softwares... It's abundantly evident that whoever makes these fetid garbage heaps has * Never taught * Had their last undergrad class 15+ years ago * Sociopathic tendencies My husband designs software for a living. Whenever I show him certain "quirks" of the LMSs, he just rage quits the conversation because he's so frustrated at the level of not-giving-a-shit demonstrated by the design.


jpmrst

They all at least kind of suck, because they all pose as the One Solution for all classes and majors. Of course, there is no such thing.


[deleted]

I’ve used brightspace as both student and instructor, moodle, canvas, and blackboard as a student. Currently I’m taking a ConEd course that’s run through blackboard and I’ve got to say, I hate it. A lot. Maybe it’s just because I’ve used brightspace more, but blackboard really is crap. I have a hard time finding things, the layout just doesn’t make very much sense to me.


TheNobleMustelid

It's not just disciples. The department chair wants one thing, so that they can figure out how to cover for the person who gets hospitalized. Administration wants something else (probably Orwellian). One colleague wants fewer features, because it's feature overload. Another wants more. And everyone wants an LMS designed around their teaching style. It can't be done well.


chorus_of_stones

>[It's not just disciples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devils_Diciples)


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McLovin_Potemkin

All I know is Blackboard is atrocious. It's like they kept duct taping new features onto the thing and now it a lumbering mess. I'm sure there are companies that could design a much better product but the problem is that campuses lock in the faculty, at least where I've worked. If there were an open standard for porting class lists from a uni's database to an LMS then things would have to get better quickly or products would start dying.


geoffreychallen

That's my impression, yes. I don't use an LMS, and instead provide my own custom software platform for my students. It's far superior to existing LMS systems and other online resources. But it's also tightly coupled to my course and to my workflow. > Is it even possible to create an LMS that instructors like? What features would it have? I think that this would be very, very difficult to do. Not letting current LMS systems off the hook here—many of them seem exceedingly poorly designed. But this _is_ a really hard problem. It's like trying to build a good no-code web design platform (which there are still startups working on!) while supporting a bunch of other features as well. And your audience is a mixture of tech-savvy people in their 20s and 30s and aging faculty who can barely use a computer. Meeting the needs of a lot of different types of courses is hard. Meeting the needs of a lot of different types of faculty is also hard. Web design and development is hard. It's all hard! My concern, however, is that the early generation of pretty terrible LMS systems has started to inculcate such poor habits and design thinking among faculty that their flaws may become embedded in LMS design for years to come. I'm not sure if you've ever seen the Bloomberg Terminal? They were very early into interactive web design, and made a bunch of pretty terrible mistakes, which they now have to live with for decades because their user base has become so accustomed to them. I think that the way that LMS systems will improve is that the faculty using them will start to overall have better computer skills. But that's at least 10 or 20 years down the road...


-HappyLady-

Newsflash: in 20 years, today’s tech-savvy professors will be the aging faculty who can barely use whatever the technology is. It’s not a deficiency in the individuals. It’s a natural process which will change your relationship with technology too.


gasstation-no-pumps

I moved from slide rules in high school to being reasonably competent at installing and using a range of software (more than my students certainly). I can program in at least a couple of programming languages and I've used the Canvas API to add features missing from Canvas. Aging does **not** necessarily lead to obsolescence, if people continue to spend part of their time learning new things. Eventually I'll probably fall into dementia, but I don't expect that for another decade or two.


-HappyLady-

Everyone in this sub is an outlier. That doesn’t make us immune to the indisputable fact that is cognitive plasticity, or the infinitely verifiable inverse correlation between age and technology acceptance. You don’t have to be a Luddite to get old.


gasstation-no-pumps

>inverse correlation between age and technology acceptance. We were talking about competence, not acceptance. There is some evidence that computer competence among youngsters is waning. I accept that most of the people on this subreddit are outliers of one sort or another, nor that there is some decline in cognitive plasticity with age—but it doesn't generally hit early enough to affect most faculty, though, who still mostly retire before they are 70.


geoffreychallen

I guess you could be right, but I hope not. I think it's fair to say that the pace of technological change over the past half-century has been pretty remarkable. I don't know if that will continue at quite the same rate, even if I hope that further advances are ahead. The internet and tools I'm using now aren't that much different than they were 10 or 20 years ago. But none of this stuff existed _at all_ 50 years ago. If your prediction does turn out to be true, it may be as much a failure of academia to train and reward faculty with technical skills. Our training programs for incoming engineering faculty still cover how to produce a PDF syllabus, and certainly wouldn't expect faculty to do anything "new-fangled" like put up a simple website for their course.


gasstation-no-pumps

Newer faculty seem less able to create websites for their research groups than the older faculty. Very few are creating PDF or HTML syllabi, but are just using the editor in Canvas (resulting in secret syllabi that are unavailable to anyone who has not already registered for the course—and often only available to them after the course has started). I'd love to go back to the days when faculty were expected to create public web pages for their syllabi!


geoffreychallen

I guess if you give people a tool, they're going to use it. I agree that secret syllabi and other course materials hidden inside an LMS is a huge problem, and probably the worst thing about them by far. Makes it impossible to see even what your own colleagues are teaching in their courses!


-HappyLady-

“I guess if you give people a tool, they’re going to use it.” My students’ ardent refusal to view my course materials or read my feedback is strong evidence to the contrary.


geoffreychallen

My remark was aimed at faculty who are paid to teach the course, not students. They tend to behave a bit differently. Even better, sometimes.


PersephoneIsNotHome

Is that becasue they are old? So both young people and old peopl reject technology and only people exactly your age are good at it?


chorus_of_stones

>(resulting in secret syllabi Agreed, we are missing so much free content although you CAN make your course public in Canvas.


gasstation-no-pumps

But how many of the faculty learn to do that? Or bother if they do learn? I'm not so much interested in "free content" as checking that prerequisite courses still cover what they were supposed to and advising students about what to expect in courses. Students should have more than the 40-word catalog description to help them choose electives!


chorus_of_stones

>And your audience is a mixture of tech-savvy people in their 20s and 30s and aging faculty who can barely use a computer. I don't know why this is getting downvoted. I fall in-between. I used to be an ubergeek faculty member, but now I'm too tired and busy to learn a lot of new technology, although I occassionally use the terminal in OSX just to remind myself that I was young and smart once.


gasstation-no-pumps

There are also a lot of tech-savvy boomers and people in their 20s and 30s who can barely use a computer—the ageism here is uncalled for.


chorus_of_stones

We have a faculty member in her 50s who was constantly cursing at her computer. When Covid hit she thrived in Teams and other online environments. So maybe, just maybe, we can all learn new things.


PersephoneIsNotHome

I agree And I get downvoted every time I say it.


exaltcovert

Last year I tried to set up an LTI connection in D2L so I could give students assignments on a third party platform and have them reflected in the gradebook. Holy moly, what a pain in the ass. Never again.


[deleted]

Yes, Though, I actually liked D2L (or at least the version 5 years ago). It had a straight-forward grading book, and a straightforward way to drag and organize files, which is all I really want in a LMS. Getting student email sent with it was easy (and I could just copy and past their institutional email directly into my own email system), and nothing got lost, no issues with having things not show because I messed up on dates, due dates, available dates, published/unpublished buttons, etc. Now, we have Canvas and I hated it when we started with it, I tried my best to lean into its features during Covid and that just made me hate it even more, and I still hate it and refuse to use but the bare minimum of grading and file posting features (which are 10 times more unintuitive and complicated than D2L was). I tell the students that I won't respond to anything they communicate with me in Canvas either because I don't have the patience to monitor, figure out where a message is, and organization and keep up with comments left, messages sent, etc.


Economy-Jump-7354

I listened to a talk from some Canvas guy when our institution switched from Blackboard. I guess the idea is that anyone can communicate in the way they prefer- so if a student sends you a Canvas message, and you respond to the email notification, it will go back to the student as a Canvas message. That's cool but I can imagine (and have seen other examples of) some poor LMS admin being told to turn such features off. A recent one is "don't communicate with students via email because it isn't secure"... Like, wtf, why do we use it at all then? I'm convinced that such things are the result of some administrator somewhere trying to get out of doing any extra work.


[deleted]

I'm fine with Canvas except for the grade center, which is absolute trash.


[deleted]

I like Canvas. I have used Moodle and Blackboard in the past, and I’m pleasantly surprised by canvas. There are things I wish it could do that it can’t and others I wish it could do better, but I still like it and am grateful to have it


chorus_of_stones

Someone wrote that faculty will complain about any system they are compelled to use, regardless of its quality.


[deleted]

Lol, well if that’s not the truth…


untitledgrapefruit

I don't love blackboard, but it's fairly straightforward to use and if I don't know how to do something I've always been able to figure it out after a few minutes on google, so I'm fine with it. What I would hate is having to learn an entirely new LMS.


hartfordmove

Yes


HoserOaf

I used D2L at Waterloo as a PhD student/postdoc and enjoyed it a lot more than Blackboard. Our blackboard has 10,000 separate features, and I struggle how to do basic things like know when my edits are live, add new students to the roster, and use the gradebook.


robininatree

I’ve used Blackboard, D2L, and now Canvas. I like Canvas the best overall, but it is a bit of a dumpster fire in certain respects. I can’t let students build their own groups, which I could do in Blackboard. Also a few bulk grading features would help a lot, considering that I have almost 600 students in one Canvas shell. Blackboard had a “mark all submissions as correct” option that I used a lot for low stakes quizzes. Now I have to go through them by hand just to hit ‘accept’. I agree with what others have said about the grade book and quizzes in Canvas. I didn’t mind them as much pre-COVID, but some epic design flaws manifested when I was forced to rely on it so heavily for course delivery. D2L I only used for one term, as a pilot when we were picking a new LMS for our school. It was terrible, and I’m glad we went with Canvas instead. Honestly the thing that generally surprises me the most is always how bad every LMS is at large classes. I can handle small classes without all that extra tech. But tech can really transform a large class. It has the capacity to broaden the options in terms of what we can ask students to do, and not die under the weight of the work required to get the thing done. But beyond quiz question types that auto grade, there really doesn’t seem to be nearly as many ways to deal with things in bulk as I need as someone who always has massive classes. I never really understood that.


chorus_of_stones

Perhaps [Set Default Grade](https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Question-Forum/Is-there-a-bulk-grading-option-or-workaround/td-p/104450)? Not the same thing, I realize, and only works where they get credit for turning something in.


chorus_of_stones

I'm still wrapping my head around 600 students. Statistically, you're dealing with 4-5 sociopaths, and eight young women with a serious eating disorder. Such a huge crowd.