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Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#111

Post by absolution »

bonemachine wrote: post #99

Officials also expressed concerns that the site was making course evaluation information available to individuals not authorized to view the information. Sounds like they have perfectly valid concerns, actually. When it comes to protecting restricted (and potentially rather damaging information) -- which also happens to be the University's property, anyway -- it's generally prudent to suppress the source, and ask que…

The site required Yale credentials to log in

Requiring these credentials seems like a perfectly legitimate way to protect this information. Later in the article it mentions other reasons that were more likely to have contributed to the decision that they made.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#112

Post by Kluny »

orf wrote: post #10

My University released a web based timetable system that was absolutely shocking - it was an ASP.net based site with the kind of unfriendly interface you expect from a 1990's era intranet site (hint: utterly utterly horrible, it produced one timetable PER MODULE rather than a single combined timetable and every time you selected a module it would refresh the page). I was hungover the day before term started and rathe…

> I wonder if other universities suffer the same issues. Could be a market opportunity.

Yes and yes. Both the schools I've been to (the local community college and university) have horrible slow Java-based interfaces that haven't been updated in a decade. I have to admit that those lousy systems were part of what motivated me to get into programming in the first place.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#113

Post by blahedo »

DiggityDug7 wrote: post #93
acangiano wrote: post #2

My money is on a professor being pissed off about poor reviews received.

I do webdev for a big hospital and when we brought up the possibility of patients reviewing their doctors, the doctors got really defensive. Turns out professionals don't want to be held accountable for the quality of their work. Too bad for them public rating systems are inevitable.

> Turns out professionals don't want to be held accountable for the quality of their work.

This statement is not supported by the rest of your comment. Your comment supports a slightly different statement (which I also believe is true): professionals don't want customer-satisfaction ratings from a selection-biased poll to be considered as a rating of the quality of their work.

Because, why would they? That's a terrible metric.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#114

Post by jobu »

bonemachine wrote: post #99

Officials also expressed concerns that the site was making course evaluation information available to individuals not authorized to view the information. Sounds like they have perfectly valid concerns, actually. When it comes to protecting restricted (and potentially rather damaging information) -- which also happens to be the University's property, anyway -- it's generally prudent to suppress the source, and ask que…

> Taken out of context, even a single vindictive or poorly composed review can be fatal to an instructor's career.

Really? Is this something particular to Yale?

Instruction was almost an afterthought at the Universities I attended. (Professors were there to get grants and do research.) Many of them only taught the mandated minimum number of classes (often poorly) and even though it was widely known which profs were terrible it seemed have little effect on their careers.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#115

Post by jarito »

logicchains wrote: post #75
mgkimsal wrote: post #15

Not at all surprised. "Big campus" is another entrenched "big industry", and disruption is hard. I'm in touch with students every so often that have essentially the same ideas - "let's make it easier for students to do XYZ", where XYZ always involves campus data and/or integrating with campus system. It's damned near impossible, and the reasons are many. Some are valid, some are invalid (obviously, these are my own p…

At least this is the internet; if the creators remained anonymous, it shouldn't be too hard for them to continue providing the service in spite of the administration's wishes to the contrary. Especially with for instance something like Tor, assuming that's still functional.

Did you read the article? Yale not only attacked the authors of the site, they used their web content filtering software to block it as malicious. Not much can be done about that and still retain you users.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#116

Post by lesterbuck »

Maybe I missed something, but wouldn't this work fine as a browser extension? I guess it depends on whether any individual student needed to crawl the whole dataset, or only the subset of courses they are interested in. The Yale administration is very clear that students have access to all the relevant data, so let each student run their own app. The app could build the schedule workbooks in local storage, no external entity required. Professors get the privacy they want, and the students get the convenient view of the data they want.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#117

Post by stared »

bertil wrote: post #9
obblekk wrote: post #3

Academia, and the Ivy League in particular, prides itself on being rigorously open, on providing broad access to all knowledge to advance intellectualism. In this regard, academic institutions often attack governments and corporations that intend to limit its free speech, but on the rare chance that this spirit of openness works against the institution, they take a hard liner approach to censoring it. The basic reaso…

I am fairly convinced that Yale would absolutely love to know which staff fits your description, and have detailed and convincing argument to let them improve their teaching style — or gladly defer that burden to more competent TAs. With increasing competition between universities, details like “accent too strong, can’t understand what professor says” become a million-dollar problem, with a solution that is actually…

At my previous university (University of Warsaw) there was an anonymous wiki for opinions on courses and teachers. And it was useful, and people were civil (insults, which were rare, were being removed by community).

So I don't see why anonymous reviews should fail in a similar case.

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#119

Post by avn2109 »

bertil wrote: post #9
obblekk wrote: post #3

Academia, and the Ivy League in particular, prides itself on being rigorously open, on providing broad access to all knowledge to advance intellectualism. In this regard, academic institutions often attack governments and corporations that intend to limit its free speech, but on the rare chance that this spirit of openness works against the institution, they take a hard liner approach to censoring it. The basic reaso…

I am fairly convinced that Yale would absolutely love to know which staff fits your description, and have detailed and convincing argument to let them improve their teaching style — or gladly defer that burden to more competent TAs. With increasing competition between universities, details like “accent too strong, can’t understand what professor says” become a million-dollar problem, with a solution that is actually…

One of Yale's peer institutions has an anonymous review site [0] that has been working well for several years now. It doesn't have any YouTube-style vitriol that I can find, though it's possibly aggressively moderated.

[0] http://www.culpa.info/

Re: Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

#120

Post by esbranson »

Fuxy wrote: post #60

Typical American double standard. We promote free speech but don't you dare use it in a way we don't approve. Is that really free speech then? I'm not free to say/do anything you don't approve of. And since when is it ok to threaten disciplinary action on a student that didn't do anything wrong just provided a service students desperately need. It's like me threatening to shoot your family if you don't sell me your h…

Well, technically...

Yale has made it clear they would set in motion procedures in which they may decide to no longer to business with these brothers, over this website.

If I don't like someone or something someone said, I don't have to do business with them. Yale is no different. Yale is a private organization that may do business with whomever they wish for whatever reason they wish, outside of the public policy decisions of the government. They have decided to utilize this right.

Its not that Yale is violating anyone's rights, its that Yale is a making a decision that reflects poorly on their institution.

Its the public institution equivalent of [insert bad thing here] to your neighbor because of something they said. Its not a freedom of speech violation to react that way, its just going to lose you alot of respect and alot of business.

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