Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most graduates aren't really qualified to work anywhere that they couldn't have worked before going to college in the first place.
I used LaTeX as a ugrad, it’s not that hard
Congratulations on your competence.
Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
521–530 of 690 posts
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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 buil…
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.
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to add one more data point, we also use Canvas at my university. The deadline for submitting who are eligible (i.e. passed compulsory assignments and labs) to take the exam was yesterday, and I couldn’t meet that deadline because Canvas went down. I usually do corrections offline so I have backups of my own evaluations, but these are courses with many teachers and many TAs, so Canvas is the way we sync our asses…
I guess what surprises me the most is that it’s even legal for schools to outsource the core of what they do to some random tech company. Either way, they were under no obligation to adopt this garbage technology regardless of whether it’s available, so this is 110% on them.
I’m sorry… is your view here that you can’t believe it is legal for a school to purchase software or pay someone to host software for them?
You are aware that you are posting on Hacker News, a forum for people who make their living selling software and the expertise to host it?
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#524> Earlier in October, an Amazon Web Services incident resulted in Canvas and Piazza outages that lasted around 12 hours.
...what does that DDB DNS issue have to do with anything?
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#525A friend who teaches at MIT said they were hit by this. I found it ironic and a little sad that a place like MIT doesn't have an IT staff that can maintain their own on-prem solutions for things like this. But it turns out that MIT used to have their own homegrown system, and recently switched to Canvas. Bet they're regretting that now. The build vs. buy decision seems to have swung very hard toward buy in the last d…
Homegrown systems are expensive to maintain and usually still fail to match up to the commercial options available at this point. LMS's are also just really complicated pieces of software. I worked on my university's own version as an undergrad.
The university I went to established has a rule that was essentially "student made software is not permitted to be used." Professors couldn't actually use student made software, the software had to be wrapped up by a "company" and a contract made. This meant that you couldn't just make a tool/utility/whatever and have it be used.
I believe the same applied to the professors themselves, although that was hardly enforced.
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#526I'm surprised how few comments there are on this thread. This is probably affecting millions of students at the most stressful time of the year. Incidentally I've always hated Canvas and probably every other LMS provider, but what is particularly amusing about this current outage is that it is occurring at exactly the time when universities are demanding that all professors put all of their materials on Canvas, witho…
I'm in Europe, and we don't use Canvas (at least, I've never heard of it). However, we have similar diseases. In my particular school, it's a massive SharePoint site plus ever more stuff in Teams. Plus Moodle, plus other services. The MS services have not improved teaching at all. What they do, is fragment communications, and add ever more places people have to look, in hopes of finding things. But the administration…
Spain here. Most of our public Universities have their IT stack on MS... I cannot fathom how much of our national budget goes to their pockets.
Thankfully, I store my teaching materials on my personal non-uni webpage, and the student's marks in my office's computer (apart from the MS-based Uni system).
Whenever something happens with MS, chaos ensues throughout the whose Uni and the students end up paying the consequences.
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
Canvas will send emails when grades are posted, but not what the grade is. Or at least that’s the way in the configurations I’ve seen. So, that wouldn’t help in a case where no one can access the canvas gradebook.
yup you just get an email saying "A new grade has been posted for EECS 420"
...then all those clicks juice engagement and utilization numbers; why would someone want to just know their grade when they can use more clicks and custom apps to get the same info?
The party line is probably something about "a lack of data security" with email, which would almost be funny given the current situation if it wasn't so stressful for those impacted...
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
Universities are not going to write their own software, and no they can’t use ‘agents’ to write and maintain it for them either.
It's somewhat ironic... if a University's CS department was charged with developing and maintaining the system, what an awesome learning tool it would be. CS students would maybe even be invested in the outcome by having to eat their own dogfood and then really appreciate it what it's like in the real world.
CS != Software Engineering
I had a lot to learn about actually developing software after I finished my CS degree.
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
Canvas will send emails when grades are posted, but not what the grade is. Or at least that’s the way in the configurations I’ve seen. So, that wouldn’t help in a case where no one can access the canvas gradebook.
yup you just get an email saying "A new grade has been posted for EECS 420"
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Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
yup you just get an email saying "A new grade has been posted for EECS 420"
...then all those clicks juice engagement and utilization numbers; why would someone want to just know their grade when they can use more clicks and custom apps to get the same info? The party line is probably something about "a lack of data security" with email, which would almost be funny given the current situation if it wasn't so stressful for those impacted...
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