It’s so simple to send an e-mail to the student with relevant records on completion of a quiz or whatnot. They don’t do it, because they want to control the data. (And universities don’t insist on it for who knows what reason.)
> setting this up is well beyond the capabilities of most students.
Going by a certain story 2 years ago, their concern should be that they're overqualified for Meta.
It doesn't help that gmail, which is the only serious direct competition to outlook, straight up doesn't do "folders" and instead goes with markers. So you can't really just put a filter that drags all the 100 low-priority alerts in what would count as a first degree abstraction of "place where things are sorted into". No, there are two layers of abstraction between point A and B of things, sorter and sorted things. The result? Muggles can't recognize the heck you're describing and refuse to even acknowledge the possibility.
While true, unless I'm mistaken, markers (I assume you're referring to tags) can be nested to provide a pseudo-folder hierarchy, and with proper filters you can remove the "inbox" tag and have the mail only show up under the specific tag.
TBH I don't fully mind it, it lets you classify an email in multiple ways (eg "See Later" as well as "Work related").
Perhaps Outlook is difficult to configure. Thunderbird is intuitive.
Biology is a great example because of just how important digital record management is to experimentation in the field.
I mean, anyone smart enough to attend university could probably figure it out if they really wanted to, but there are hundreds of other useful things that they could learn too. There are only so many hours in the day, and given that most students don't get that many emails, I can hardly blame them for not wanting to prioritize learning how to filter emails.
(I personally have over a hundred lines of Sieve filters, but I'm definitely not a typical student)
Yes. And most of the general population. They can do it once they know it exists, most people just are not aware it is a thing at all.
>What are they learning?
Here, their "major" as you say in the US. Someone in econ, biology or even CS is not going to learn Outlook rules. Maybe IT or business will have a sentence on it.
>Where will they be qualified to work?
Any office job. Any job really.
Exactly what is in their field of study, nothing more. That's a huge part of the problems created by treating academia as a degree mill mandatory to get a job able to feed yourself instead of a place only for those truly interested in actually studying a subject.
It's better than nothing. (And good training for the real world.)
Also, most universities (and many schools now) issue academic e-mail addresses to students. In those cases, the email is definitive proof.
This would undermine Canvas's lock-in.
ed tech is the WORST performing VC sector
the ONLY game in that town is vendor lock-in! are people joking?
c'mon, canvas is a huge piece of shit. the SaaSpocalypse is coming for them - it seems it is simply that LLMs will be used to exploit it first, rather than universities writing an open alternative they share with each other for free.
Canvas is used by Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, CalTech, etc. If they each paid 10 FTE, they could set up a foundation that could govern the development of a top-tier LMS. Every tier-1 state institution could contribute 5 FTE. Even little JuCos could chip in an employee here and there. You'd pick up hundreds of capable employees at a fraction of what those schools currently pay to Instructure.
In reality, universities always spin off anything that looks like it could generate revenue. It is very telling that you can't even get your college transcript from your college. You have to go to (and pay) some third party to get it. Some universities even outsource their "classes" like elderhostel to cruise lines and travel companies.
That already exists [0], and is actually reasonably popular.
> the SaaSpocalypse is coming for them - it seems it is simply that LLMs will be used to exploit it first
I doubt it, because enterprise sales has nothing to do with how good your product is, how expensive it is, how easy it is to administer, how secure it is, etc.; it only depends on how good you are at enterprise sales. I mean, my university is Oracle-based, and I'm pretty sure that you could get 3 random undergraduates to write something better, so I don't think that LLMs writing better/cheaper software will make any difference here.
[0]: https://moodle.org/
Extremely non-tech savvy, hates computers, and is gonna grumble "What the hell is a PGP? Better not be another one of those phone code things." as you try to pitch this highly-technological solution to a largely niche problem domain.
Hell just getting people to do secure passwords is a whole thing.
What seems easy on hobby projects gets way more difficult at scale. Source: experience.
Everything we know has come from reddit threads / hackernews threads. There has been 0 official communication today indicating this was an attack, yet the login page was defaced by ShinyHunters.
Either way, they were under no obligation to adopt this garbage technology regardless of whether it’s available, so this is 110% on them.
Edit: No idea why this was down voted so much. I'm not defending Canvas, just wondering what the alternative would be.
But you do then have to have a sysadmin capable of managing an enterprise grade LAMP stack.
And from the hacker's message itself, it's clear they want money in exchange for not releasing private info, not for the data itself.
Do we live in a fear based culture? Why the panic? Even if everything was hosted on Instructure's infrastructure, it's all AWS. I'd be VERY surprised if there aren't multiple way to go back to a previous state.
Most of the work and delay is to make sure they figure out where the breach occurred.
Here in the Netherlands a data center's power source (not even the machines) burnt down, data center is offline and University of Utrecht, one of the biggest universities here, is closed. Access passes don't work, work from home environment doesn't work, student information system is down, system for grading doesn't work. No failover for any of them (or maybe it was in the same DC?)
https://nos.nl/artikel/2613485-storingen-in-hele-land-door-b...
Backups can be sabotaged (turned off or schedules manipulated) or compromised (say, by lateral movement).
> Even if everything was hosted on Instructure's infrastructure, it's all AWS.
AWS Backup isn't foolproof. Get your hands on administrator credentials as an attacker and suddenly the only thing between everything being gone for good and unrecoverable even for AWS is remembering to have put a permanent deletion protection on all resources in AWS Backup.
Does anyone have a list of affected schools?
And then wish for the death of saas and a day where you can deploy your own software you can control and modify as you need.
Does a future employer look at pass/fail vs the grade? do they care? Are there even jobs that matter enough to care out there for them?
This seems like, solving the problem but without actually seeing the broader goal or trajectory education is supposed to follow.
Canvas is mostly FOSS
... and assuming they have a documented, tested, and trusted restore process.
Some data was permanently lost, and then officers told reporters that multi-regional backup was not yet built because it was too hard at such a massive scale... of 858 TB.
There are probably many S3 buckets in existence that are bigger than that.
Not saying that they should've used S3, but it's definitely possible configure multi-regional backup (and a government can afford it).
As a parent of kids who are impacted by this, I’m not super concerned about the data being held for ransom, but I sure as fuck am concerned about how much it’s going to cost the district to move to another provider.
Does Canvas have cybersecurity insurance?
Schedule a single exam and that's your grade for that subject? That's how it should work anyway, credits for work during semester (or worse attendance) are not needed to evaluate if someone learned the material, give them an exam and done.
Which to me seems the best way, you still have to learn throughout the year. Especially to avoid cheating this works nice. And as an aside, most people I know that did a year abroad in the US got 1-2 grades higher, as it was quite easy to just farm extra credits.
At my school, tomorrow is the last day of exams. Most of the students have left campus. There's no time or mechanism to schedule an(other) exam.