> 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.