Our daughter and son in law are also similarly careful about our grandkids' use of school systems and the Internet in general.
We now have the capability to algorithmically generate an estimate of how long it should take an average person to read any given text. Take something like 3/4 of that time (this value is tunable), and if a person wasn't given at least that much time to read a contract, then there patently cannot be a "meeting of the minds"[1] and the contract was never established.
This removes much of the social pressure against holding up the line, and discourages extra-long contracts. Every contract should be read and understood completely.
However, your objection to the use of proprietary software seems completely misguided to me and reeks of overzealous naivety. The software you describe are tools for educating and conveying information. Why don't you object to your being forced to use other proprietary, non-software tools? Your teachers "force" you to use the textbook they select for the course because if every student used a different textbook, the teachers' jobs would become impossible. Why do you accept the "forced" textbook but not the forced software tool?
Your teachers force you to use a particular software tool because education would be hopelessly inefficient if every student were using different tools.
Textbooks commonly reflect the biases of their authors. These biases range from benign (Sedgewick doesn't like parent pointers, so he rants against them in his book) to malevolent (See any social studies text in Texas).
Without sufficient knowledge of the subject, a reader may be unaware of the author's biases and will shape his view of the subject based on biased information. Most high school students (and people in general) do not have sufficient knowledge of history to carefully analyze the biases of their author, nor do they have enough time to read enough books to access a balanced view.
We accept the negative effects of this bias when the effects are minor, as is the case with most high school textbooks. The benefits of forcing everybody to use the same textbook generally outweigh harm caused by bias.
Society is living with compromises. If you want everyone to switch to open source software make it better than the alternatives, they won't switch because of any other reason.
If you were on the wrong platform you had a hell of a time submitting assignments. (CS students on Windows found their C programs would run fine on their laptops but would crash in the CS environment because of compiler and C std lib differences. Engineering students on Linux found that they couldn't open the .docx files to submit lab reports without destroying the mandatory formatting in the tables.)
[0] By "they" I mean the persons who created the documents, not the ones who try to edit them using Gnu/Linux...
Often when people talk about open source "not being as good" what they really mean is "not being the exact same" if a button is in a different spot or something is named differently that is perceived as being "worse" because for the most part people hate change.
GAFE requires a dns change, and optionally syncing your directory with them, and has a modern interface for the admin user. So to be easier I'd probably want a debian package, or a virtual machine image.
If someone would package a virtual machine image that interfaced with common directories, provided web office tools, and a version of Classroom (which doesn't have many features), for free, it would probably have some traction, not needing to rely on the internet connection at school to be stable.
I think it wouldn't be hard to provide a virtual machine image that provides similar functionality to Google Apps (at least e-mail, storage, calendaring, and address books). Educational institutes switch to GAFE because it cuts away a lot of sysadmin salaries. You do not have to worry about getting your SMTP server whitelisted when a student/employee falls for phishing, ensure redundancy, scale up the architecture as users have more data, replace malfunctioning servers, etc.
Of course, Google's competition to an open source solution is not really fair. First of all, Google can benefit the economy of scale. Secondly, Google is large enough to assume the cost in trade for future income (get them hooked or locked in). Thirdly, Google can to use the data indefinitely to some extend for their own use (e.g. training models).
An open source solution can only win over GAFE (or perhaps Office 365) when a principled choice is made to protect the privacy of students and employees.
tl;dr: it is hard to compete with free.
Good luck with your college.
For those that aren't aware, it's essentially a solution to the issue of BYOD. Students want to use their own laptops to take exams (and I'm sure it's also a lot more economical for the school since each student will already own a computer whereas building large computer labs and maintaining many machines just for computerized testing would be prohibitively expensive in our current facility).
The way it works is you essentially grant the software low level root/admin access to your machine so it can sandbox exam software and prevent you from running anything else during tests. This alone would drive me batshit insane if I was a student forced to use this setup but the worst part is that the actual software always seems out of date and doesn't support current OS versions.
We had so many problems this term when students arrived in the fall with new laptops running Windows 10 and OSX 10.11. Apparently, ExamSoft hadn't had enough time to make sure their software worked properly with these new releases so students were told a) if you haven't upgraded to the most recent OS version yet, don't do so. b) if you have recently upgraded to the most recent OS version, you should downgrade. c) if you just bought your computer with the latest OS version installed, um...we'll try to work something out.
I am so glad I am not in the group that handles this stuff because it seemed like a total shit show. The nature of the software prevents it from running in a VM so you can't just run an instance of Windows 8 or OSX 10.10. A lot of the exams aren't simple computerized versions of the old scantrons or paper tests and require the use of software run from inside SofTest. And the worst part is that people generally want to keep their OS fully updated and patched for security and support purposes (not to mention the money people spend on new computers only to find that the required software only runs on old OS versions).
From my end, dealing more with online course delivery, I've thankfully been able to move us away from Flash or Silverlight players for watching recorded content but there's still infrastructure that we need to work around since we can't simply replace it all if the frameworks in place still require some plugin or another for the time being. Not so much a privacy issue as one of keeping up with advances and standards when enterprise/education software can be slow to adapt.
I have several classes that require the use of proprietary software such as Google classroom, Microsoft silver light, and Adobe flash. On top of that I cannot even remember the last time I was given a document that wasn't a .docx.
It would be one thing if these tools were optional, but they are strictly required and students' grades do suffer if they choose to opt out of using them. In previous years I simply followed along in my windows VM, but after getting accepted to the university of my choice I've had enough. I have alerted all of my teachers I will not be using Google classroom, or complete any assignment that requires the use of flash, silver light, or any other proprietary software. Has my grade suffered? Sure, but now that I am securely in the school of my choice I could not care less.