Re:Parents demand academic publisher drop Proctorio surveill...
by gorgoiler on Tuesday December 22, 2020 @03:53PM
(#25511102)
Even in the private sector (my school is independent, with 600 pupils, 200 staff, $20M revenue) things are as bad.
Technical decision making is by an IT department that reports through the bursar (head of all non academic staff) to the head. There’s no accountability to core competency: teaching and learning. We are merely stakeholders at an equal level on the org chart.
Contrast this to when I was a FAANG SWE, when every function at the company — including IT — was subordinate to those who built the actual tech: Engineering.
The flip side is that as a teacher I have complete autonomy over anything that does fall to me; namely the bulk of the CS curriculum and the way it is taught.
(Tools like repl.it are wonderful for completely side stepping any involvement with bureaucracy. Invite the kids to sign up and just get stuff done.)
This scenario encourages focus on features that are important for the decision makers and less focus on the features (or usability) important for the actual users - exactly as you describe.
A bottom-up approach where students and teachers would identify what works best for them and push for it is extremely hard. Teachers try the best but are limited by their budgets (many pay out of their own purse for tools and equipment!) and students have basically no say.
This leads to the situation where most successful (profitable, largest) edtech software has no relation to what actually might be the best tool.