Cmr: ‘Maak informatiesystemen op de HR gebruiksvriendelijker en eenvoudiger’

De centrale medezeggenschapsraad (cmr) wil af van de veelheid aan digitale informatiesystemen die op de HR in gebruik zijn. Het moet eenvoudiger en gebruiksvriendelijker. Dat stelt de raad in een initiatiefvoorstel, waarop collegevoorzitter Sarah Wilton-Wels in de cmr-vergadering positief reageerde. Met een kanttekening: ‘Dit is niet zomaar van maandag op dinsdag geregeld’.  

‘Sommige informatie staat op Hint (intranetsite, red), andere informatie is te vinden in Osiris en voor wie toch iets anders zoekt moet weer kijken in Brightspace’, schrijft de cmr in haar voorstel. ‘Voor nieuwe studenten voelt dit als het binnengaan van een doolhof, terwijl het de bedoeling is om studenten goed en efficiënt te informeren zodat zij zich kunnen richten op de studie. Ook zijn er informatiesystemen, voor medewerkers, die elkaar soms tegenspreken.’ De voorkeur gaat uit naar meer gebruiksvriendelijke applicaties.

‘Belangrijk dat alle informatie eenvoudig te vinden is’

Ter onderbouwing van het voorstel zette de raad een enquête uit die door 126 personen (83 medewerkers en 43 studenten) is ingevuld. ‘Studenten vinden het belangrijk dat alle informatie eenvoudig te vinden is en dat de systemen gebruiksvriendelijk zijn’, concludeert de raad uit de enquête. ‘Daarnaast hechten ze veel waarde aan de bereikbaarheid van docenten via Teams en aan het hebben van alle lesmaterialen en studie-informatie op een centrale plek.’

Gevraagd naar de meest favoriete app is Outlook met 37 procent koploper bij de medewerkers, en bij de studenten is dat Brightspace (32 procent). Hint scoort resp. 7 en 9 procent.

De cmr wijst bij het bespreken van het initiatiefvoorstel ook naar de 100-dagen onderzoeken van afgelopen twee jaar. Daaruit werd, ondanks een verbetering dit jaar, duidelijk dat eerstejaars niet altijd even goed geïnformeerd zijn over diverse zaken op de HR.

‘We willen potentiële studenten niet afschrikken’

‘Onze focus ligt er ook op dat we potentiële studenten niet willen afschrikken (voor die veelheid van systemen, red.)’, voegde student-cmrlid Sylvester Stolk er in de vergadering aan toe. Hij benoemde ook het eenduidig gebruik van systemen, dus dat verschillende opleidingen systemen idealiter op dezelfde manieren inzetten.

Met dat pleidooi was collegevoorzitter Sarah Wilton-Wels het, in de lijn met de Strategisch agenda, roerend eens. ‘Als je met discipline overstijgend opgavegericht-onderwijs (DOO) aan de slag wilt, en je als student dus op verschillende plekken terecht komt, zijn verschillende systemen erg onhandig.’ 

‘Lastig om het zomaar voor elkaar te krijgen’

Voor Wilton-Wels klinkt het cmr-voorstel ‘in beginsel als muziek in de oren. Maar om het zomaar voor elkaar te krijgen is lastig. Anders hadden we het al gedaan’. Het verzoek van de raad om in gesprek te gaan met ‘bijvoorbeeld de directeur opgave standaardisatie’, werd ook door het cvb omarmd. Wilton-Wels kwam ook nog met de naam Anjo van Kelckhoven, de HR directeur IDT (Informatievoorziening en digitale transformatie).

Tekst: Jos van Nierop
Illustratie: Demian Janssen

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Hoping those familiar with #LaTeX can give me some advice here. I've started using it to create my assignments for school. I'm not writing technical papers yet, but I find using LaTeX with #Zotero in #VSCode more #accessible with a #ScreenReader than most other setups I've tried.
Since my discussion posts have to follow #APA style, I’m using LaTeX for those as well as full papers. That part is going well—but I’m running into trouble when I need to actually post what I’ve written.
My school uses Brightspace, which allows discussion posts in either rich text or #HTML. I have #Pandoc installed, so I tried converting my LaTeX source to HTML and pasting the code. But Pandoc didn’t include my references section in the output.
I also tried copying from the PDF, but that stripped all formatting.
Does anyone know how I can get a clean HTML version of my work—with references included—that I can paste into Brightspace?
Here’s the command I’ve been using:
pandoc main.tex \
--bibliography=references. Bib \
--csl=apa.csl \
--standalone \
-o main.html
It creates the HTML file, but the references section is missing.
Any tips?
#Accessibility #AssistiveTech #Pandoc #APAstyle #Brightspace #EdTech #AcademicWriting #InclusiveTech #BlindTech #HigherEd #CitationTools #OpenSource #WritingWorkflow

The #ITMasters #CSU has changed from #Moodle to #Brightspace on 18/12/2024 I found out via #CoPilot and old courses are on original URL not on current main site where old login no longer works

Setting all grades to "visible" except there are at least two settings buried in menus and submenus that make it "invisible".

Students can't see grades. Takes a while to figure this out.

Fucking #SUNY has apparently decided to disable (WTF) the instructor "student view," so we can't see what students see.

This means yet more time to do really basic things that shouldn't take time at all.

#professor #complaint #highered #brightspace #lms #baddesign

#brightspace is still a massively overpriced, barely-functional, heavily-enshittified prototype of the principal-agent problem, in case anyone was wondering.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem

#enshittification #highered #educorporate

Reason 237 I fucking hate #brightspace: they lock all conversation about their product behind a soft paywall (e.g. I get stupid emails like this where I can't just see what Yi Yan.L.782 said). Every fucking interaction has to be on their platform, under their control. Much of the content is hidden from search engines.

Of course, once you get into their little walled garden you discover that searching for unfixed bugs or unmet feature requests is only possible on a one-term-at-a-time search basis. There's almost no way to see if related issues exist.

No surprise: when I dove into this last year and spent a couple of hours trying to answer some questions about basic, industry-standard functionality (spoiler: the answer to all of them was "No"), I figured out that they have hundreds or thousands of unresolved issues going back 20 years.

This company is worth a billion dollars.

Edit: I clicked the link. I did. The message was "We have also had this question. Does anyone else know..."

Holy fuck this is stupid.

#lms #highered #enshittification #monopoly #shittydesign

Delete/Replace is 100% necessary for #BrightSpace's odd webdav implementation.

Replacing the file is not enough. Even with different size and timestamp it is not recognised as changed.

OK, if the file is open locally it won't update. Not ideal but not insane.

And a tip: delete then replace on the remote location, rather than just update.

(Since I'm using a Makefile to update the remote file(s) that's easy to automate. It's a trick that also works with #webdav, eg on #BrightSpace.)
#oneDrive

This post might seem like it's about #brightspace (the #lms the #suny system is forcing us all to use), but it's actually about having bosses who hold you in such contempt that they can't even be bothered to explain why they paid millions of dollars for a product that doesn't work while telling you to use it or else.

Today's Brightspace issue: hundreds of questions with images (trapped within BS's little walled garden of impenetrable database locations) that appear only as placeholders, but might or might not render when placed into a student quiz. The odds seem so far to be about 50/50.

There is no way to know which items are affected *even when I edit each of the hundreds of items by hand*, because I see this placeholder for MOST of the questions but then the students sometimes see the image. Sometimes not.

It's silent failure. No flags, no checks, no indications of what's wrong. No way to know if any changes will fix things.

Other silent failures: BS will cheerfully tell you it has imported your 5,000 or so items (painstakingly created over the past decade) from your previous LMS--which was also mandated--and then just *won't tell you* that hundreds or thousands of them did not import because BS simply choked and pooped or because BS doesn't even have the functionality to use those question types.

I fucking hate this LMS, but I really hate the fact that the people in charge think so little of me and 30,000 of my colleagues that they shove shit like this at us and tell us to pretend it works.

#professor #rant #highered #broken #shittydesign #baddesign #badsoftware #capturedmarket

#Brightspace is a series of missed opportunities and profit-based shortcuts masquerading as an #LMS. Its gradebook has significant, inexplicable (in light of 20 years of web development) shortcomings. Naturally, many people want to just use #Excel.

Well... good luck.

#educorporate #enshittification #teaching #professor #highered

Every time I'm forced to use #brightspace (so about every day) I have the urge to find whoever is responsible for its shitty, substandard, user-hating state of existence and lock them in a room while I give them a 3-hour lecture on how shitty, substandard, and user-hating this trash #software is.

#ui #ux #baddesign #enshittification #lms #highered #professor

#Brightspace has to be a prime example of #enshittification

Student looking at "D2L" in big letters on LMS page: "My class is down to... luck?"

(probably)

#brightspace #branding #baddesign

More things #brightspace can't do: negative numbers.

The formula editor in the gradebook is already a horrorshow of bad 1990s web design. And now this.

There's probably a workaround.

OK, I just realized that I said "there's probably a workaround" for the problem of a software system used by education systems all over the world that can't handle negative numbers.

#billiondollarcompany #enshittification #math #mathishard

More things #brightspace can't do: change a quiz question grading in a way that allows all attempts of that question to be regraded. Apparently, it can only change future attempts. If you want to fix (or update or give more credit for) a particular question after the quiz has started, you can go fuck yourself and then go edit a few dozen individual quiz responses.

#badDesign #badCoding #capitalism

More #brightspace #badDesign so I can have a record of it:

When grading items like this, you can't get a keystroke or even clicky rhythm going. You're grading 60 exams/quizzes and you enter an adjusted grade in the box, then hit Tab-Tab <enter>... great. It saves your work,

UNLESS you're on the last student record for that question, in which case Tab-Tab <enter> clicks "Go back to questions" and DOES NOT save your work.

As with so many other things in this software embodiment of complacency and missed opportunities, there is no flag that this has happened, no warning. You just notice... someday... maybe... that you didn't regrade that item.

#frustration #ActorAgentProblem

Just a quick #brightspace #hatepost:

1. In at least a couple of multiple-select dialogs, choices down the page FUCKING RESET all choices previously made up-page. With no flag, no warning, etc.

e.g., for accommodation overrides for students on a quiz, you choose dates, extra time, other conditions, etc. Then at the bottom of the page (actually a 20-line window within a page, so what you already did scrolls up and out of sight) you choose the subset of students this applies to.

And as soon as you do, everything else you have done resets to default values--that is, Very Wrong Values, without any indication this has happened. There you are, looking at the "save" button, unaware that brightspace just fundamentally fucked something up that will take back-and-forth emails, frustration, and crying/angry students to notice or fix.

While I'm at it...

2. Half the "enter URL" fields when adding links to external content are pre-populated (hard version) with "https://" and the other half aren't. If you get into the wrong habit when creating your content, you get broken links.

3. Half the "insert an image" fields for content (e.g., for quiz questions, handouts, etc.) accept drag-drop from a desktop file manager. The other half don't, requiring a sequence of 3-5 button hunts and clicks, then (in a subset of these) searching through your computer's filesystem.

Is it so wrong to want my job not to be made harder because a billion-dollar company can't be bothered to do basic shit?

#badCoding #badDesign #UserAntagonistic #basic #lms #highered #frustration #fuck #capitalism #educorporate

Oh My Fucking Heck.
#Brightspace's gradebook apparently gives no errors, warnings, or alarms when you name a grade item the same thing another is already named. It just does whatever it does without telling you it's fucked-up.

Every time I think I've seen the bottom with Brightspace, the pit goes deeper.

Come on, #brightspace, you've been around for 25 years, you're worth billions of dollars, you've got yourself embedded in the required educational paths of tens or hundreds of millions of students...

A normal distribution probability function for quiz questions isn't that hard.

But nothing you refuse to innovate is actually particularly difficult; you just don't do it.

Stans: don't tell me to file a feature request until you've looked over their backlog (or tried to; searching is heavily nerfed for that).

#lms #highered #disappointment #professor #unfundedMandate

Maybe I should just make this a Brightspace Kind of Sucks account. Gah.

#highered #lms #brightspace #fail #baddesign #enshittification