I work at a very large University. I am the parent of a child who has just started secondary school, and of one in the middle of their primary school journey. I am currently taking what in the UK is called a Level 2 Adult Education course. In all four of those domains – and more – there is a conspicuous absence of a streamlined place to access, or input, material – be it learning materials; homework; stuff to mark; lecture slides; lists of students; exam dates; you name it. Things are instead, scattered through a multiplicity of platforms and apps, with no particular rationale, order, or clear chain of command.
Of course, each of them requires different passwords (or more robust login methods still). What is more, most of them are not particularly good: they are not very user friendly; they are all structured in different ways and require roundabout procedures to access information; and finally, many of them have persistent, deal-breaking glitches. The app which my son’s football team requires me to use to register his availability for matches doesn’t actually let me log his availability two times out of three. The platform on which I am supposed to log my homework for the course I am taking fails to save my work on random occasions, but when I try to address the problem by writing everything up in a word file first…I then find out that it is impossible to copy and paste stuff into it. I could go on, but you get the gist.
Of course, my first thought was that I am just a dinosaur. But some of my younger course attendees are even more helpless than I am, and both my students and the pupils at my oldest child’s secondary school are permanently overwhelmed and confused.
So, CT readers and fellow bloggers, what is the issue? Seriously, I am asking you, there must be some fledgling literature, in sociology and/or organisation studies, addressing this? My clever husband speculated that this might be (hopefully) a transitional phase: there are too many apps; quite a bit of money to make producing them; quite a bit of inertia within large organisations when it comes to transferring stuff that has already been started somewhere else: and generally a lack of investment in streamlining (by allocating staff to this task, for instance). As a result, nobody is really doing the job of making online platforms more user friendly, and there is a lack of incentives to do that anyway. I find this thought quite plausible, but it is just armchair sociology at the end of the day. Is there soome truth in it?
Still, the issue isn’t trivial. It is wasting workers, and users more generally, a lot of time, and it probably contributes to the mushrooming of bullshit jobs and unnecessary menial tasks that technology was going to liberate us from. I haven’t been able to find any work on this so far – if you are aware of any, please share it here.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
mkvf 10.01.24 at 10:14 am
I don’t think this is unique to education. I see it at work in media CMSes and other tools, and whenever I try to contact the NHS. The problem, I would guess, is who decides whether to buy a piece of software: typically not employee users, let alone external ones. Instead, senior managers who never use the tool themselves, or interact with customers, buy it based on claimed benefits—particularly, how much it saves on staffing or staff time. Until it breaks so badly you lose business—say a restaurant booking tool that doesn’t record reservations—there’s no incentive to replace it.
Miriam Ronzoni 10.01.24 at 10:16 am
Yes yes I was in no way suggesting that it was only happening in education!
notGoodenough 10.01.24 at 10:34 am
(apologies for the double post – please do delete the previous as I fluffed the html formatting)
Perhaps an answer may lie in this thought:
That is to say, commodification inherently leads to exploitation as profit is more important than providing commodities.
(c.f. the various digital entertainment industries moving towards business models which prioritise maximums extraction from customers over convenience, value, etc.)
Jestyn 10.01.24 at 10:53 am
Isn’t it just the demon of corporate IT – systems are bought by purchasing departments not end users, so they go for things like cost and deployability as the main drivers, not ease of use. Anyone who ever tired to use Peoplesoft or SAP know all about that…
Doug Muir 10.01.24 at 10:57 am
It’s not only happening in education, but it might be particularly bad in education. Four kids here, and they’ve all passed through multiple schools. And the online experiences have been wildly various but have mostly ranged from mediocre through bad to horrible and destructive.
We’ve had pretty much exactly the experiences you describe, plus some additional awfulness — like the online course that kept mis-grading my son’s submissions, and where the human in the loop agreed that it was graded wrong but wouldn’t (probably couldn’t) change the grades.
Why education should be particularly bad in this regard I don’t know. But it kinda seems to be.
Doug M.