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Comment by jrells | Hacker News Reader

My University uses Moodle, which is also TERRIBLE. I do all my grades and such in Google Docs, since Moodle is a UX nightmare. Something as simple as entering grades in Moodle requires a lot of clicking around for each grade. We have multi-page documents describing how to perform even the most basic tasks, they require constantly clicking and going to new pages of indiscernible icons. Menus are impossible to navigate without help.

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Moodle is such a terrible thing to happen to the education ecosystem.

It's free/open sourced, meaning that every education system with a budget finds it appealing. Once implemented though, the organization will need to spend buckets of money to design, roll out, and maintain Moodle.

What you end up with is organizations installing Moodle, rather than some higher quality, equal-cost education software they should have installed from the beginning.

> I do all my grades and such in Google Docs

You upload all your students grade information to an external private company? Which university do you work for where this is allowed?

It's probably not allowed, but I think apps for education actually includes a promise from google to obey FERPA.

http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/

Tragically, the larger the organization, the more likely computers are to increase manual labor and repeated data entry, rather than reduce it. In the days before automation, you'd have simply written a letter on a piece of paper, in a second or so per student. I am not surprised to hear that "designed by committee" results in replacing something fast and easy with a long complicated process.

It is totally allowed BY having a separate ID system. If no one can ID the student then no one would gain the information.

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