Hey Beloit students! Here’s a fun exercise for you: open up your laptop. Now, count how many different applications, websites, or submission-machines you would have to use to submit an assignment for each class. Is the answer “more than two?” Is the answer, as it has been for me in past semesters, “more than five?”
Beloit College technically works off of a free software called “Moodle”, but professors absolutely can and will often run their classes through an entirely different platform altogether. Google Classroom? Why not. A secondary subject-specific website? Go for it. Entirely through subfolders of Google Drive, where any student in the class can view (and therefore copy) anyone else’s work? FUCKING SURE.
(These are all, in fact, actual methods I have turned classwork in with, some much less objectionable than others.)
Why do professors do this? Well, simple answer: there’s no rule against it. I kinda get it, even- Moodle is notoriously difficult to program and finicky at the best of times. I can’t knock professors for running classes via something they, at the very least, know how to use and can grade with. Still, I will not lie and say I do not kind of want to stab something in the eyes every time I have to convert a project rubric in screwyou.fileformat thrice over or navigate through Google Classroom’s frankly mystifying “work folders” when it hides my own work from me. What is up with that? Crazy stuff going on in the Google Classroom world, man.
One day, perhaps, Beloit College will pay for a software that is usable on both ends. Until then, I shall continue to have seven sites open as I lock in for my classwork.
Featured image: Betty Cavicchia’28
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