< Education during Covid

~nargran

I feel you there. I had so many issues with Microshit Teams in GNU+Linux (in the browser of course, I wouldn't give superuser privileges to a M$ installer). Some professors were understanding, but most weren't at all and went with the "it works in my machine" logic. I ended up installing an ubuntu based distro with Chrome on an USB drive so I could use it without installing Chrome. A very sad and frustrating state of affairs.

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~pseudoriemann wrote (thread):

That sounds tough too. I'm glad I was spared with Microsoft Teams. Zoom is perhaps not much better, and for a long time I resisted installing it too, until I almost missed an exam because as the only browser user I somehow couldn't connect. So now I have Zoom installed in a flatpak. At least emotionally I can endure that better than having to sign up for a Microsoft account, even if the consequences are probably not much different.

Thankfully Linux usage is relatively common among professors in my department so they were usually understanding about most issues. One class was even held over Jitsi, but it had technical problems with screen sharing so next semester he switched over to Zoom (which had other issues but apparently less severe.)

I wish universities would just host their own Jitsi servers and give direct support to lecturers when there are problems. Why is our education tied to accepting the terms and conditions of some tech giant in the US? Mine hosts an internal PeerTube instance for prerecorded lectures but not everyone uses it.