< Education during Covid

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~pseudoriemann

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.

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~nargran wrote (thread):

> I wish universities would just host their own Jitsi servers

Yes, or other similar libre option. I wrote some mails to people at my uni in charge of that (to question, for example, whether our Teams accounts are legal under GDPR or not, because the university made them for us without our consent (!!!)). They told me not to worry about privacy because "Teams" (that is, Microsoft) "follows the regulations". That's basically saying nothing and doesn't address my concerns.

I also pointed out that there are some students in our university from countries in bad relationship with the US that could even be in danger if forced to use a product by a company with close ties to the US three letter agencies. For example, according to the numbers the university publishes, there are several dozens of students from Iran and even three from North Korea.

Something funny and sad at the same time is that while the department of education of th regional government has their own jitsi for primary and secondary education, and schools are forbidden from using different, private services, their servers were overwhelmed at the beginning of the pandemic and teachers were angrily protesting not being able to use Teams, Zoom or Hangouts instead and saying that the regional government "feared private competition to their product" (which isn't even a product).

Okay, /rant for now

~fish-fingerer wrote (thread):

At least in the UK we're not allowed to much anymore. Everything seems like it has to be hosted on Microsoft's cloud, and we're not allowed to self host (our IT departments are actively searching for our hidden servers and telling us off).

There is fight back against it (at least at my uni), but it is coming from the top. It is incredibly short sighted.