[avs733]

Because faculty didn’t want to do it anymore. They want it handled by others but also they want oversight and veto power but also they don’t want to be bothered. But it better always work, and if they make a mistake the software is broken because don’t tell them it’s a user error they used to write Fortran.

As a faculty member at a large university…I have a deep respect for the impossible job of university IT departments.

We originally rolled our on LMS decades ago. When we switched to canvas we kept the home brew running for five years past its expiration date because faculty refused to remove their files. Finally each one was manually moved by IT for the recalcitrant old faculty.

[asdff]

It is kind of funny when these LMS tools with 100+ functions are being used for little more than what email, a grades spreadsheet, and maybe a shared drive would do. University might even ask for the final grades in spreadsheet format by the end of the term anyhow, so data goes into the LMS just to come back out again.

[avs733]

In a sense you aren’t wrong but those analogies fail at scale. It’s like saying you could replace all hr functions with a spreadsheet.

They are large databases yes but they do a lot of small and large things that that analogy glosses over

[asdff]

Well, whatever the large and small things they do are that aren't bound within I described, no one really articulates what they really are. I mean there's like wiki functionality built in. A whole forum system built in. That isn't necessary for education. It is an extra song and dance we might play just because we can, shoehorning some lesson into having to use the forum system or make some dumb wiki page instead of a good old fashioned essay or in class discussion, which no one had a problem with and still doesn't have a problem with. I remember there being like multiple different ways one could go about copying content from one course to another. And that was sort of indicative of the whole software suite. Just keep adding functionality. Never mind if it is redundant. Pure bloatware. A dozen ways to do the basic thing. No one sits there and cuts features because the incentives are the opposite with this software. If canvas can do 105 things, blackboard wants to show the software purchasers at the school they can do 106 things. Doesn't matter if no one uses 103 of them. Doesn't matter that no one even gets trained in how to use these 105 functions.

[Mezzie]

This is a lot of it.

I used to work in academia and am now an LMS admin (in private industry). I've interviewed for LMS admin positions at educational institutions and each time I've ended up walking away. The questions I was asked at the last interview revealed what a ridiculously unplanned, spiraling mess their system was and that I would have no agency over it. No, thanks. And it was clear the reason for this was faculty recalcitrance and an inability to tell them no. Each one wanted a special plugin/special way of doing things, causing a giant mess of insecure bloat, and a fair amount of interview questions always amount to 'how do you wheedle faculty into doing things/placate their egos to keep things running?'

I'm not a rockstar candidate either: I'm a disabled, geographically-constrained, self-taught(ish) sort-of techie. The disability means I have substantial holes in my resume/work history, etc. I don't have a CS degree or any kind of formal IT education. If people at my level of knowledge are looking at these jobs and passing because they're not worth it, I can't imagine the actual pool of people who get hired is great.

LMS admins in particular are going to be harder to find/retain because we tend to have options we can jump to that would be less onerous than doing LMS admin for a dumpster fire. I could go straight IT or full Instructional Design, for example.

In private industry, I can tell people to kick rocks if they want to do something that the system doesn't support/is a really bad idea. And if I can't, I'm not held responsible for the consequences.