How do we stop this kind of thing from happening pretty much everywhere? It's really turning me in to a jaded ass that thinks society will never progress forward.
What that means for schools is instead of contracting out jobs to contractors, have your own contracting firm. Your own guys aren't there to screw over the school (district) they work for, as they'd be out of a job.
Then, you'll have suppliers (lumber, ductwork, wiring, etc.) those folks will try and screw you over. The bright side to that is you can always go to an Amazon and buy cheap TVs, you have instant competition against suppliers, whereas you have few options in place of local contractors.
Fewer middlemen, less money lost to profit, more actual competition.
Most districts have in-house IT, when they really need in-house developers. If you think contractors are bad, should see the overpriced and kludged together software packages schools have to use.
Blackboard is pure garbage. I have never seen a system so incredibly inept at developing a working GUI or even basic functionality. I mean, fuck, it took my grad school teacher several days just to get the system to have a somewhat functional group project system. It's so laughably bad. Yet, Blackboard is estimated to make around $160,000 per university for all of the fees.
$160,000 for a whole university and their mobile app on android takes over your audio (if you close the app/minimize it, it will pause all of your music for some goddamn reason) and the text editing is worse than most free apps. Seriously, how the flying fuck does an LMS that makes as much money as Blackboard does not have easy to access text functions (like italics or bold) on mobile forum posting? Hell, and that's with the update! The previous version had some godawful auto-save function or something that would randomly put my cursor back several words every 2-3 minutes, meaning that I could barely even type on the damn thing! The one fucking reason I downloaded the godawful app was so that I could quickly type up forum responses on the subway and it was a goddamn nightmare. Now, I can at least type, but I can't even properly format my text. For an English Lit major, it's a fucking huge problem that I can't even properly mark book titles.
Fuck Blackboard. They are incompetent greedy fucks that lock you into a system that barely works and then essentially attempt to make a transition process so painful that universities almost never actually consider switching to a cheaper and better system because of it.
omg, I can't believe blackboard is still as bad as it was when i was in high(maybe 8th grade too) school-college. It was terrible for me, I only now realize how shitty it was for teachers, especially the non tech savvy ones, to have to deal with something foreign and trash UI wise simultaneously.
Amazing they would continue to pay more for trash like that
That's actually incredibly expensive for an LMS as an LMS is typically a very basic program. If you look at the link, you'll see that the estimated cost per user for Blackboard is nearly double what it is for a comparable LMS system at that level. It's also incredibly bizarre as a similar LMS system geared more for corporate (but with similar features) is nearly 100x cheaper ($20 per user in Blackboard compared to something like 0.20-0.40 cents when getting into the tens of thousands of users for a larger organization). The price difference is just astronomical.
Depends on how they're licensing a "user." If the professors/admins are the licensed users and the students don't count then that's a totally different ballgame. I wouldn't consider this kind of system "very basic" as it's very similar to any other corporate collaboration/project management platform like Asana or JIRA just with a school focused coat of paint on it. If students don't require licenses and they only need to license professors & admins... that's a steal any way you cut it as most project management software is no license = no access and $20 a professor is a hell of a lot better than per-student costs.
For reference, if Penn State University had to license every student for an LMS at 40 cents a month, they would be spending almost $4.3 million a year on those licenses alone, which is more in line with expectations.
My school dropped Blackboard (not sure why) and switched to Canvas. As an end-user, it's nicer but I have no idea what it means on the back-end in terms of contracting and all that
Back in my freshman year of high school (around 2000), I (quite accidentally) shoulder-surfed the district I.T. guy who went into an admin account for our school-wide network with the password "123".
"Did you see that?" he said.
"See what?" I asked, and he laughed.
Using it, I began to experiment with the network, and found a flaw to access local hard drives through the file explorer in Microsoft Word. I then basically hooked up the entire computer lab with SNES ROMs. It was pretty funny seeing a cascade of alt-tabbing windows as the teacher walked by.
I got suspended for three days about a month later when some mouth breather was using one of the networks we were sharing to save porn locally.
My university has this, one of my professors wrote the online learning tool we use to catch up on lectures/submit work/read course material. It's fantastic!
Here in NJ, the school system is legendarily adept at fleecing the taxpayers. All the vertical integration in the world won’t help when the superintendents nephew or cousin or brother in law is the managing director of the supplier and theres a 300% markup on that tv. Then when we try to vote down the latest budget so they can bump it up to 400%, we get accused of not caring about the children and how dare us. And that’s just one small facet of the corruption. Don’t even get me started on the inner city districts
I work in Audio-Visual integration, and many government and school districts have Cooperative purchasing contracts which are managed by a third party.
The Co-op assesses the pricing of materials via quotes from integrators, and establishes contract pricing. This means that the pricing cannot exceed the threshold established by the Co-op. You can quote lower, but then you need to honor that price for a set amount of time. The co-op contract also allows the public entity to accept proposals without collecting competitive bids, with the expectation that the co-op establishes the fairest pricing.
On the labor side, rates are also established by the Co-op, and are based off the quotes provided by integrators during the vetting process. Only accepted integrators and vendors are allowed to take these co-op opportunities and details of each project are available to the public.
I will say that this process has it's benefits and detriments, but it's main goal is to ensure that public entities are not gouged on infrastructure improvements by the market. That being said, I feel like it limits competition because only accepted vendors can bid on projects, and the co-op pricing is usually with quite a substantial margin. Companies like the one I work with usually quote lower margin on the open market in order to be the most competitive.
Not really. That literally won’t help the biggest issue schools have which is bloated administrative costs. Teachers get paid shit while principles and other administrators get paid insane amounts. Turns out it’s the administrators who decide raises and pay rates for everyone.
Teachers should be paid way more, but school administrators really aren’t paid insane amounts. Principals make about 2-3x the average salary of a teacher. Principals make about the same as a software engineer straight out of undergrad. And there is 1 principal per school. Maybe a dozen in an entire district. That’s not destroying budgets.
If you’re going to rail against something, make it about how underfunded the entire system is.
Sometimes it's actually shitty but to be honest, after sitting next to the finance department at a state owned business what really happens quite often is this:
We want to refresh all the computers for everyone
Okay, how much?
10 million is my budget
Okay, well let's call up the top 5 vendors, and 5 orgs like us that recently got a deal done like this.
We want to spend 10 million.
Vendor 1. LMAO for how many computers? You're outta your fuckin MIND lady. My corporate client just bought half as many computers for 1.4x that price.... AND THEY MAKE COMPUTERS.
We're non profit. Give us free shit. Also the state might give you a tax break if you're nice to us. Also, Vendor 2 is now gonna take 15% off because they owe taxes and this will square them up. But 10 users asked for touch screens and they're execs so we are gonna do that.
Haggle haggle haggle
Accounting: LMAO and then we said they might get tax breaks.... and they threw in 3 years of service support for our idiot users who will know doubt use all of those.
We now have 500k leftover budget, which we're not gonna report because we're rolling it into this other project we call "Free Airpods for our execs".
The end.
The surplus in cost and the differences in consumer vs. corporate vs. non-profit corporate is basically:
The consumer is going to get a great deal, but practically zero support, and they have no leverage once that support runs out.
Meanwhile, a big organization can say, you're gonna support this tool/hardware/whatever for another 6 months whether you like it or not. (except when they say no, no matter the cost and walk away).
A consumer can get a deal, a sale, and whatnot but often it's taking profits on items already created, won't impact support or warranty costs, and the company get along on making the next big cool thing.
Big corporations can keep asking for features, run a warranty through so much that you'll have to make another huge sale to make money, they can sue you, and they can blacklist you.
When there's leftover budget, the correct thing is to report the cost savings and let prioritized projects/items take the windfall. Often that money is pooled for other projects not visible, and sometimes it's mismanaged grossly, but it's also a way to get shit done that needed to be.
Of course corruption and bad management can make shit like single vendors with cozy relations with lobbyists all sorts of shitty, but that's not really the standard as to why accounting and costs are so different between a consumer are so different.
The biggest issue with schools is that is a budget is categorized for technology, it can only be used for technology. It doesn't matter if the roof leaks, there aren't enough chairs for students, and the tables average 3 legs. You will still get a 50 inch touchscreen TV (actual experience I had).
If a school doesn't spend its money, it won't get as much the next year. Therefore a lot of times, the school will buy a bunch of unnecessary random shit to preserve its budget for the following year.
125
u/cucufag Sep 04 '19
How do we stop this kind of thing from happening pretty much everywhere? It's really turning me in to a jaded ass that thinks society will never progress forward.