Comment on Pearson complaining about using Linux to access my course material
KAtieTot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days agoIn my experience professors are heavily overworked and heavily underpaid. Offloading work onto other systems to get a better work-life balance seems like a natural response.
GoodLuckToFriends@lemmy.today 2 days ago
No disagreement on the overworked and underpaid bits, but I look at it like this: a parent with a full time job is extremely overburdened. Get the kid up in the morning, get the kid dressed, get the kid fed, deal with the inevitable breakdown from not getting the right cereal or the other kid taking the favorite seat, getting the kid’s backpack and homework sorted, and finally get the kid to the bus stop or take said kid directly to school because there was a fight and now the kid isn’t allowed on the bus… and they still have to drive to work by 0800 hours. Just because they’re late to work and in a rush doesn’t excuse the speeding. Teaching is a shitty, hard profession. You don’t get appreciated despite almost literally doing nothing but try to improve the next generation. I still think that turning over the task of teaching (which the courses I had to take did; it was entirely book+online portal driven, very little teacher) to the textbook company is a bad track to take.
KAtieTot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
What is the relation between someone speeding in their car and a professor using a bad set of course materials?
Your analogy doesn’t really establish any causal or relational links. Both subjects are victims of America’s capital-dominated power structure?
Sure better decisions can be made, but how much can you blame the subject under duress? How much blood can you reasonably expect the parent or teacher to draw from the stone? At what cost of their health?
GoodLuckToFriends@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Professor=overworked and pushed to do the coursework more quickly so they can get everything; research, classwork, grant writing; done in the limited time they have. Not bringing in enough grant money or publishing enough well liked research often gets you fired, you know.
Parent=overworked and pushed to get to work faster so they’re not late. Being late often get you fired, you know.
Both are being pushed into actions that are detrimental to society. Speeding creates a slew of cascading issues, starting with small things like increased frustrations in all drivers and building to large things like much more serious wrecks. It’s a terrible thing. Giving up control of the curriculum and passing the buck to pearson (in the original OP’s case) to teach students, make tests, grade coursework (that can no longer be anywhere near as inventive or applicable because it has to be in some format that a computer can grade), etc. is a terrible thing.