Pointlessly duplicated effort is not my favoritre thing. My school's #LMS (#brightspace) is set to prohibit having multiple sections of the same course in one LMS shell. I teach 2 sections of #stats. This means creating all quizzes twice, posting all announcements twice, uploading every document twice, constantly checking and tweaking the two course shells to keep them synched, etc.
Of course the decision to adopt the LMS was made without significant input or testing from the people who would use it. Of course #SUNY legal's opinion that allowing any student to potentially see which section another student might be enrolled in is a "FERPA violation" was made without faculty input (and I think without checking with any FERPA experts).
Brightspace employees say it's dead easy to separate sections completely, to satisfy SUNY's interpretation of FERPA. However, there is ONE INSTANCE of Brightspace at SUNY (apparently), running at 56 separate colleges and universities. One instance for thousands of courses at dozens of schools.
The SUNY sysadmin for Brightspace (who controls everything b/c one instance) says the Brightspace people are wrong. He doesn't explain why, hasn't responded (so far) to several schools asking him to implement this, and to the Brightspace documentation and employees specifying which settings need to be set at the instance level to make it happen; he just says "that can't be done".
Tens or hundreds of thousands of wasted hours of work, and probably a few cases of #RSI because someone at the top of an #authoritarian system has an idea he won't check out because (and now I'm guessing) it doesn't affect him, just a few thousand other people.
I'm getting closer to my goal of just abandoning my LMS entirely, except maybe for posting midterm and final grades. We've all been told that no other "online platform" can be used, meaning definitely no other LMSes but (at my school, anyway) several other platforms, like Discord and Slack. The prohibition seems to be driven by student complaints (i.e., if a student complaints something is "confusing," the dean or provost will declare that it is prohibited).
Yeah, getting closer to ditching all LMS use. Maybe I'll try this next fall.
