Parents demand academic publisher drop Proctorio surveillance tech
The world of school software and educational materials is a dystopian and dysfunctional nightmare. Nearly all a re badly designed, sloe, confusing and built with accidental and intentional backdoors, spyware and software sxpliciftly intended to cripple your PC (no screenshots, no copying, phone home functions)... And all of them are deeply designed for &#x27;lock in&#x27; - nothing more profitable than a guaranteed multi year contract with tens of thousands of unwilling students. 98% of features are broken and just exist on fancy marketing documents to make sure some lying middleman can push them through a procurement process.<p>I remember being at an EdTech conference ~ 7 years ago and even then i was not just stunned by the amount of false claims (AI, ...) but also generally where the focus lay (anti-fraud, student control, web filters...).<p>The whole ecosystem is just massively broken with students and teachers at most as an  afterthought. Neither the entrenched companies nor startups seem to understand concepts like PEDAGOGY, TRUST or student-teacher RELATIONSHIP and instead consider students somewhere akin to criminals to be monitored, controlled and indoctrinated and teachers as nothing more than passive vessels that need ready made solutions and no freedom whatsoever.<p>In the end your average functional school probably gets some of this software but most likely would fate best with its own install of Moodle (for all its flaws - reliable, lots of community support, and cheap) and then various web apps.<p>With the current ecosystem most students and teachers fare best with just nothing than with any of this. School districts&#x2F;owners should invest into teacher training and maybe generic moodle instances, and to get laptops near the classrooms. But please don&#x27;t buy any of this evil crap.