Sorry for the Danish post i hope you can translate it.
The Ministry warns that Microsoft programs can create problems for written exams for students with Mac computers.
Users who have updated the programs to the latest version may experience the programs running slowly, freezing and crashing. This means that the examinees are delayed in their work and that parts of the answers risk being lost, write the Agency for Education and Quality and the Agency for IT and Learning in a notice to schools.
I know it sounds crazy, but a better free alternative exists.
It sounds insane to me they would use a suite where they have no control over its state… Can’t they at least block the updates? Just imagine you’re a student and your success depends on the incompetence of others
your success depends on the incompetence of others
This is an excellent lesson to learn in school since it happens a lot in life.
Fair enough, but if it was at work or something you can at least say, ‘eh at least I still get paid’ Here you have no recourse options.
edit: Having read the translation now. It seems the students do have a choice in which software suite they use. So I guess they did have a recourse. So in the end it was their own responsibility. I guess it was a good lesson then.
Here you have no recourse options
I can’t speak for every University, but some have a way for you to appeal issues like this to the Dean.
What do you recommend? I love LibreOffice on Windows and Linux, and it still works well on macOS but the GUI seems weird on it, the buttons are really large. I still use it but my partner is put off by it.
Honestly Markdown is perfectly fine 99% of the time. It also has many advantages by just being much simpler
This is what I do for my own notes now, but could it work for students writing essays and that sort of thing? I suppose there must be some markdown to HTML/PDF/etc converters (also probably ODT or DOCX or whatever).
OnlyOffice is nice, but a tad controversial. It’s UI is much much closer to how 365 looks.
Cool, thanks! This is what I was looking for. I’ve briefly tried playing with Nextcloud before, but this seems like another good option.
Nextcloud is a lot of things. A bit overkill for just it’s office offering tbh. But, if it fits your workflow, and you like other things it offers go for it. The snap package actually makes it very easy to tinker with (despite the deserved hate of snaps in general).
LaTeX, code and compile your documents instead of fighting with word.
This is actually what I did when I was in school, and overall it was quite pleasant. There was some WYSIWYG LaTeX program too that I shared with some colleagues when we were working on a document together, I remember it working okay.
But I don’t see the average student, especially studying non technical stuff, to pick up LaTeX just for normal sort of essays. Even I am fairly rusty now. And honestly I don’t even know if I could have managed it during high school, where I had to write English essays and stuff with specific formatting for references. (I am grateful that my engineering education was less strict about that sort of thing).
I was hoping that someone would suggest a self hosted web document suite, I think “Nextcloud” is a popular one. Then it should work on any OS, and you don’t have to worry about syncing files. Even if you can pay to have someone else host an instance (not sure if this exists), and ideally a program that can keep a local backup synced to your PCs would be a big step in the right direction. Syncthing seems pretty great, though I haven’t used it much, and on iOS it doesn’t seem to be able to run in the background.
edit: I just read another comment that recommended OnlyOffice, this seems like another good option (source: this reply: https://lemmy.ca/comment/9415293). Aside: is there a proper way to link to a comment on lemmy that will go through your own homeserver?
While I agree with you that LaTeX is an impressive tool, I would not choose it for an exam whith a short duration. It is great, but for short documents that should be written quickly, I don’t think it’s the best tool.
I (almost) only use LaTeX now, I find it easier than having to manually set headings etc. I find it great even for just one page notes.
The few times I do not use it is when I have to colab on a document with someone else.
I’ve used it a lot for reports when I went to university, but for short notes I would prefer markdown and for a few pages or documents where formatting is trivial I still find it easier to use LibreOffice or word. I find it likely that most high schoolers would find it easier to use word for any document than LaTeX which they probably have never heard of and would be unable to get support for unlike word which is commonly provided by the school. So while understand where you are coming from, I don’t think the students are in a situation where that would be a plausible solution. Especially due to the many pitfalls and the learning curve you have to get through for using LaTeX as efficiently and for as complex formatting as they already know how to do in word. LaTeX has a way higher ceiling of quality, but the floor is also much lower for those new to it and without the drive to learn it.
Two simple words: digital sovereignty.
Hopefully this serves as another case in the push for the EU[0] using native alternatives instead.
[0]: Not just the EU of course. Any non-American company should see dependency on Microsoft as a liability. I hope all countries around the world see this as a warning of things that could happen to them.
Sorry for the Danish post […]
Never apologize for your own language.
Thanks! I guess foreign languages nowadays are just a minor inconvenience.
That said, apologising for sharing an article in one, is an even smaller inconvenience for me, so I can as well do it, for the sake of the few who may feel that its a huge burden
Seeing posts in languages other than my mother tongue is something that I like about Lemmy. Never be ashamed of your native language and the beautiful variety that it adds to the human experience.
Unless you’re French.
Or Canadian.
But only if you’re from Québec
Why are they using Word in an exam in the first palace? Like, to write an essay? Our non-pen-and-paper exams were all using some web platform that worked pretty well.
It’s mostly for students with issues that puts them at a bigger disadvantage to those that are “normal” when writing with a pen. Learning difficulties and motor function issues and differences alike. I used a word processor in exams towards the end of college due to learning difficulties and a subconscious grip that would ache my hand with overuse of a pen that slowed me down compared to others by a lot.
This is not true. At least not here in Denmark. Computers are ackctually required
You can even see in the picture above that everyone has a pc
Can a school lend you a computer if you don’t have one of your own? Or only have a shared stationary one?
It’s Denmark, everyone can afford a laptop, even if it is difficult for someone the government pays you $900 USD a month to study.
Man I feel old, back in my day we weren’t allowed to use anything more powerful than a TI83 on most exams and the answers were on scantrons or paper due to fears of using the internet to cheat. These days with GPT I’m surprised that’s not even more of a concern.
I feel you! When i took my exams we didn’t even have the internet!
My university used something called Lockdown Browser. It was free to download for students. On Windows (can’t remember if there was a Mac, and it definitely wasn’t available on Linux), it could only run after a UAC prompt. It used the webcam and microphone on a computer to record the student. It also used facial detection. I’m pretty sure it also recorded the screen, at least inside the browser window.
It also had options that instructors could enable that had us students have to record a video of our immediate surroundings and have to take a picture of a photo ID with our name and picture (preferably our student ID).
If you did the three-finger touchpad swipe (which I’ve done accidentally before) to change to a different window or minimize the program, it’d refocus itself immediately, a warning would pop up and tell you that, if it happened a second time, the exam would be closed and the instructor would be notified.
If it detected certain applications running (ex. Discord, WhatsApp, Xbox Game Bar, etc.), it would ask to force close them or it wouldn’t run.
Barring a situation in which cheating was possible (ex. the three-finger swipe mentioned above), the browser could not be closed until the exam was submitted.
If instructors chose to use Lockdown Browser, students wouldn’t be able to open the exam unless they were using that browser.
So it was still possible to cheat (not that I did, but I’d heard of people who did and how they did it), but still difficult.
It was pretty buggy though, my class had people’s laptops permanently locked into the browser and unable to close it after the exam. Sometimes it wouldn’t even let you start the exam even after launching with the browser until you restarted the whole system.
Why do governments and schools force people to buy crap from scammy companies? I don’t ever want to have to deal with shit from Microsoft
The schools recommend windows or mac computers but not browser based computers like Chromebooks, basically because the software that they use for the education can’t be installed.
Yeah and I think that is a bad thing ™
Sxhools and governments should focus on using open source tools, let people decide what they want to use later. If you want to torture yourself with Microsoft tools that’s your decision but I won’t let a government tell me I have to pay that company money against my will
Really? A 10 year or so old 4chan post? Well that must mean you are right and Linux sucks
Its not about Linux being good or bad. I run Linux myself
I wouldn’t though, if I was taking classes that needed me to run certain programs
I always have for the past 25 years. I always managed to adapt and it had become easier every year.
No university should ever require students to pay an abusive company money because reasons. Microsoft doesn’t bring anything new or good tot he table, there are free softwares for everything, so allow me to use that.
Oh! In this case, Office and any other software they have to use, is free while you study. I dont see an issue in requiring students to have computer’s that can run the software that the school pays for.
Because, if you’re expected to use or at least understand that software in the work force then schooling should cover it. Open source is nice and some countries have adopted LibreOffice as their standard but Word is still so commonplace in many industries that it is an essential tool for document writing in the age of computers.
Open source software might not directly be used in the workplace but if someone can’t adapt from LibreOffice to MS Office they won’t be able to adapt to MS Office updates either. It’s been decades since productivity software had significantly different feature sets for most users. That weird legacy Excel formula the Finance Department uses will need training no matter how many years of Office experience a new hire has.
And you think it’s a good thing that Microsoft has so taken over companies and governments that you now no longer have the choice?
Also, you can use open formats and learntbhe tools. It’s not like Microsoft word is rocket science
Think it’s good? No.
Surprised by it? Fuck no.
In the Scandinavian countries this sort of software is usually provided by the school/university, so the students don’t have to buy it. You may however be (essentially) forced to use that software, since other options aren’t supported. The exam software my uni uses for instance only runs on Windows & MacOS.
usually provided by the university
Yeah, and nobody thinks that is a seriously bad idea? Here, please allow is to lock you into all our products so we can ensure you have to use them life long, like it or not.
why is it a bad idea that studenst get some tools, free of charge, that they are free to use (or not if they choose open source or whatever else)? As far as I know, at least in uni, exams can be submitted in different formats, one of those being pdf, which is pretty universal.what would be the alternative?
The tools aren’t given just out of the goodness of Microsofts heart. Make everyone use word so now if i don’t use words I might run into compatibility issues. Make everyone use Microsoft teams, so well, little options there to even use a competing product.
The issue here is that Microsoft does it to force people into using their products whether they want or need to or not
Microsoft doesn’t give out shit. The schools pay for it.
You don’t seem to know how that works.
Microsoft will gracefully give lower licensing costs for students if the school opts in Microsoft and opts out the competition. It’s been a while (10 years ago) but I saw this in universities where then students had the choice, windows or mac because Microsoft forced it.
In my school they used A1 (or some other A) licences for students. They are probably cheaper than other licenses but they are not free.
I have no idea if they have opted out the competition (whatever that means).
Our class never used any normal windows client OSes (on bare metal anyway). We primarily used Windows server evaluation or Linux depending on the course. I think the other classes primarily used VDI.
Do you have a source for this:
Microsoft will gracefully give lower licensing costs for students if the school opts in Microsoft and opts out the competition.
And what do you mean by opt out? Do they sign a contract saying that they won’t use Linux? That seems extremely unlikely, why would they even care? Seems more likely to be an IT policy because they want to manage the devices or they don’t want to provide support for non Windows or Mac devices.
If you have no evidence or source, do you know for sure that it’s happening (as in you worked in IT or similar role for the university) or it’s a rumour you heard?
