this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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Asklemmy
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Really no point in doing a Lemmy instance if you're going to defederate from everything. There are easier forums to set up, or better yet, actual tools for classrooms like Blackboard and Moodle.
A key issue would be accounts. It would be a pain to have an account for every class. If it's one instance with many communities, it might discourage people from participating if everyone in the school can see what you do. Tools like Piazza make it easier to deal with these issues, and they have a lot of other tools specific to courses.
If it's a general instance for the entire school, then an instance run by students and unaffiliated with the school would be best. Otherwise students wouldn't feel comfortable using it. I help with the community for my university (UBC) And there's a lot of content that wouldn't exist if it was an official thing (reporting issues with professors, asking for help with academic/mental health/relationships, sharing news critical of the school, etc.)
I really do want more academics on the fediverse, but "Lemmy for school" doesn't feel that useful
Ya I forgot about its all anonymous. I don't see how that wouldn't free up everyone to participate without worrying about being tied to anything necessarily. At the very least, using for an after-school homework tool might work
It's still a nice idea, we briefly talked about starting our own instance for !ubc@lemmy.ca (run the same way as the subreddit)
I do think universities should run their own fediverse instances. Mastodon is an obvious one and I'm pretty sure my school is still trying to figure out how to move forward after the twitter nonsense. An events platform would be another good step
How dialectical does Mastodon come across? How deep can discussions get in terms of nesting/indentation?
Are these alternative tools open source?
On the federation front, defederating from everything now doesnβt mean it will stay that way. Down the track, it might make sense to federate with similarly aligned instances. So having federation baked in from the get go might actually be a good idea for certain purposes.
Moodle is.
As an educator who has only ever worked with Moodle,
I agree that Canvas has better UX. I can't imagine another platform being as terrible to use in 2023 as Moodle lmao
Can you comment on Lemmy's suitabillity in this context?
Not really? It's a programming class with automated assignment submissions and grading, I don't see a lot of overlap with Lemmy's feature set for the kind of thing I'm doing.