There seems to be a horrible trend in academia these days.  Or maybe it’s just here in Utah.  It is the problem of University classes trying to become technology savvy, and use the internet in their curriculum.  On the one hand, I applaud them, I, and many others continue to talk about the future of education in a web 2.0 type of society.  However, they are doing it very wrong.  Rather than using open standards, or at least standards that appear to be open, even if they aren’t, they are basing it off of programs that are shoddy at best, and simply don’t work at worst.  The only exception is the occasional dedicated CS professor, who takes the time to build his own system.  WebAssign is one example of this.  The problem starts that once you have paid to enter the class, and have bought the textbook, you then need to pay a $35 fee just to turn in your homework, which is pathetic.  Although, there is some good points to WebAssign too, first of all, you can choose to pay $35 for every semester, or if you have multiple semesters that use the same book, you can pay a flat $85 fee, and get a free copy of the ebook, along with being able to use Webassign for free, at least for every class that uses that version of the textbook.  Don’t jump out of your seat just yet though, you don’t get a PDF file of the book, you don’t even get some proprietary ebook download, you are required to view the ebook on a horrible flash type of interface.  In addition, you are allowed to print the book out, along with the notes that you make on a page, but you have to print out each page individually, also, they have taken provisions to make it difficult for you to print it to a PDF printer.There are still a few other good points of WebAssign.  It works on any modern OS and browser that supports flash.  It is sad that this is a good thing, and not the defacto standard.  I say that because I have seen software such as MyMathLab, which requires the user to not only be on Windows, but also be on Internet Explorer, and using an ActiveX plugin.  I’ve also seen software that works just fine on other operating systems and browsers, but they artificially limit it by locking out anyone who isn’t using their required OS and browser, even though there website works perfectly fine on other platforms.  Fortunately, this is easily circumvented with plugins such as User Agent Switcher.

At least most schools have settled on one standard, Blackboard, but even that has many limitations on how it can be used.  With that being said, there are better alternatives out there, such as Moodle.  One of my classes does use it, and I had to laugh the first time I used it, because it felt like I was signing up for a social networking website, not a university style website.  However, it worked very well, it even gave the student the opportunity to disable AJAX and Javascript if he/she liked, a feature which I admire very much.  I also later found out it was open source, so kudos to them.