Rant about college's IT system

A college with a high rating should have better IT management.

Let me preface this rant with this: I am not an expert on IT managment and I don't know what it takes for a place to handle around 40 000 students but I am going to talk about it anyway.

Our university is old but not as a building, no it is not. The building is quite newly built and has great IT infrastructure but it is not being utilised correctly. I have been there for only a year, give or take (thanks to a certain pandemic), and I already witnessed multiple bugs and glitches ranging from inconvenient to out right frustrating.

I encountered my first annoying bug right in the first week where the "designated" website that we are supposed to use to help us navigate to our classes is almost always broken. Now to be fair it is not the website, but the hyperlinks that should auto-fill the class name since it is quite a code to write in manually. The hyperlinks were almost always broken and we would end up inserting the class code each time until we became familiar with how the layout looks in what is literally a modern day corn maze.

On the topic of classes and class codes; another major bug (I consider it so anyway) is the study room scheduling website. We as first year students are not allowed to book these rooms for whatever reason and it is literally: first come, first served. I believe it is to make sure that teachers and professors have priority but that is another topic. So whenever a group of students were to get in an empty room, they would scan the QR code on the side of the door to make sure it is not booked at that moment and they would have a few hours before they are told to leave the room. So as you can guess, that barely worked and would always show the room is booked when it is empty and showing it empty when there is literally a group outside of it waiting to get in.

Another annoyance that started happening around December last year (that is 2019) is the bus schedule screen. Yep, another schedule thing. There are muliple screens showing the different buses coming to the bus stop right outside the building. The idea behind it for those that wonder why would we have such a thing, is simply put: the building is 100 000 meters squared and it takes around 7-8 minutes of speed walking to get from one end to another if the person is walking in a straight line. So even for the screen on the entrance nearest the bus stop, it would be around 3 minutes of walking to get to the bus stop. And while that doesn't seem like a lot, in the freezing winter, I would pay to wait as least as possible outside in the cold. The problem then is that these screens almost always have the wrong time and almost always have some kind of a windows alert window because something crashed.

A whole other level of bugs/glitches and annoyances is the online learning (again thanks to a certain pandemic). It all started when a bunch of admittedly great professors tried to switch to online teaching in a slew of different methods that mostly gave the desired effect but.....
Oh there were a lot of "buts" throughout this mess that is called online learning. Firstly I understand the extremly hard pressure on the professors having to rewrite, remake or even record new material but that was no excuse for some "let's say messy" bugs. It started with a course that had 9 different professors since it was the largest, most important course in this program (it is even named after the program). One professor was lucky enough to have their section done before the quarantine started, but the 8 others didn't have the same luck. Almost all of them used different ways which resulted in 3 different hosting websites being used and many recording softwares being used. One of the hosting websites was called box, and it sucked. There is sadly no better way to describe that website; it had many playback issues, speed issues and it cut almost 30 seconds of the end of each video (I am not sure it is box to be blamed for the last one, but I can't prove it either).

The recording software used by one of the professors seems to be from the 80s because the sound glitched constantly and there were multiple slides without sound. There were to be fair a couple of professors who had excellent recordings that matched their expertise in real life, but those two had done that for a couple of years prior to the pandemic so I am not sure if it is fair to compare them. Another major course that is considered harder than the aforementioned course was also pre-recorded and it was a hit or miss with many of the recordings missing some slides and having to email the professors for explanations many many times.

With that, the semester was finally done with a lot of pain and major workarounds. Now comes the current semester (by the time this is released, it will probably be finished too) with the scary annoying Zoom. Now Zoom for me came out of nowhere and that also applies for like 90% of all students and somehow it took over the educational scene. I resented Zoom for its major privacy concerns since I am a privacy freak, but the university just went with the flow with no considerations to that. Zoom behaves okay when it is limited to the browser, but of course a big chunk of its functions are only available in the client version which is a big security risk. Although I resisted installing the client for the majority of this semester, I was finally forced to install it when the web version wasn't allowing me to go into breakout rooms and discuss important parts of the courses.

I have been meaning to write this for the better part of half a year by now but I never got the chance to write between the endless exams and hundreds of recordings to go through for each course. In conclusion a university with such a high rating (I won't name which of course) shouldn't have so many broken IT systems. But I don't know who to blame when it seems that everything right now is just broken (real life or digital).