Bye, Edmodo
In this article, I share some ideas about the closing of Edmodo, in September 2022.
Last week (August 2022), users of Edmodo learning management system were notified that the platform would sunset (?) on September 22.
This decision is communicated a few days before the starting of the school year on the North. In the Southern Hemisphere, we’re in the middle of our courses. Anyway, difficulties for students and teacher are undeniable.
From the bussiness-model point of view, Edmodo’s decision is completely respectable: they provided a service for free, for more than a decade. When they decided that this business model was not convinient, they just stopped.
In the school where I work, Edmodo was adopted on March 2020. Suddenly, COVID-19 forced us to turn our 100% in-person courses into remote classes. At that moment I agreed with the decision of adopting Edmodo, considering the urgency.
With the gradual return to in-person classes, the school’s authorities considered convinient to keep Edmodo as a learning platform. Once again, I agreed. The benefits of keeping track of the learning proccess on a platform were obvious.
So, class after class, teachers, students and the school board generated learning material, assignments, dialogues, polls, chats and many interactions that became a journal of the learning process, in a way that had never happened before on our school.
And, out of the blue, we got the dissappointing news that Edmodo was closing: download everything you can, take screenshots of what can’t be downloaded. You have to do it painstakingly, manually and fast: no automatic procedure is provided, and everything will be gone in a month.
That means: the Governmente (all of us) paid for the teacher’s sallaries. Those teachers, interacting with each other and with the students, generated valuable cultural products, which was kept track of on a platform. Cultural products that have been publicly funded, and that could have been used for reflecting on our own experience, learning lessons that would yield future improvments on the educational system. But, suddenly, the actor that appeared as a mere facilitator revealed its own face, as the owner of the whole thing. And, as an owner, it is entitled for taking it all, forbidding access to anyone else.
It can be argued that no one forced the adoption of the platform, so Edmodo is taking nothing: all the material had been willingly given away by its creators by the very act of hosting it on the website. They could have used their own, self-hosted platform, so they depend on no one.
And the answer is no. It’s impossible for a school (at least in Argentina), to devote the necessary budget for researching and hosting this kind of service. But it can be provided by the state. In fact, several weeks after the first lockdowns, schools were provided with a platform (paid by the government, but using priopietary software), with huge performance problems at the beginging, that were solved afterwards. I don’t know if it is a viable alternative nowadays.
I think that we can learn some lessons from this unpleasant situation:
In the first place, we should keep in mind the famous phrase we heard some time ago:
There is no cloud. It’s just someone else’s computer.
Everything I keep on the cloud, is in fact given away to someone else.
Second is, if we are to use the cloud (or Software as a Service, Saas), we’d better go with trustable providers, both in the technical and in the ethical/ political aspects. If I’m going to use someone else’s computer, I should at least try to find a trustable someone. It may seem better to go with big player’s clouds, like Google’s, for example. From a technical point of view, it is. From an ethical or political one, may be not.
Third, it’s not the same if the cloud runs free software. In Edmodo’s case, for example, no one can replicate the closing service, no matter their resources, simply because the code is not publicly available. On the contrary, if the platform were functioning over free software (like Moodle, namely), it would still have been a problem when closing, but at least someone with the time and resources could provide a similar service.
In any case, I think the main lesson to learn here is that, as teachers, we are not merely transmiting culture. We are also creating culture along with our colleagues and students. And, as Edmodo’s closing shows, giving away the product of our work to anyone offering a free of charge service on the cloud, is far from sensible.
Tags: articulos, cultura-libre, english, educacion, politica