caurea.org

Then they would be out of business. If you thought the 50MB mail quota was ridiculous, this will blow your mind. The Ilias platform which students and teachers use to exchange information, is down every single night between 3am and 6am. That means it has an uptime of about 87%. Usually businesses measure uptime with the number of times the digit nine appears in the uptime to downtime ratio, such as five-nines meaning 99.999%. But there is no nine anywhere near eighty-seven. I don't demand a five-nines uptime, I could live with 98% or 95% (a bit more than an hour per day). But three hours does seem a lot even for the daily windows server reboot.

The site doesn't even degrade gracefully, sometimes all it displays is MDB2 Error: connect failed, sometimes the error message is hidden somewhere between html markup. And the downtime couldn't come at a worse time, it's right when I am the most productive: a couple hours before a deadline or an exam at 8am. So here I sit from 3am to 6am, writing a blog post, instead of doing what I am actually supposed to do.

My university gives each student a 50MB mailbox quota. It's hard to find something to compare that amount with, nowadays even USB sticks are bigger than that. 50MB is somewhere between a floppy disk and a Iomega ZIP disk. I don't even remember the last time I was limited to 50MB, not after the year 2000 anyway when I started using CDs (700MB for those who don't remember how big a CD is). Last time I checked (read: right now), harddisks cost less than 0.1 CHF per gigabyte, both Google and Microsoft offer free or cheap email services to universities with essentially unlimited quotas and here I am forced to delete emails from my inbox. Or not, good thing I have a gmail account!

Has anyone ever seen a website that needs to shut down in order to perform backup? I have, in fact, I use it almost daily. It is the ILIAS Learning Management System that my university uses. And the worst thing it is not just for a few minutes, it's for hours! This is especially annoying when I try to learn for my exams. I know I am one of the very few trying to access the system between 3am and 6am, but hey guys, this is 2009, no website should require downtime during backup.

All the projects that I have done at my university so far have no intrinsic value. Every single semester the students work on the very same project assignment the last students have. Every semester the students produce more or less the same, meaningless output that is then thrown away. Worse than that, they know that the output will never be used, so they don't have any incentive to make an effort. A second problem is that many of the courses overlap significantly. In the past three semesters I attended three particular courses in which I have not learned anything new at all. Everything I was supposed to learn has already been covered by other courses. The university has recognized this problem and is currently in the process of restructuring the CS courses.

I would love to see the university to adopt an open-source project or start a project on their own. Something the students can participate in, something they can show their future employer as a proof what they have done. While I doubt the university would be fundamentally against such idea, it is unfortunate that there still are professors who don't want students to publish source code they have written for a course (also see the article on arstechnica). At the same time it is good to see that there are professors who encourage students to participate in open-source projects. David Humphrey even points out that students want to produce meaningful output. The university just needs to give them the opportunity to do so.

Back to my story. At the end of the last semester I was very frustrated about the lack of proper education. By pure chance I found myself sitting opposite of the vice head of my departement discussing what we (the students) want to change for the future. I raised all the issues I described above and even offered help teaching skills I think the university has little experience in (source code management using subversion or git). I would love to see my university adopt a program like Senecac College has where students work on open-source projects as part of the course.