Hi Demetris,
That is unfortunate.
Personally I believe we already have so many different topics to focus on (governmental policies, PMPC, Open Standards, Router freedom, DRM exemptions, eduction, etc.) and so I like to align my efforts with the FSFE campaigns to have a greater impact. Doing a few things right, rather than a lot of things badly. But of course you are free to initiate an effort yourself.
From your writing I get the impression that this was an incident
uncommon at your institution. Considering this case is about a single file, perhaps you could have got it from another student as a pragmatic solution in the moment? And considering that there is a proper solution provided by the insitution, you can ask the lecturer why the file wasn't uploaded there. And go so far as to make a complaint within the institution about this incident.
More general speaking I would try to talk with the lecturer and explain why this is important to you, and work out a solution that works for the future. Perhaps there was a reason the lecturer couldn't upload the file. But putting the file in an e-mail could have been a non-Google workaround.
(I'm not trying to be pedantic here. In my days in Uni I have failed an exam as some PowerPoint slides didn't render properly in LibreOffice and so I missed some information. From that point onwards I got a friend to convert them to PDF's. And I agreed with a lecturer to use Scilab instead of Matlab in class as long as I used Matlab in the exam, not to confuse the exam supervisors).
Yes it is worthwile to stride for the issue at large. But for your own interest it is often best to start the conversation in the small.
Kind regards, Nico
On Thu, 2019-11-21 at 20:14 +0200, Demetris Karayiannis wrote:
Hi all,
I'm sure many of you are aware that students at all levels of education are forced to use nonfree software, and more recently, nonfree network services in order to receive their education and fulfil the course requirements (see https://www.gnu.org/education/ for prior writings on this).
I'm having a bad day today because I'm currently a studying at a programme that is an exception to the above, with a lot of focus on using free software. But for some reason, a tutorial today was behind a Google sign-in wall and the lecturer didn't want to export the tutorial (which is just a jupyter notebook file) and upload it on the existing learning management system for students to download and study.
This led me to imagine some possible ways in which the FSFE and/or other organisations in the free software movement could try to work on this topic:
- A survey of students and instructors about their experiences
and/or policies in mandatory nonfree software and nonfree network services in university classrooms (which can establish the magnitude of the problem, and help identify ways to change this)
- A campaign for instructors to pledge not to mandate the use of
nonfree software and network services and/or eliminate them from the curriculum of their courses
Apologies for the hastily written email, but if anyone in the list is interested in this topic, I'd love to here more.
Best, Dem