Closed atneeley closed 3 years ago
The purpose of the bot isn't as an educational tool, it is meant to facilitate interactions within the UAF community. I don't believe blackboard and canvas have the ability to connect users across a school, which is what the discord is for. The bot is running on uaf infrastructure and has a negligible impact on the cost. This is not something run by UAF faculty, it's been a student run thing from the beginning.
Blackboard, canvas, and now Google classroom are meant as tools to be used within a single course or a collection of stacked courses. They aren't used to facilitate discussion across classes or used for social interaction.
This bot is just used to manage roles so members can join and leave class channels as needed and actually removes the need for an administrator to handle that (less middle management :D).
Like Tyler said, there's no cost and all the development of this bot has been done by student volunteers and it's hosted on a very small VM on the UAF Cyber Security Club's VMware infrastructure which is also student volunteer maintained.
I don't understand the advantage of using a discord bot to accomplish things that can already be done with canvas or blackboard. Could have saved a whole lot of time and money. Now it's another app to download and an extra layer of middle management.