CS Teachers Panic as Replit Pulls the Plug on Educational IDE (theregister.com) 66
Computer science teachers around the globe have been left scrambling to find an alternative IDE for their students, after Replit announced it was shuttering its Teams for Education plan. From a report: "To focus on improving the Replit experience for all users, we have made the difficult decision to deprecate Teams for Edu ... Teams for Edu will no longer receive new features or bug fixes, and we will suspend the creation of new Teams and Orgs," a statement from Replit, shared with educators and brought to our attention on Monday by Reg readers, declared last week. The platform provided a collaborative integrated development environment (IDE) tailored toward classrooms. It allowed students to work together on projects at the same time, similar to Google Docs, as well as automating code evaluation to streamline assessments carried out by teachers.
The decision has sparked frustration among many educators who'd invested heavily in the platform since Replit made the plan available for free in early 2022. "Computer science teachers in the last 48 hours have had to scramble to try to find alternatives as soon as possible and it will be the students that suffer," a teacher based in Asia-Pacific told The Register. "Replit was the only organization we are aware of providing online coding with instant assessment and so it was a hugely popular choice with computer science teachers." In a Xeet last week, CEO Amjad Masad acknowledged the pain the decision to shut down Teams for Education was likely to cause, but said the current system had become economically nonviable.
The decision has sparked frustration among many educators who'd invested heavily in the platform since Replit made the plan available for free in early 2022. "Computer science teachers in the last 48 hours have had to scramble to try to find alternatives as soon as possible and it will be the students that suffer," a teacher based in Asia-Pacific told The Register. "Replit was the only organization we are aware of providing online coding with instant assessment and so it was a hugely popular choice with computer science teachers." In a Xeet last week, CEO Amjad Masad acknowledged the pain the decision to shut down Teams for Education was likely to cause, but said the current system had become economically nonviable.
Unforseeable tragedy (Score:2)
If only there were some mechanism by which people with advanced CS degrees and large populations of potential interns and alum could collaborate to produce essential tools, and license them in a way to ensure ongoing availability.
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Would you care to name the institution, or the "billionares", or provide any citations? You speak of others spreading FUD, yet your own post shows all the signs of being the same.
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Perhaps he is referring to Scratch [mit.edu], produced by MIT.
I was a parent volunteer in an after-school programming class that used Scratch to teach coding to 4th, 5th, and 6th graders. It is free and works well.
Khan Academy also has good programming tutorials.
Many schools have a knee-jerk rejection of free stuff, presuming it must be inferior. So they spend money on proprietary crap instead.
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But then I remembered that even the people behind open source projects are pulling the same shit. Java, MySQL, Red Hat, OpenAI...
It doesn't seem like there's any escaping the enshittification.
Not something for a for-profit driven commpany (Score:2)
So you have a popular product (Score:5, Interesting)
And then instead of adjusting it to be profitable, you shut the whole thing down.
Shows what their real interest is in - capital investment. Another one of those pump and dumps.
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Indeed. Creating value? That is soooo yesterday! Today you just transfer capital from others to you by some clever pretext.
Must be a lot of bad CS teachers then (Score:2)
A tool is just a tool and tools change. You are supposed to teach knowledge and skills and tools only as examples.
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YEAH! And preparing syllabuses is zero-effort so they should just stop whinging. They've only got to rewrite their course materials in all their free time. Bad teachers. And the school's tech people (if they have them) have only got to find a whole new platform to teach with. No biggy.
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You obviously have no clue. Bad CS teacher? If your course is centrally focussed on one specific tool then you are doing it wrong.
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I was systems manager for a university in the UK for a few years. Nothing annoys lecturers more than changing software under them.
Other than the coffee machine running dry. Or the car park being full. Or any one of a million annoyances.
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Bad form, replying to self, but there you go.
I happen to agree that Universities shouldn't be vocational colleges and should teach how to learn. But that hasn't been the reality for a couple of decades now (in the UK at least). The students pay the fees and expect to get the skills to get the job. Sad.
So I'm more inclined to say "Bad government, making education a profit-driven industry", "Bad students, expecting to be hand-fed knowledge for interview questions" and "Bad company, for pulling the rug" than I
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Well, to that I basically agree. Education for profit is universally bad and usually in the process of getting worse. CS students and CS teaching here are a bit different, but this is not for-profit teaching (continental Europe).
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The materials are available. Any motivated student can get a university-quality education for pennies compared to tuition costs. What the universities really offer is certification.
Blah blah social experience, enrichment, well-roundedness, etc. None of that is worth the outrageous prices that universities charge these days.
Re:Must be a lot of bad CS teachers then (Score:4, Insightful)
Not true. The most important thing I do when teaching is to a) select the material and b) explain what is important, what is not and how it relates to other questions.
Very few students can even begin to do that with just the materials. This is not rote learning some crap you could also simply look up. I do notice that only people that have gone through a good academic education understand this though.
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While the concept of learning is correct you assume materials can't produce this. No you don't need someone to tell you what is and isn't important and how it relates. It is possible to write this information down.
Not all textbooks are about memorisation.
That said the GP missed something insanely obvious to anyone who has ever met other people: Not all people learn the same way. Some couldn't read one chapter of textbook before their brains melt down. There are readers, there are talkers, and there are doer
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What the universities really offer is certification.
In addition to a diploma, universities provide structure and collaboration.
It's hard to teach yourself if you don't know what to learn. Self-taught coders tend to know half a dozen languages but have no idea what a quadratic algorithm is.
Universities provide an environment for collaboration. Many people learn more from their fellow students than from their professors.
The diploma isn't worth much in itself. No employer has ever asked to see mine, nor for any other evidence that I have the degree I claim to h
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Indeed. Self-taught people universally lack dept of skill, because as soon as you go deeper you really need a good idea what will benefit you and what will not and that is long-term. You also need to know what basics you need and sometimes these alone will take years to acquire and a lot of discipline. Hence basically no self-taught coder has them.
Now, if you do not know what a quadratic algorithm is and why it is bad in almost all situations, then you are a _bad_ self-taught coder. Some elementary theory i
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Universities do need to teach skills - lab practicals are an important part of any science degree - but I get what you mean. However, without a robust alternative of technical colleges we are stuck with universities picking up that role as well.
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At the stage that people are using Replit to learn to code, they require complete 'Move the cursor here, yes that's the cursor, good. Now move it here and click that.' style instructions. Ponder a moment trying to teach a class of 40 young kids who are all using something different, including that smug bastard using ed on Slackware, and you'll come round to the idea of standardising on a tool. Think a little bit longer and you'll understand why the teaching materials then have a dependency on that tool.
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yeah, bad choices have consequences.
when you grew up in an era where universities pioneered and actually ran a big chunk of the internet all by themselves you would expect their information workflows to be unaffected by "random startup shuts up free service" events, but times change.
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yeah, bad choices have consequences.
when you grew up in an era where universities pioneered and actually ran a big chunk of the internet all by themselves you would expect their information workflows to be unaffected by "random startup shuts up free service" events, but times change.
^^^^THIS
For reference, see Berkley. They built and ran their own stuff for years (decades) before the bean counters started gutting departments so the football team could build a shiny new locker room.
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I assume the "CS teachers" are just babysitters who just stay one step ahead of the kids by following an instruction manual and clicking on what is in that manual without actually understanding what is happening. If they were any good they'd just install linux on some donated hardware and teach with that, and their students would be a lot stronger.
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I assume the "CS teachers" are just babysitters who just stay one step ahead of the kids by following an instruction manual and clicking on what is in that manual without actually understanding what is happening. If they were any good they'd just install linux on some donated hardware and teach with that, and their students would be a lot stronger.
You have obviously never dealt with IT in a school district. TechyImmigrant describes school computer resources distributed to students to a T. There's no way those schools are ever going to allow some random linux box on their network. And if you can't get on their network how are you going to maintain and manage 30+ machines for a classroom?
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There is a very easy solution for that: Distribute VMs to the students. They all have laptops anyways. Apart from the occasional issue with a MAC, this works just fine. In a different place, we just get the students a partition of a Linux cluster per exercise group, although that particular implementation still needs some work. Yes, CS departments can still have their own computing infrastructure and show corporate IT the finger.
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We actually have teh CS students do most of the exercise on Linux VMs. Some use the Unix interface on their Macs as well as many exercises are not even Linux specific. Basically no problem at all on the student side. They are all smart enough to know that Windows on the server is a dead-end and that Linux/Unix skills will be necessary to get a good job selection after graduation. I even have some students that can do LaTeX, because they found it much superior to the MS crap when doing some things.
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Oh, if only it was still that way... Way back when I was a CS undergrad, and presumably you as well, we studied computer science. That is not the case today. For the last 20 years, at least, CS programs have been four-year programming boot camps tailored to the needs of industry.
Now, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with teaching programming as a trade, but we've essentially stopped teaching computer science. Even the MSCS program at CMU is mostly programming. It's absolutely baffling.
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Well, yes. I did the equivalent of a CS Master's degree and put a PhD on top. I had things like computability, formal language theory, deduction systems, term rewriting systems, logic, formal program semantics (both wp and Hoare), etc. And all of them have been valuable, looking back. I do know CS students still have some math and algorithms and some theoretical CS, at least here (Europe).
My guess is that will swing back again. Just teaching programming produces technicians, not engineers. Technicians are o
Why?... (Score:2)
Universities have been using all kinds of IDEs for decades now. Panic?
Maybe panic that they might not have the latest, neatest, totally unnecessary whiz-bang software.
Fairly obvious what's going on here (Score:3)
From the article:
"Replit's decision to shutter its Teams for Education suite came just as the development startup announced a singular plan, called Replit Core, which it plans to invest in moving forward.
According to the launch blog, Replit Core is a $220 a year AI-assisted IDE"
In other words, we're moving from free to pay us $220 a year per seat.
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I looked at Replit's website, first I heard of them. Their "Multiplayer" live collaboration function looks a lot like VS Code's Live Share, which I also haven't used but is probably free. And they have an AI copilot. How much effort do you think it would take to set up a server to support VS Code with repositories and live share? Live Share: https://code.visualstudio.com/... [visualstudio.com]
Odd. (Score:3)
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Ah, but how will they learn useful skills like hitting tab after typing every letter to see if autocomplete can write the rest for them yet?
When I learned to program my IDE was a piece of paper and a pencil.
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"When I learned to program my IDE was a piece of paper and a pencil."
And the paper was a coding form. Remember coding forms?
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We always used booze-stained cocktail napkins.
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I still have a bunch somewhere, along with some flowchart stencils. You know, from the days when we designed and planned things before we started writing code.
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You know, from the days when we designed and planned things before we started writing code.
It's a crazy idea but it just might work...
Now it's like, "We're going to build a thing but we're not really sure exactly what the thing will be. Even the customer isn't sure. We're pretty sure we'll figure it out by the end, probably maybe, but rest assured we're going to make up for the uncertainty, daily pivoting, and weekly refactoring by having lots and lots of meetings."
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I assume this is the difference between a "coder" and a "programmer." Coders write code like you might write an e-mail.
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I'm not quite old enough to have used one, but yes, I remember seeing them. We tended to have a couple varieties of paper: lined or unlined.
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Same here, wrote code for years without an IDE, but I was too stubborn and stuck in my ways to adopt one when they became a thing. I should have, though. I literally used Metapad and a bunch of ancillary tools to code and build sites. (And I still do when I have to make changes to a few of the remaining sites or code bases.)
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I'm embarrassed to admit that for a single coder, I wrote some fairly large code bases; tens of thousands of lines in some projects, more than that in others. Way bigger than I should have while relying on Metapad and a slew of 'version control' directories to keep stuff straight.
Good times, though. I would start coding after I put my son to bed, and code like a demon until around 2:30AM when my anti-virus kicked on and made further work impossible for the next hour or so. :)
Not having an IDE to prompt me d
WTF is it? (Score:3)
Is it just me? I had never even HEARD of Replit until I saw this story.
Re: WTF is it? (Score:2)
https://www.urbandictionary.co... [urbandictionary.com]
"elon's dumbass name for a tweet Did you hear? Elon Musk just posted a new xeet."
The Plan (Score:3)
Step 1. Buy chromebooks for the kids instead of real computers.
Step 2. Lock them down hard so the kids can't write programs on them.
Step 3. Find an online service that lets you write programs in a web browser so the kids can write programs.
Step 4. Panic when the web service goes away.
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Unfortunately it's an institutional problem. What you said is dead on. Your schools that are run by 'Education' Majors. Which is a fancy way of saying Jack of all trades, master of none. At university CS classes are taught usually by people with mostly CS , EE or Math PHD's. So they understand fundamental concepts. In the US at Public schools ( and sadly some trade schools and JUCO's) you have faculty and Admin that really know very little about technology and they pretty much follow pre done 'les
Questions? (Score:2)
So this software was made available for free just last year, and now it is no longer free. So just what percentage of "CS teachers across the globe" would be using it in such a short amount of time?
sparked frustration among many educators who'd invested heavily
Well, considering it was free, it certainly wasn't money that they had invested heavily in Replit.
in the last 48 hours have had to scramble
It sounds like all existing organizations and teams are left functioning. So I'm not sure why the 48 hour scramble if it is still functioning for their teams and organizations.
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So this software was made available for free just last year, and now it is no longer free. So just what percentage of "CS teachers across the globe" would be using it in such a short amount of time?
sparked frustration among many educators who'd invested heavily
Well, considering it was free, it certainly wasn't money that they had invested heavily in Replit.
No, probably just the teachers non-student time - potentially a lot of unpaid overtime.
in the last 48 hours have had to scramble
It sounds like all existing organizations and teams are left functioning. So I'm not sure why the 48 hour scramble if it is still functioning for their teams and organizations.
I'd imagine that the end of term/year involves some configuration changes for exams and assignments that can no longer be put in place. There also needs to be a new system in place and running for 2024 classes, so finding/acquiring/implementing/learning/populating a new system all while teachers would have been expecting to take some time off. I'd be quite peeved if I was in that situation.
Xeet? You can't be serious. (Score:2)
In a Xeet last week
Yeah, that's a no for me. I really hope that was a joke.
Not a charity. (Score:2)
Enjoy the party while it's in full swing. But don't expect it to go on forever. At some point somebody will saunter up to the microphone and say, "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."
JupyterLite (Score:4, Informative)
For anyone in need of an alternative to repl.it, I would recommend checking out JupyterLite [github.com]. It's a JupyterLab distribution that runs entirely in the browser, so basically all you need to run it for a whole classroom full of students is the ability to serve up a bunch of static files. They even have a demo you can try [readthedocs.io] embedded in the documentation. While the default distribution is tuned towards single-user deployment it should be pretty trivial to repackage it to deliver the key bits of repl.it that are missing, and the UI it offers is much better than repl.it ever had.
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If they have a few people involved in that who have actual educational experience, that could evolve into exactly what is needed.
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https://www.bu.edu/rhcollab/20... [bu.edu]
Well, it was always going to happen (Score:2)
For want of an IDE (Score:2)
For want of an IDE, a CS program failed? Now I have to go read the article because it can't be that dumb.
IDE?? (Score:2)
When I did my CS degree in 2004 we were not allowed to use an IDE.
It was seen as disconnecting us from the true understanding of the code.
We were very jealous about the other campus when we found out they used an IDE :D
We had to use notepad, but soon upgraded to something like notepad++ as we wanted auto indentation.
The best IDE I have EVER used is the Object Oriented REPL VM environment of Visualwaorks smalltalk. Online coding and testing of running instantised objects in real time. That was simply beaut
Study (Score:1)