Why Exeter Needs to Fix Its Disjointed Tech Ecosystem
By SHAYAAN KASHIF ‘26
Blackbaud, Canvas, Orah, Microsoft SharePoint, and total inundation by Outlook. If you’re a student at Exeter, you’ve probably become pretty familiar with all these systems which make up Exeter’s tech ecosystem. While these systems do work, they are disjointed, inconvenient, and time-consuming for most students.
Canvas is for academic classes; Blackbaud is for student resources, calendars, and clubs; Orah is for planning off-campus activity; and email is—well—email. Oh, and if you want to lead admissions tours, there’s a separate portal. Sure, it’s doable, but it’s certainly not ideal. User-friendliness is at the very core of good application design. A system where I have to check a different website or app for almost everything is certainly not user-friendly and is often confusing. For one, the lack of a mobile app for Blackbaud means that I have to spend about a minute logging into an already slow website through a browser whenever I want to check my schedule, club announcements, or even what’s for lunch. Sure, there’s Campus Commons, but yet another app? Did I mention that I get logged out every time I minimize Safari and thus have to repeat that process? It seems like a minor thing to complain about, but it starts to get on your nerves when you have to repeat a log-in process dozens of times a day just to quickly glance at what time a club or class is meeting.
Moreover, while there are ways to circumvent issues like this, the solutions are usually hard to find and require a certain level of tech-savviness. Did you know that you can export your schedule to your iPhone calendar? You just have to go to your Blackbaud calendar page, find the tiny “Share” button, and then find the even smaller “Export to iCalendar” button. This isn’t necessarily Exeter’s fault—the school didn’t design Blackbaud—but it nevertheless creates extra work and inconvenience for both students and teachers. In general, I feel I could be missing out on a lot of important information on campus happenings. That certainly isn’t helped by the fact that some clubs still use email, while others use the Blackbaud announcement feature that doesn’t notify me of anything by default. I’m tech-savvy enough to figure out workarounds for most of these problems, but I know most Exonians (and people) are more used to highly responsive, streamlined interfaces mobile apps offer. Blackbaud’s front-end web is hard to navigate due to its lack of quality-of-life features. Even if you meticulously scavenge through Exeter’s tech ecosystems for information, the fact that they’re so decentralized still means you may miss something.
Like many things in life, there’s not an easy solution to Exeter’s issue of disjointed online systems. For one, the unique environment of a boarding school means that traditional Learning Management Systems (LMS) may not wholly fit Exeter. These are great for classes, and maybe even clubs, but they’re not so great for stuff like dorms, planning off-campus trips, dining hall menus, and the endless intricacies of living on campus. The only way to solve the issue of a disjointed, confusing ecosystem would be to create a streamlined interface where all information can be accessed from a single “portal.” No such app currently exists, so while it would be a monumental task, designing an Exeter-specific app that truly does the diversity of offerings on campus justice wouldn’t be impossible. It would take at least some endorsement from the school, however—there’s only so much I can do to work around Blackbaud’s tyrannic restriction of their API. Either way, one thing is for sure: every student, and several faculty, would appreciate an easier-to-use, convenient online system.
