This year, Agnes Irwin welcomed a new online assignment platform named AIS ON. Allegedly, administrators made the switch to AIS ON to put everything students would need on one website. However, in the first month of using this supposedly “more efficient” website, many students have called for the return of Google Classroom. As one of these students, I find AIS ON less than satisfactory as an organizational tool.
Firstly, the user interface of the website is unpleasant to look at and confusing to navigate. When logging in, which you have to do manually every time, you are taken to the home page, “My Day.” This page displays a student’s courses, advisory, and other activities, such as clubs. Next to each course, AIS ON has the number of assignments attributed to them, categorized into “due today,” “assigned today,” and “active.” None of these numbers are useful in any way because even if you have marked an assignment as “completed,” it will still appear as “active.” It is misleading, and students feel the need to check if they have missed something, even if they know they have done the assignment. This is merely one example of AIS ON’s faulty user interface and layout.
Alerts and notifications are another area of criticism for AIS ON. While one can turn on email notifications for assignments and announcements in settings, updates to class content are not included in these notifications. Agnes Irwin pitched this new system as better than Google Classroom by advertising its convenience, noting that everything a student needs would be grouped into one place. This pitch is ironic because the Upper School already uses a separate site, Owl’s Nest, for announcements and daily news. Google Classroom, of course, has email notifications set up for anything posted in classroom pages.
Lastly, AIS ON has abundant issues with grading glitches. Often, the temperamental site will allow half of a class to view its grades on a test, but restrict the others’ access. On Google Classroom, it was easy to locate past assignments and view grades, but AIS ON keeps students in the dark about their grades. For these reasons, I believe switching back to Google Classroom would be the best option to promote efficiency. In the meantime, while we must deal with the substandard platform of AIS ON, I strongly recommend students and teachers get a planner to keep up to date with their classes.
