EduVULCAN

eduVULCAN

Basic Information
Release Year	2024
Product Type	Software
In Production	Yes
Official Website	https://eduvulcan.pl/

eduVULCAN is a Polish school e-journal service developed by Vulcan sp. z o.o.., allowing students and their parents to view grades, submit absence notes, contact teachers, and more. Similarly, it enables teachers to record student attendance, add or modify grades, and perform other administrative tasks.

It is the successor to Dzienniczek VULCAN (referred to here as simply VULCAN). Most students previously using VULCAN were encouraged to switch to eduVULCAN unless their school employed a custom solution incompatible with the new system.

Many schools in Poland rely exclusively on Vulcan’s services to manage their systems, effectively requiring many students to use the platform.

The service has faced a lot of controversy, particularly around their restructuring beginning around the 2024/2025 school year.

Consumer impact summary

• User Freedom:
• User Privacy:
• Business Model:
• Market Control:

Anti-consumer practices

Blocking of third-party clients

Many students utilized unofficial clients to use the VULCAN service, particularly during COVID when the service was constantly overloaded as these apps had the ability to download data once and work fully offline, making these apps more preferred as they were generally more reliable than the official app.

Wulkanowy's announcement on Facebook regarding the app being blocked

Blocking third-party apps

On 25 April 2024, Wulkanowy, one of the most popular third-party free-and-open-source (FOSS) clients mysteriously stopped working and started displaying a "No Access" error message upon logging in. Wulkanowy stated this was a deliberate move by Vulcan, who allegedly placed an extra piece of code in the login endpoint’s response. This tricked the app into interpreting the request as a failure, while the official app would continue to function.

The website czyvulcanapojebalo.pl also alleges that Vulcan analyzed the Wulkanowy SDK further to try to exploit every potential vulnerability that could cause the app to malfunction.

Later versions of VULCAN introduced additional variables in the web requests made by the app, causing third-party clients to become inoperable after each official app update, as these variables were altered with every new version.

Legal threats

In the beginning of June, VULCAN started sending out cease-and-desist letters to third-party app developers, ordering them to cease app development completely and make all apps display a message that was allegedly prepared by Vulcan themselves. As such, nearly all forks and clients of the app stopped development and were updated to only display a static message, and their respective app store pages were removed in June and July.

On August 22, 2024, just before the new school year began, Wezuwiusz, a fork of Wulkanowy preparing for compatibility with eduVULCAN, also received a cease-and-desist letter. It was allegedly sent by one of the biggest law firms in Poland and was accusing the developers of:

• Trademark infringement,
• Unfair competition,
• Damaging their server infrastructure by scraping, allegedly leading to higher server costs, and
• Harming Vulcan's reputation.

Additionally, Vulcan criticized the developer’s review of the official app on Google Play and referred to unofficial apps as "parasites".

The eduVULCAN terms of service were also adjusted to forbid the use of apps that "automate logging in and receiving data from the website" for "security and confidentiality reasons" and to clarify that Vulcan "may employ technological measures to block access to the service using such software" (§3, section 11). These measures appeared to prepare the way for the new account system.

New eduVULCAN account system

Just before the start of the 2024/2025 school year, Vulcan announced the eduVULCAN platform and changes to their account system. There are now two types of accounts:

1. Basic accounts, which have no access to the mobile app, and
2. eduVULCAN accounts, which provide access to the mobile app but with new limitations.

Several previously free features in the VULCAN mobile app, such as push notifications, messaging teachers, and submitting absence notes, are now behind a paywall. The cost for the full school year is 32.99 PLN (around 8 USD) with tax per student. This fee is in addition to the costs schools pay for access to the service, which remains undisclosed.

Access to the website version of these features is still free, as required by law.

While you can quickly switch a basic account to an eduVULCAN one, you can't switch back an eduVULCAN account to a basic one without having to reset your entire account (this requires the school's secretary office to print a new one-time code).

Public reception

The changes were met with extreme criticism as students and parents opposed the new payment options, sparking discussion around the Polish parliament about a possible creation of a free state-owned e-journal system.

Several Polish MPs submitted interpellations to the Minister of Education. However, the responses offered no substantial new information, as Vulcan complies with legal requirements by providing "at least one channel of free access to the electronic journal [...] whether on a stationary device or on a mobile device with Internet access (via a web browser)."