Lessons From the Canvas Outage (opinion)

I, like many of you, was caught off guard by the massive Canvas outage, caused by a group of hackers who demanded that Instructure pay a ransom to avert the disclosure of millions of users’ personal data. The outage could not have happened at a worse time, as instructors were evaluating final exams and assignments, calculating final grades, and gearing up for summer online courses.

I also witnessed it from the other side: My daughter’s community college and my son’s online high school both use Canvas. For the first time in her life (her words) my daughter had actually completed and submitted her coursework early, so she wasn’t stressed about the outage. My son is in the midst of state testing, and when that wasn’t impacted, he was disappointed. But the level of panic that many students felt, on top of the usual end-of-semester stress, was high.

I also watched the reactions of my friends and colleagues from all over North America in real time across social media (mostly on LinkedIn), but also locally at my own institution. While faculty were stressed and scrambling to reassure our students, there was also quite a lot of, well, not quite schadenfreude, but an expression of a feeling of superiority toward the company itself and the administrators who’d foisted this learning management system on us. Many hoped, and I am sure this will come to pass, that Instructure would get sued, contracts would be broken and the company—along with their LMS—would become a thing of the past. (The latter part I am much less sure of.)

What troubled me through much of the dialogue, however, was a hard and fast turn against all technology and a commitment to return to a more or less fully analog classroom when we’re back in the fall. Never mind that many of our students were never taught cursive or how to take notes longhand. Or that digital texts are more accessible in multiple ways than physical books. Or that, guess what? You kind of like the grade book doing math for you.

It isn’t that surprising a reaction, especially given our current AI moment. Call this LMS outage the digital straw that broke the professors’ backs. We’ve been struggling to get our minds around the impact that AI is having on our classrooms and institutions, and now a tool we’ve come to rely on (or been forced to rely on, depending on your attitude toward the LMS) failed us at the most critical time of the academic year. But we cannot simply turn away from technology as a response.

To return to an analog classroom would be, well, almost impossible. Are we bringing back the overhead projectors? Back to bibliographies that only had to have three references, tops, because that was all that was on the shelves? Not to mention that technology has made higher education more accessible to more people. We live in a technological world whether we like it or not, and while helping our students learn when and where to use technology, as well as how to use it effectively, could and should have always been one of our goals, simply pretending it doesn’t exist does them a disservice.

I don’t want a return to big tech for the solution, either. I think, however, that digging our heels in and refusing technology opens the door for administrators to just pick the next big tech solution that promises to be more secure than the last one, all the while assuring us not to worry, that this time it will be different. Once again we’d be stuck using whatever enterprise solution that administrators chose.

I don’t want it to be like this anymore. And it doesn’t have to be.

I was always struck by the inspiration for the Domain of One’s Own project, where a group of staff and faculty at University of Mary Washington were tasked with selecting an online e-portfolio tool and were so underwhelmed by the choices they thought they could do something better locally. Or rather, that they and their students could do something better themselves. On the surface, giving every faculty, staff member and student the opportunity to create their own domain and website doesn’t seem all that innovative, but it was new. And it called into question the accepted orthodoxy that all digital solutions must be enterprise solutions owned and operated by big tech.

During the pandemic, for a brief moment, we acknowledged the inequities in digital access in our students’ experiences. It was a topic I had long been interested in, and I was heartened by the awakening of the higher education community at large, as well as mainstream media, to the very real issues that a large portion of our students face when it comes to digital accessibility (among other important issues like food and housing insecurity, mental health, etc.). At that time, I started to think about how the idea of minimal computing, a concept coming out of digital humanities to address issues of accessibility, sustainability and democratization, could help us rethink and reimagine ed tech for the better.

What I found most inspiring were these simple questions, as posited by Roopika Risam and Alex Gil, that inform the choices we make when we take a minimal computing approach to our tech challenges:

1. What do we need?
2. What do we have?
3. What must we prioritize?
4. What are we willing to give up?

The answer to question three for big tech is always to prioritize profit. By recentering local solutions, we can prioritize our students and our communities, while also making clear that we are not willing to give up our students’ privacy, our faculty’s intellectual property and autonomy, and our ability to not be at the whims of venture capitalists and private equity.

It is one thing for individual faculty members to take a minimal computing approach to their own classrooms, but it will take an institutional approach if we really want to forge a new direction for ed tech. I asked the following in another essay on minimal computing and instructional design:

I cynically concluded the above-cited essay with little to no hope of this approach ever taking root. But now we have a moment, an opportunity, to decide we are going to do things differently. A moment for faculty to come together and say, no, we will not choose between two poor choices from big tech. An opportunity for a forward-thinking administration to say, we’re going to explore other options. Technology isn’t going away, but we don’t have to accept big tech’s plans for us. Taking a minimal computing approach is one answer, one alternative, but we need something so we can start cutting our own path forward.