Maybe you heard the yelps echoing from the hallways of Kansas schools last week as a software outage essentially paused academic work. No quizzes. No assignments. No grading. No video tutorials.
And no sense of when it would end.
Canvas, a so-called learning management system, serves as the classroom spinal cord for thousands of schools nationwide, including many K-12 public school districts, Kansas State University and Pittsburg State University. When it fails, our schools seize up too.
A group of hackers calling itself ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for an attack that shuttered Canvas right before semester exams at many schools.
At the University of Kansas, where I teach journalism, we gathered for our end-of-semester faculty meeting last week during the software blackout.
Instructors asked for advice about how to stay in touch with students, how to back up grades and how to safeguard student data. Understandably — because the extent and duration of the outage was unclear — the advice was little more than a collective shrug.
When service was restored, a faculty member in our meeting burst out in the middle of a colleague’s presentation, “Canvas is back!” Many of us cheered and then scrambled to our laptops to back up valuable files.
Consider how acutely the Canvas outage hit just one of my three classes: Media & Society.
Heading into finals week, I planned to proctor a comprehensive semester exam with 100 multiple-choice questions. (“How did P.T. Barnum influence advertising?”)
When I heard about the hack, I considered the work needed to convert the exam to an old-fashioned paper test. The obstacle: all of the questions were on Canvas — and nowhere else. Could I write 100 more questions before Tuesday?
The grading for the class of more than 170 students was also inaccessible. As I sat in the faculty meeting, I tallied the man hours that it had taken to grade more than 1,300 pieces of in-class group writing this semester. Add to that the eye-spinning grading that my GTAs and I did for the midterm essay. I estimated at least 450 hours of grading alone this semester. I couldn’t redo that.
Class communication was manageable, if chaotic. While instructors could revert to emailing students using class rosters from the registrar, student inboxes were suddenly inundated.
One student told me he missed my clever Canvas workaround for one assignment. Why? The glut of instructor emails only gave him time to read the email subject lines.
Next, consider all of the curriculum that today’s teachers store online using websites such as Canvas. For my Media & Society class, that includes reading assignments, links to podcasts, streaming documentaries and study guides. Even more basic, our online classes remind students when final exams meet.
I won’t bore you with the rest of modern schooling that we have assembled online. Trust me. It’s so much more.
Without Canvas, I simply could not have completed the semester (which ended Friday on the Lawrence campus for undergraduates).
