“No more pencils, no more books,” Alice Cooper sang on the 1972 hit record, School’s Out. “No more teachers’ dirty looks!” Two generations later, the so-called learning management tool Canvas has made the ages-old schoolyard chant come true. Good-bye pencils, books and sometimes even teachers. Hello Canvas.
Canvas is a grand tool for our pixelated era. In that spirit, allow me to use ChatGPT, Canvas’s coconspirator, to define it:
“Canvas is a widely used online learning platform,” reports the AI chatbot. “Schools, colleges, universities and some businesses use it to organize courses, distribute materials, collect assignments, administer quizzes, communicate with students and post grades.”
I’ve always hated Canvas—its dreary regimentation, its homogenized sameness, its demands to do what it commands (because otherwise it stalls and waits for obedience). So imagine my schadenfreude when in fact it did collapse just as spring terms were ending worldwide. And worldwide were the repercussions when Canvas screens everywhere flashed threats from the predatory hacker organization that calls itself ShinyHunters (“rooting your systems since ’19,” is their tagline, followed by a winking semicolon smile).
“ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again),” announced the message, in reference to Canvas’s parent company. “Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us.” The message then offered institutional victims a workaround. “If any of the schools in the affected list are interested in preventing the release of their data … contact us privately to … negotiate a settlement … before everything is leaked.” The hackers claimed to have secured the personal data of users, data that included private messages.
Here I must state unequivocally that I am 100 percent opposed to such threats and attacks and extortion.
Ultimately, Instructure acknowledged that it made an agreement with the hackers to scrap the stolen data, paying a ransom of an unknown sum. Canvas was back online in hours. And Instructure apologized to clients with CEO Steve Daly acknowledging the system continues to be susceptible. “The threats facing academic institutions and education technology providers aren’t going away,” he admitted in an official company statement. “No single platform can build a resilient ecosystem alone, but I believe we can as a community.”
But why has so much of higher ed (including my own academic home) allowed itself to become Canvas addicts, effectively ceding control of the classroom to a for-profit company? It’s a company now doing much of teachers’ and administrators’ jobs. It’s a company teaching students to conform to its systems (and hence systems in general). Instead of outsourcing routinization, higher education should be fostering and encouraging individual creativity.
As is the case at so many universities worldwide, we all use Canvas at the University of Oregon. It systemizes our operations. It can be convenient. It enables us to operate 24 hours a day (is that a good thing?). I use it to keep in touch with my reporting, writing and interviewing classes.
Immediately after the ShinyHunters hack, I asked my students how they related to Canvas—was it friend or foe? Although my students used their full names on this ad hoc assignment, I’m exercising due diligence and only using their first names here.
“I can’t say that I cared much about the Canvas outage,” wrote Will. “For me it meant I couldn’t double check the instructions for an assignment I was working on. The money involved wasn’t mine and the people’s whose it was did not need it anyway.”
“It scares me that my entire education could be dismantled in an instant,” worried Brendan. “It makes me think if there is a solar flare that wipes out all technology, we would be screwed.”
“Most of my friends were joyous it was down,” reported Braylon. “They could write excuses to the teacher.”
“I had two papers due and was stressing out because I had two papers due and I could not turn them in,” said Meileen.
A relieved report came from Max. “I was not directly affected by the Canvas shutdown,” he confessed. “I was too tired to do work that day.” But when he’s well rested, Canvas rules. “Without Canvas, I wouldn’t know how to do well in my classes.”
Reliance on Canvas proved problematic for Tayli because it serves as an intermediary between students and teachers. “The malfunction made me feel unprepared as a student.”
My favorite response came from Sidalu. “I was hoping it was down forever,” she wrote neatly in pencil on college-ruled paper. “I hate that app.”
Imposing Canvas standardization on students, faculty and administrators does not just make education susceptible to ShinyHunters types of hijacking. Such regimentation serves to suppress both teacher and student improvisation and creativity. ShinyHunters’ successful shutdown of Canvas presents academe with an opportunity to reconsider ceding the classroom to a brave new world of standardization and control fueled by big business.
Canvas enables us to operate 24 hours a day (who in their right mind wants to do that?). But I push back. Screens are verboten in my classroom; I assign students to turn in their work old school style: ink on paper. No thieves operating on the dark web can steal such assignments out of students’ backpacks.
We now know that Canvas easily crashes. Paper not so much.
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