With Canvas software outage, Kansas schools discover how much they leaned on it

Teachers and students found themselves at loose ends after the online education platform Canvas went down. (Illustration by Eric Thomas for Kansas Reflector)

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 ends Friday on the Lawrence campus for undergraduates).

When I was pitching this topic as a story for the Reflector last week, I proposed this headline: “Brief Canvas outage reveals the enormous reliance the campuses have on software.”

As Associated Press reporter Heather Hollingsworth found in her reporting, this concentration risk — “how much schools depend on outside companies’ digital platforms to keep their operations running” — hit schools nationwide.

This is the paradox of software today. We concentrate 80% of our daily work on a website hosted by a single company. In that way, work is concentrated.

Meanwhile, across the country, others similarly trust in a single education solution. In that way, the effect of an outage is widespread.

Danger is calling when we have risk that is both concentrated and widespread.

To be clear, during my 25 years of teaching, I have used many types of educational software. Canvas stands above the rest.

We were especially grateful for Canvas’ ease of use during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and the semesters that followed, when classes were more likely to be hybrid or fully online. Teachers couldn’t replicate in-person classes, but Canvas and other LMS platforms made it easier to deliver something educational.

(As a sidenote: Many educators believe this widespread practice of putting more course materials, especially notes, online has depressed attendance rates: “Mom, I can get an A without going to school!”)

In being so efficient, however, Canvas invites us to trust it more deeply with each posted assignment, each passing week and each completed semester. Call it the curse of working too well. Even a blip in service and teachers dissolve into crisis.

For their part, students said they didn’t miss the short hiatus from Canvas and course work.

Over lunch this week, I talked to one of my students about his recent KU highlights. He raved about a professor he had recently. The lectures were lively. The notes were a revelation. The readings were well chosen. The course was great, the student said.

“And,” he said, his eyes twinkling, “there was almost nothing on Canvas.”

Online-learning fatigue hits hard at the end of the semester, when we grudgingly log into the same website to review the items on our to-do list, whether it is writing an essay as a student or grading one as a teacher. (I am procrastinating doing some grading by writing this column.)

Although one Kansas public school teacher I talked to this morning said the Canvas fiasco is still complicating grading, the outage was less than 24 hours for most schools.

During the brief time, we learned the degree of our reliance on a single piece of software, especially at this time of year. Imagine the academic chain reaction that would be brought on by a longer or permanent outage.

Along with other Kansas teachers, I will consider that looming pitfall as I stroll into my summer break today, grateful that Canvas flickered back to life as we finished this semester.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.