LMS Liabilities

Many digital pixels have gone into dissecting the Canvas shutdown debacle ten days ago. What certainly emerges is that Canvas did a poor job communicating with its constituents. Whether or not they paid a ransom, or whether the hacked data is contained, or whether they have fixed their vulnerabilities, is unclear. I don’t think my campus was directly targeted; my students and I did not see a ransomware notice, only that the system was down. It was accessible again the same evening, so it was down for maybe six to eight hours. I had a P-Chem problem set due the following morning. The majority of students uploaded it to Canvas, a handful sent me a pdf directly via email, and one additional student turned in a hard copy.

 

I had not experienced using a Learning Management System (LMS) as a student. In my first couple of years teaching, everything was done hard copy just like when I was a student. I don’t recall when my campus started using WebCT, but I do remember teaching myself HTML and building a simple rudimentary website that provided my syllabus, basic information, and downloadable materials. It had a simple password protection scheme. It lived on one of the university servers that hosted faculty home pages. Few faculty had or used them. I still maintain my text-only webpages making minor updates every semester. Very low maintenance. I never bothered to learn Wordpress or other fancier tools as they showed up over the years.

 

WebCT looked clunky and I resisted using it, preferring my low-maintenance website. Blackboard bought WebCT. I used it a couple of times when I was team-teaching with colleagues who used it. The university continued to push (or “encourage”) more faculty to utilize Blackboard so that students would have a more “uniform” experience. I was one of the rogue faculty members who did not for a variety of reasons. At one point I vaguely recall being told that the university was shutting down the faculty webpage host server, but that did not come to pass. I think there were enough rogue users like me who hacked together their own sites that made sufficiently reasonable arguments. I did lose the battle over using Pine for my email and was forced to switch to my university’s Gmail.

 

Then Covid-19 came. I was on sabbatical in Spring 2020 so I did not have to make the hard pivot that my colleagues scrambled to do. I had time to think about how I was going to teach the next academic year online. My clunky website did not support video but the Zoom integration in Blackboard did. I spent part of Summer 2020 setting up all my classes in Blackboard, not just material delivery, but a Discussion Board, a wiki, online quizzes, and assignments for uploaded exams and other materials. Blackboard wasn’t too bad, and after we went back to in-person classes, I retained using Blackboard instead of my simple HTML website for managing class materials. P-Chem homework could be submitted online which worked well for students retaining their original problem set for annotations. Quizzes and exams reverted to in-person. I stopped using the Discussion Board when ChatGPT arrived.

 

Two and a half years ago, our campus made a hard switch to campus. I had winter break to make the adjustments. It was annoying because the Blackboard import did not work well for setting up my Canvas shells so I put up everything again from scratch. I don’t use the majority of the LMS features, and certainly not the gradebook, so the Canvas outage ten days ago did not affect my classes significantly. The way I set up the G-Chem online homework system and eTextbook as single embedded links to access, rather than a full Canvas integration, meant that there was an alternative way the students could access both directly from the publisher website. In a more extended outage, I could have revived the use of my HTML website and everything would have still worked.

 

Covid-19 made me think about how to set up my courses to pivot quickly without too much hassle. Although I hope it doesn’t happen before I retire, I expect a reasonable probability of another pandemic forcing us to move online. The possibility of zoonotic virus spread is very likely given how we humans live today and how biology works. But with the latest Canvas debacle, it now makes me think about how I might pivot quickly should another hack occur. I think there is an even higher probability that LMS vendors will be breached by hackers; not a question of if but when. Something will go down at a crucial time. I hope the education industry has learned something from all of this, but I’m honestly not sure if anything is going to change. In the meantime, I’ve downloaded all my Canvas materials and will rework how they are organized in case a quick pivot is needed in a future year. I just finished giving my last final exam and I go on sabbatical next academic year so I have time to think about the reorganization.