A number of top universities have been impacted by the breach. .
Makes me feel like going back to everything being paper and pencil and a phone.
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Really bad timing with end of semester things happening! I’ve got grades due Monday and new course shells for summer that open Monday as well and am at a standstill until they get this fixed!
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Top topic on Reddit - Will Finals Be Cancelled?
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Will grades be adjusted upward?
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Most schools are back online today. My university is doing some extra maintenance and security checks before they open the links (although I think some of my colleagues have been able to get access on their phones). In all, it will have been less than 24 hours, hopefully, before everything’s running normally. In the meantime, professors have been emailing students materials they need to study for exams and complete final projects, giving extensions when needed, and making other adjustments. Some of us keep copies of most of our students’ graded work offline (I download papers, keep an Excel spreadsheet, etc.).
I will add that there is a contingent in the higher ed tech world (ITS, web design, etc.) who act as if the online learning platforms like Canvas are the most important elements in teaching – that it’s the Canvas course design, and not the professor behind it, that’s the core of instruction. They have been encouraging (demanding?) that Canvas be the medium for all communication, course design and instruction, to the point that the Canvas page is the course in their minds. It’s probably too much to hope that those people will realize that teaching remains human at its core, and that Canvas is just a tool and not equivalent to the act of teaching.
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still like this now? A little more than 10 years ago I functioned (for a year) as the liaison between a group of professors and the university instructional design team, mainly because they couldn’t understand the other group’s viewpoint. I happened to be quite good at both. It took us close to a year working together to reach a decent level of collaboration.
Yep. Still like this.
In other news, Canvas is up and running for us at my university! Students will be devastated to learn that finals are back on!
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The second to last question and answer on this page is about Canvas. One of the writers is a college faculty member teaching history describing experiences with the crack and outage. (As this web site is mostly about politics, please start a thread in the politics section if you want to comment on the political stuff on that page rather than the non-political Canvas question and answer.)
This writer’s account reflects my experience of what happened during the 24 hours when Canvas was down. At my university, we are expected to deliver all course materials (other than books and in-person class activities) through Canvas, and to use it for all posting, communication, syllabi – everything. That means we’re not supposed to use our personal websites or Teams, etc., to set up the online components of our courses. And to some extent, that’s fine – it gets confusing for students when they have to use different interfaces with different functions to access course material and turn in assignments. And like I indicated above, many of us do store back-ups offline. I regularly download all of my students’ written assignments, grade them, and upload the graded versions, so I have those grades and comments; and I keep an Excel spreadsheet, though I do get behind in entering attendance and online discussion grades, so those are often stored only on Canvas until I get around to updating my spreadsheet.
Still, relying on Canvas has serious drawbacks. First, when this is the only way students have to access course material, things look dire when there is an outtage. For my online class, for example, I was facing the possibility of having to post a whole semester’s worth of readings in folders on Google Drive had Canvas not come back online, just so they could write their take-home finals. Possible, but an enormous headache. So in a cyberattack incident, even those of us with offline backups are in a tight spot – and that’s partly because the university has deemed Canvas the only acceptable way to deliver course material, so we have fewer ways to pivot. Second (and this is not directly related to the Canvas cyberattack itself, but rather to the relationship between education and technology), educational ITS and digital design types tend to equate the online course design with the course itself, and according to this perspective, the actual instructor is interchangeable. So my course (according to this view) is what’s on Canvas – not the interactions I have with my students, or the intellectual work I devoted to creating a course, of which Canvas is a supporting (but not central) element. If we dehumanize teaching to the point of making it all about technology, then cyberattacks are the least of our problems.
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