I will never forget being told by my supervisor in the early '90s that it was inappropriate for me to walk down the hall to ask a coworker a question when I could email him.
That was truly the beginning of the end of community.
Great piece. Another thing all this edutech, metrics, and rubrics has led to is this: us lying while performatively delivering bullshit. What I mean is that no matter how many “student learning objectives” I put on a form, or course outcome assessments, or whatever else, I’m still just going to do whatever I think best in the classroom. End of discussion. The rest is merely empty numbers and checkboxes. Likewise I never give my students a grading rubric. Life doesn’t come with a rubric and never does genuine education.
I thought it was NYU that was forcing me to list those Procrustean learning outcomes and those middle-management rubrics. Now I understand the villain is the system. I think that makes me feel worse.
Among the most terrible qualities of Canvas and other LMSs is their total lack of interest in helping us provide meaningful feedback to students. An LMS *could* be a dramatic improvement over paper-based comments if it allowed us to store meaningful (and therefore usually lengthy) comments and then review all comments to date for a specific student to consider their growth over time and where they should go next. But every time I've asked for this feature, I've been treated as though I've developed some highly unusual pedagogy. When I searched Canvas for how to provide a comment on a student assignment, the example they had was something like, "Thanks for submitting! I'll grade this as soon as I can." This is what they imagine we do, and I very much fear that people (especially folks learning to teach in the age of Canvas) will start conforming to their imagination.
How well I remember being a TA and learning the importance of a good relationship with the department secretary. Not only did it turn out this dour-looking woman was one of the kindest people I'd meet in grad school, she knew everything about the inner workings of the department and helped me navigate the choppy waters. I shot the shit with her every day. And, yes, I remember hanging out in department or, when I started teaching at an independent high school, school-wide mail rooms and getting to know my colleagues. The sense of community there created a functioning collective.
Like so many other forms of tech, LMSs can seem like a good idea--ways to provide support materials for students, for example. I can't tell you how helpful it was to be able to post scenes from Romeo and Juliet as my 8th-grade students first dipped their toes into Shakespeare. Or transferring my lecture on Elizabethan theater to video where students could watch it at their own pace. But like everything, there's technology creep. Suddenly, we're forcing student engagement by requiring daily posts on meaningless topics, then expecting students to reply to each other in substantive ways on no-content posts on those meaningless topics. The proliferation of busywork. And, as you say, Claire, the act of grading in the humanities and arts, devolves into an automated, mathematical, unnuanced, robotic act, rather than the careful, sensitive, fully human process our students deserve and learn from.
This article is spot on and one angle you take here is one I've been saying for years as well: whatever the problems with online/distance education and the technological system that comes with it (and there are MANY), at least its intent is mostly understandable. But the overwhelming requirement of technology for ON-CAMPUS, IN-PERSON students is just downright stupid. And the worst of it that I started to notice at my university was when on-campus, in-person students (through Canvas) would take courses online. Students were literally in their dorm room 50 yards away from my classroom where I was teaching the exact same class in person. Students were sitting by themselves and staring at a screen instead of just being in a normal class.
For my many years as a professor, I would put minimal info on Canvas. I always kept an old-school gradebook where I tracked attendance and inputted grades by hand. Maybe this latest hacking incident and your article will lead to a wake-up call. But knowing how higher education works, I'm not holding my breath.
Thank you for this timely piece, which I'm sharing with my students in a Critical AI Studies seminar. We've been having broader discussions about big tech platforms, including ed tech, and the Canvas hack happened just after we'd discussed Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" model. Your piece helps me see that LMSs have also been fully enshittified: stage 1 is user lock-in, stage 2 is business lock-in, and stage 3 is the selling out of user and business value so maximum profits flow upwards to shareholders and execs. A few differences - we don't see algorithmically-selected ads on Canvas for example (though there are plenty of 4th-party plug-ins we're encouraged to use) - but the basic degrading of user experience and culling of data for profit is the same.
One huge hurdle is the "stickiness" of LMSs for institutions, in the name of access and accessibility. A central platform for digital delivery of materials helps institutions guarantee compliance with ADA; it's the path of least resistance and it's cheaper than hiring actual humans in disability resource offices. And since Covid, there are expectations that students should be able to complete a course without attending much in person - LMSs allow for multimodal course delivery, which is a massive workload escalation for faculty but which allows universities to brag about "schedules that fit your needs".
You might want to check out the book Teaching by Numbers by Peter Taubman for an earlier critique of audit culture, and the hollowing out of education.
I agree with so much of what you have to say here. The hacking incident really does expose just how dangerously dependent we've become on a single point of failure. But there’s a pretty big blind spot that I can’t let pass: the piece is written entirely from the perspective of someone whose educational path was never contingent on remote access existing.
For non-traditional students like working adults, caregivers, people in rural areas without commutable campuses, those managing disabilities, veterans, incarcerated individuals…Canvas and platforms like it weren't a "solution" to a problem of questionable urgency. They were the only door into the building. I finished my undergraduate degree and my master's precisely because online course infrastructure made it possible to do so without uprooting my life or abandoning my responsibilities. Without it I wouldn’t be sitting here, Ph.D. in hand, debating its merits. Your nostalgic departmental mailbox was never available to me, and neither was the physical campus community you mourn. Your conclusion left me wanting more, because your own diagnosis points somewhere more nuanced. If the problems are vendor dependency, poor security practices, and rubric driven pedagogy, those feel like arguments for better designed and more accountable infrastructure, not for retreating to analog. And whatever that reformed infrastructure looks like, it had better account for distance learners. Because for a lot of us, pulling the plug without a serious alternative isn't a bold pedagogical stand. It's pulling up the ladder.
We definitely need to keep having conversations like this one, because real improvements are long overdue. But those conversations have to account for the fact that the academy is no longer just physical campuses full of traditional-aged students. It hasn't been for a long time.
That's actually not true: not only did I teach remotely during the pandemic, I voluntarily taught online classes in a university that has a sizable online curriculum. But why would we use these platforms for in-person teaching?
I am not at all suggesting that we pull up the ladder for remote students--and I think Instructure mostly did a kick-ass job of getting everything back up and running. But the research is very conclusive about the negative outcomes for most people who are on screens--yet for purely institutional reasons we put students on screens who do not need to be.
Among the most terrible qualities of Canvas and other LMSs is their total lack of interest in helping us provide meaningful feedback to students. An LMS *could* be a dramatic improvement over paper-based comments if it allowed us to store meaningful (and therefore usually lengthy) comments and then review all comments to date for a specific student to consider their growth over time and where they should go next. But every time I've asked for this feature, I've been treated as though I've developed some highly unusual pedagogy. When I searched Canvas for how to provide a comment on a student assignment, the example they had was something like, "Thanks for submitting! I'll grade this as soon as I can." This is what they imagine we do, and I very much fear that people (especially folks learning to teach in the age of Canvas) will start conforming to their imagination.
In reading this, I think there are two distinct threads being pulled: a (healthy and good) mistrust of the motivations of ed tech writ large, and a serious critique of what higher education *is* in 2026 compared to what it used to be or should be.
While Instructure's handling of this situation--end to end--has been horrific, and there are certainly plenty of things about Canvas and other LMSs to be wary of--especially related to what data they have and how they store/use it, a lot of the issues raised in this piece seem to me to center on the bureaucracies of secondary and higher education in this country, not on the technology itself. YMMV.
For instance, did the erosion of college-ready students that is traced to the 2010s come from LMSs being introduced, or was it the logical end point of a decade of NCLB "teaching to the test" so that schools could "show academic progress" year over year to retain funding, in lieu of teaching critical thinking and learning skills in secondary education?
Did Canvas/Blackboard/Moodle invent learning outcomes and rubrics as a means of assessment, or are they responding to what universities are asking for due to administrative and accreditation decisions? LMSs don't *require* the use of rubrics to grade things, departments/colleges do.
Any institution using Canvas (and by extension, any other prominent LMS) should be asking themselves a lot of tough questions right now. Those questions can, and should, be extrapolated out to other tech tools. But this piece seems to want institutions to ask a lot of questions that exist outside of the technology as well, and frankly our society has some issues to grapple with (such as, fundamentally, what is the "purpose" of a college education?) vis a vis higher education.
"For instance, did the erosion of college-ready students that is traced to the 2010s come from LMSs being introduced, or was it the logical end point of a decade of NCLB "teaching to the test" so that schools could "show academic progress" year over year to retain funding, in lieu of teaching critical thinking and learning skills in secondary education?"--yes to both? I think these two threads are inextricable. LMS's do not require the use of rubrics, but they facilitate them--technologically, as something that can be ascertained by a supervisor, and by the emphasis on metrics that they facilitate.
I totally agree that they offer a certain "path of least resistance" that institutions--especially smaller ones with very limited resources--find attractive and convenient, and there is a certain pitch to be able to "aggregate your data" institution-wide.
That said, I am an Ed Tech person by vocation (though not a Canvas apologist, by any means), so I must cop to a certain amount of bias and perhaps pollyannishness because I still look at an LMS as a "tool" and not a "solution".
Thank you for this article. I agree with much of what you've said. Canvas may make a few things more accessible, but it mostly just adds more work for the professor. And rubrics ... yuck!
Glad this went onto the Chronicle; too bad there's no discussion opportunities there. I had heard that Canvas was initially used in K-12 and then jumped to college. I think this is also problematic because it makes college seem like a continuation of high school. It also becomes a "one stop shop" that organizes their academic lives so they never have to keep track of their own schedules. Get out into a real job, and there's no longer a mothership telling you when your work projects are due! Also, Canvas courses blur some lines regarding intellectual property...we've had faculty leave here and have their carefully crafted Canvas courses just be handed over to a grad student to use to teach....because its on the platform, it's now "owned by the University. Lordy, I could go on and on bitching about Canvas but I'll stop here. One final note: The book Immeasurable Outcomes by Gayle Greene is similar to your discussion of teaching Thoreau's Walden. Chapter 7 or 8 has a great analysis of why and how learning outcomes have become the tail wagging the dog. Like a lot of well-intended educational philosophies, they're ultimately becoming a road to a hell of bureaucratic bean counting, and evaluation. And the enforcement of digital accessibility within Canvas will ensure that education will continue its downhill slide toward uniformity and bots talking to bots.
I will never forget being told by my supervisor in the early '90s that it was inappropriate for me to walk down the hall to ask a coworker a question when I could email him.
That was truly the beginning of the end of community.
Great piece. Another thing all this edutech, metrics, and rubrics has led to is this: us lying while performatively delivering bullshit. What I mean is that no matter how many “student learning objectives” I put on a form, or course outcome assessments, or whatever else, I’m still just going to do whatever I think best in the classroom. End of discussion. The rest is merely empty numbers and checkboxes. Likewise I never give my students a grading rubric. Life doesn’t come with a rubric and never does genuine education.
I thought it was NYU that was forcing me to list those Procrustean learning outcomes and those middle-management rubrics. Now I understand the villain is the system. I think that makes me feel worse.
Among the most terrible qualities of Canvas and other LMSs is their total lack of interest in helping us provide meaningful feedback to students. An LMS *could* be a dramatic improvement over paper-based comments if it allowed us to store meaningful (and therefore usually lengthy) comments and then review all comments to date for a specific student to consider their growth over time and where they should go next. But every time I've asked for this feature, I've been treated as though I've developed some highly unusual pedagogy. When I searched Canvas for how to provide a comment on a student assignment, the example they had was something like, "Thanks for submitting! I'll grade this as soon as I can." This is what they imagine we do, and I very much fear that people (especially folks learning to teach in the age of Canvas) will start conforming to their imagination.
How well I remember being a TA and learning the importance of a good relationship with the department secretary. Not only did it turn out this dour-looking woman was one of the kindest people I'd meet in grad school, she knew everything about the inner workings of the department and helped me navigate the choppy waters. I shot the shit with her every day. And, yes, I remember hanging out in department or, when I started teaching at an independent high school, school-wide mail rooms and getting to know my colleagues. The sense of community there created a functioning collective.
Like so many other forms of tech, LMSs can seem like a good idea--ways to provide support materials for students, for example. I can't tell you how helpful it was to be able to post scenes from Romeo and Juliet as my 8th-grade students first dipped their toes into Shakespeare. Or transferring my lecture on Elizabethan theater to video where students could watch it at their own pace. But like everything, there's technology creep. Suddenly, we're forcing student engagement by requiring daily posts on meaningless topics, then expecting students to reply to each other in substantive ways on no-content posts on those meaningless topics. The proliferation of busywork. And, as you say, Claire, the act of grading in the humanities and arts, devolves into an automated, mathematical, unnuanced, robotic act, rather than the careful, sensitive, fully human process our students deserve and learn from.
Good riddance, Canvas.
This article is spot on and one angle you take here is one I've been saying for years as well: whatever the problems with online/distance education and the technological system that comes with it (and there are MANY), at least its intent is mostly understandable. But the overwhelming requirement of technology for ON-CAMPUS, IN-PERSON students is just downright stupid. And the worst of it that I started to notice at my university was when on-campus, in-person students (through Canvas) would take courses online. Students were literally in their dorm room 50 yards away from my classroom where I was teaching the exact same class in person. Students were sitting by themselves and staring at a screen instead of just being in a normal class.
For my many years as a professor, I would put minimal info on Canvas. I always kept an old-school gradebook where I tracked attendance and inputted grades by hand. Maybe this latest hacking incident and your article will lead to a wake-up call. But knowing how higher education works, I'm not holding my breath.
Thank you for this timely piece, which I'm sharing with my students in a Critical AI Studies seminar. We've been having broader discussions about big tech platforms, including ed tech, and the Canvas hack happened just after we'd discussed Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" model. Your piece helps me see that LMSs have also been fully enshittified: stage 1 is user lock-in, stage 2 is business lock-in, and stage 3 is the selling out of user and business value so maximum profits flow upwards to shareholders and execs. A few differences - we don't see algorithmically-selected ads on Canvas for example (though there are plenty of 4th-party plug-ins we're encouraged to use) - but the basic degrading of user experience and culling of data for profit is the same.
One huge hurdle is the "stickiness" of LMSs for institutions, in the name of access and accessibility. A central platform for digital delivery of materials helps institutions guarantee compliance with ADA; it's the path of least resistance and it's cheaper than hiring actual humans in disability resource offices. And since Covid, there are expectations that students should be able to complete a course without attending much in person - LMSs allow for multimodal course delivery, which is a massive workload escalation for faculty but which allows universities to brag about "schedules that fit your needs".
You are an inspiration. I'm moving back toward more paper in the fall and banning electronics in my classroom most of the time.
Beyond a cyberattack that should not have happened, AI is quickly rendering many of the "preferred" assignments in the LMS world obsolete at best and irrelevant at worst. Recently, I took a look at how the widely used discussion question (DQ) will likely end up in the scrap pile before too long. https://ex4edu.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-death-of-the-dq-and-a?r=iqw7f&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
You might want to check out the book Teaching by Numbers by Peter Taubman for an earlier critique of audit culture, and the hollowing out of education.
I may indeed, Peter! Thanks.
I agree with so much of what you have to say here. The hacking incident really does expose just how dangerously dependent we've become on a single point of failure. But there’s a pretty big blind spot that I can’t let pass: the piece is written entirely from the perspective of someone whose educational path was never contingent on remote access existing.
For non-traditional students like working adults, caregivers, people in rural areas without commutable campuses, those managing disabilities, veterans, incarcerated individuals…Canvas and platforms like it weren't a "solution" to a problem of questionable urgency. They were the only door into the building. I finished my undergraduate degree and my master's precisely because online course infrastructure made it possible to do so without uprooting my life or abandoning my responsibilities. Without it I wouldn’t be sitting here, Ph.D. in hand, debating its merits. Your nostalgic departmental mailbox was never available to me, and neither was the physical campus community you mourn. Your conclusion left me wanting more, because your own diagnosis points somewhere more nuanced. If the problems are vendor dependency, poor security practices, and rubric driven pedagogy, those feel like arguments for better designed and more accountable infrastructure, not for retreating to analog. And whatever that reformed infrastructure looks like, it had better account for distance learners. Because for a lot of us, pulling the plug without a serious alternative isn't a bold pedagogical stand. It's pulling up the ladder.
We definitely need to keep having conversations like this one, because real improvements are long overdue. But those conversations have to account for the fact that the academy is no longer just physical campuses full of traditional-aged students. It hasn't been for a long time.
That's actually not true: not only did I teach remotely during the pandemic, I voluntarily taught online classes in a university that has a sizable online curriculum. But why would we use these platforms for in-person teaching?
I am not at all suggesting that we pull up the ladder for remote students--and I think Instructure mostly did a kick-ass job of getting everything back up and running. But the research is very conclusive about the negative outcomes for most people who are on screens--yet for purely institutional reasons we put students on screens who do not need to be.
Among the most terrible qualities of Canvas and other LMSs is their total lack of interest in helping us provide meaningful feedback to students. An LMS *could* be a dramatic improvement over paper-based comments if it allowed us to store meaningful (and therefore usually lengthy) comments and then review all comments to date for a specific student to consider their growth over time and where they should go next. But every time I've asked for this feature, I've been treated as though I've developed some highly unusual pedagogy. When I searched Canvas for how to provide a comment on a student assignment, the example they had was something like, "Thanks for submitting! I'll grade this as soon as I can." This is what they imagine we do, and I very much fear that people (especially folks learning to teach in the age of Canvas) will start conforming to their imagination.
In reading this, I think there are two distinct threads being pulled: a (healthy and good) mistrust of the motivations of ed tech writ large, and a serious critique of what higher education *is* in 2026 compared to what it used to be or should be.
While Instructure's handling of this situation--end to end--has been horrific, and there are certainly plenty of things about Canvas and other LMSs to be wary of--especially related to what data they have and how they store/use it, a lot of the issues raised in this piece seem to me to center on the bureaucracies of secondary and higher education in this country, not on the technology itself. YMMV.
For instance, did the erosion of college-ready students that is traced to the 2010s come from LMSs being introduced, or was it the logical end point of a decade of NCLB "teaching to the test" so that schools could "show academic progress" year over year to retain funding, in lieu of teaching critical thinking and learning skills in secondary education?
Did Canvas/Blackboard/Moodle invent learning outcomes and rubrics as a means of assessment, or are they responding to what universities are asking for due to administrative and accreditation decisions? LMSs don't *require* the use of rubrics to grade things, departments/colleges do.
Any institution using Canvas (and by extension, any other prominent LMS) should be asking themselves a lot of tough questions right now. Those questions can, and should, be extrapolated out to other tech tools. But this piece seems to want institutions to ask a lot of questions that exist outside of the technology as well, and frankly our society has some issues to grapple with (such as, fundamentally, what is the "purpose" of a college education?) vis a vis higher education.
"For instance, did the erosion of college-ready students that is traced to the 2010s come from LMSs being introduced, or was it the logical end point of a decade of NCLB "teaching to the test" so that schools could "show academic progress" year over year to retain funding, in lieu of teaching critical thinking and learning skills in secondary education?"--yes to both? I think these two threads are inextricable. LMS's do not require the use of rubrics, but they facilitate them--technologically, as something that can be ascertained by a supervisor, and by the emphasis on metrics that they facilitate.
I totally agree that they offer a certain "path of least resistance" that institutions--especially smaller ones with very limited resources--find attractive and convenient, and there is a certain pitch to be able to "aggregate your data" institution-wide.
That said, I am an Ed Tech person by vocation (though not a Canvas apologist, by any means), so I must cop to a certain amount of bias and perhaps pollyannishness because I still look at an LMS as a "tool" and not a "solution".
nah i’ll be fucked if all that time i spent moving shit on there comes to nothing, and no, i’m not rewriting curriculum for the 22nd time in 26 years.
Canvas had to pay to get freed this time. It is what it is
Thank you for this article. I agree with much of what you've said. Canvas may make a few things more accessible, but it mostly just adds more work for the professor. And rubrics ... yuck!
Glad this went onto the Chronicle; too bad there's no discussion opportunities there. I had heard that Canvas was initially used in K-12 and then jumped to college. I think this is also problematic because it makes college seem like a continuation of high school. It also becomes a "one stop shop" that organizes their academic lives so they never have to keep track of their own schedules. Get out into a real job, and there's no longer a mothership telling you when your work projects are due! Also, Canvas courses blur some lines regarding intellectual property...we've had faculty leave here and have their carefully crafted Canvas courses just be handed over to a grad student to use to teach....because its on the platform, it's now "owned by the University. Lordy, I could go on and on bitching about Canvas but I'll stop here. One final note: The book Immeasurable Outcomes by Gayle Greene is similar to your discussion of teaching Thoreau's Walden. Chapter 7 or 8 has a great analysis of why and how learning outcomes have become the tail wagging the dog. Like a lot of well-intended educational philosophies, they're ultimately becoming a road to a hell of bureaucratic bean counting, and evaluation. And the enforcement of digital accessibility within Canvas will ensure that education will continue its downhill slide toward uniformity and bots talking to bots.