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I'm surprised how few comments there are on this thread. This is probably affecting millions of students at the most stressful time of the year. Incidentally
by Gabriel54 5mo ago
I'm surprised how few comments there are on this thread. This is probably affecting millions of students at the most stressful time of the year.
Incidentally I've always hated Canvas and probably every other LMS provider, but what is particularly amusing about this current outage is that it is occurring at exactly the time when universities are demanding that all professors put all of their materials on Canvas, without exception, due to ADA compliance regulations. It is explicitly forbidden for professors to, e.g., refer to pdfs posted on a personal website.
Other commentators here seem not to understand that many faculty also do not enjoy being forced to use Canvas.
- Loughla 5mo ago[flagged]
- Gabriel54 5mo agoAccessibility regulations, implemented with feedback from faculty and with the support of university resources, are certainly a good thing. But that is not what is happening in my experience.
- sellyme 5mo agoPutting aside the "So you hate waffles?" non-sequitur, surely the entire topic of this thread should be a bit of a hint that this misguided policy has not, in fact, "[made sure] courses are fully accessible".
- Gabriel54 5mo agoWell, to be fair, it has made every course hosted on Canvas equally accessible to everyone. ;)
- yard2010 5mo agoNot GP, Incompetent policy makers are the bad thing.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoUniversities do not care if course materials are accessible. They do care about getting sued. And that is what this furor over accessibility is about. Federal law requires accessibility, and the universities perceive that there are lawyers circling the bloody waters just waiting for the deadlines to pass and start filing lawsuits because they found one PDF on a professor's home page that doesn't pass the requirements.
- dreamcompiler 5mo agoIt's like the situation with HIPAA rules in electronic health records: It wouldn't be impossible to write your own EHR system but if you do you have to spend a lot of money proving it meets HIPAA regulations or accept substantial liability. So companies just pay Epic $$$ because they promise HIPAA compliance. Likewise with classroom software if you just use the "industry standard" enterprise crapware you've outsourced the accessibility liability to somebody else. If the software is hot garbage from a usability perspective, that's irrelevant. And this is why we cannot have nice things in the enterprise space.
- phendrenad2 5mo agoThat's what I got from it. But it's misdirected, the problem isn't being forced to use a platform, the problem is the platform.
- dang 5mo ago(Comments were split across multiple threads and we've since merged them.)
- Gabriel54 5mo agoDefinitely not a criticism of your (hard) work here. Thank you!
- dang 5mo agoThanks! I just added that bit to pre-empt confusion - context-switches like this are one of those rug-pulling moments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48041875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48041875).
- MarsIronPI 5mo agoWe all appreciate the work you do! Thank you!
- gchallen 5mo agoThey have not succeeded in forcing me, yet. But it's sad how many computing faculty apparently can't operate the basic online infrastructure needed to support their courses. Not that universities make it easy for us. And of course the other serious concern I have with Canvas is that they are likely using all the materials faculty upload to train their AI replacements. Many of my colleagues engage in dark humor about this but I haven't noticed much action.
- FloorEgg 5mo agoI'm sure the engineers at instructure are not capable of building systems that can do that. You give them too much credit.
- hunter2_ 5mo agoIf they're at the level you say, they just might install some AI gizmo like the Vercel employee was accused of, but really let it run amok with write permissions.
- freedomben 5mo agoFormer Instructure engineer here. Ive been gone almost 10 years at this point, but some of the best engineers I've ever worked with were at INST. I'm not sure where your stereotype even comes from, because Canvas is not trivial software. You can see for yourself as it's AGPL and I assume you looked at the code before criticizing it because any good engineer would do that.
- hackyhacky 5mo agoI've been using Canvas for years and it's some of the worst written software I've ever used. It's slow, buggy, with an atrocious 2001-era UI. It's a CRUD app that has no excuse for being so cumbersome. I'm not surprised at all that their security is just as bad as the rest of the product. A bright undergrad could build a superior replacement in a few months, even without AI.
- 5mo ago
- altairprime 5mo agoNot much overlap between students and HN these days, though? I’m an extremely rare outlier afaik :) The administration has so far opened with one “Canvas said” and then an hour later one “Canvas is down indefinitely” email noting that they’re aware it’s serious. (Canvas is a glorified wiki for teaching students, with quizzes and such, for those unaware.)
- dang 5mo ago> Not much overlap between students and HN these days, though? That's my biggest fear.
- strix_varius 5mo agoIs there any internal data on where students are going instead?
- Ronsenshi 5mo agoPerhaps some interest-related Discord servers. Tragically, Discord is just another locked down silo without publicly accessible front on the web.
- DaSHacka 5mo agoYou honestly don't wanna know If my peers are any indication, a whole lot of TikTok, Reels, Twitter, Discord, and other such mind-numbing platforms. The types of platforms I would consider 'substantive' (or, at least, more substantive than those platforms) are definitely on the way out. The few times friends have seen me browsing Hacker News or a certain Mongolian basket weaving form, the first thing they comment on is how confusing the interface is, and how old the site looks. I truly don't understand the mentality, but if your site doesn't take three seconds to buffer a simple text drop down menu, and have JavaScript elements load in mid-scroll that bump elements around the page making you just barely miss that button you were trying to click, then your site is seen as 'inferior' or 'sketchy'. Perhaps I've just had a bad sample, but I've experienced a variety of different environments by this point, and by and large, I've seen more people in my generation act in that manner than not.
- isityettime 5mo agoWhat? What makes Canvas accessible in a way that HTML and PDF files are not? It's true that PDF readers aren't the best for screenreaders, but surely you can just upload a .html copy as well.
- Gabriel54 5mo agoCanvas has an easy way of checking if a pdf or other course material is accessible, so many universities are forcing faculty to put all their materials on Canvas. That way if a pdf or powerpoint is not compliant it is immediately flagged. The goal is to reach a "100% accessible" metric. Note that little of this really helps the students that it is supposed to help, because as you wisely point out, raw HTML is almost by definition extremely accessible. I work in a field that uses Latex and the source code of Latex should also be considered more accessible than the compiled pdf. But for university administrators the only important thing is that the accessibility metric that appears (or used to appear, before today!) on Canvas shows 100% accessible.
- isityettime 5mo agoThat really sucks. I'm visually impaired and many members of my family are/were blind. I think accessibility is really important, but it's so painful to me to feel like people's limited energy is being directed towards performative measures, useless rituals, vanity metrics, etc. Nobody has infinite energy, and disabled people don't have infinite social capital. It's a shame when energy from that shared pool gets spent on things that don't really impact meeting people's access needs. And the other thing is that everyone's access needs are different. It can certainly be useful to try to set a baseline or propagate common guidance. But the most important thing, especially in a university setting, is for instructors to be flexible and responsive and for classes (and non-teaching workloads) to be structured in a way (e.g., small enough) that supports that. I think metrics like "100% accessible" might even be dangerous. It makes it easy for able-bodied people who aren't in direct contact with disabled stakeholders to pat themselves on the back without actually knowing what's going on. Bleh. Good luck doing right by your disabled students and disabled colleagues, and good luck resisting the bullshit.
- onetimeusename 5mo agoLive streaming of class through Canvas is very popular. Quite a few people just watch from their dorms. So maybe people will have to come back to class, that will be entertaining. The class rooms are almost standing room only (sometimes they are) on the first day of class and then gradually thin out. Sometimes 10 or so people show up out of a class of 100. If Canvas is not back up soon I think it could actually be disruptive for that reason also.
- ecshafer 5mo agoThis is awful to hear. The idea that students are just half assedly streaming the lectures is really just ruining things in the long run. This is a bit old manny, but showing up to lectures is good. You go to class, you get face time with professors, you can ask impromptu questions, you rub elbows with classmates, you talk on the walk between classes, you maybe run into a cute girl. Friction like walking to class and finding a nook in that annoying hour gap you have, are the things that make life enjoyable.
- gwerbin 5mo agoWhen I was in school, professors attitudes around attendance was usually "you're only hurting yourself, I don't care if you show up or not". It's been long enough that I can't claim to be in touch with the current generation of teaching faculty. But it might be an element of that, combined with the desire to provide accessibility for the handful of students who do in fact need the accommodation.
- tokai 5mo agoShowing up to lectures is vastly overrated. Like note taking it's cargo cult behavior for middling students that care more about going through the acts of studying, than actual learning.
- ecshafer 5mo agoYou'll note I didn't mention quality of education in my arguments. I am talking about the human experience. Though the studies typically show a correlation with grades and attendance.
- cocoto 5mo agoReplace your material content with lorem ipsum or garbage LLM content and upload it to Canvas to test the accessibility of your documents if required.
- apublicfrog 5mo agoCan you explain for the billions of the rest of us why this is the "most stressful time of the year" for the group you're referencing? I assume that's American students and/or teachers?
- isakmarr 5mo agoFinal exam season, and it's ongoing in Iceland too, so not just American students.
- Steve16384 5mo agoHere in the UK it's currently exam season. One of my son's had a GCSE exam just today.
- pfortuny 5mo agoEuropean students are preparing for their finals.
- bradley13 5mo agoI'm in Europe, and we don't use Canvas (at least, I've never heard of it). However, we have similar diseases. In my particular school, it's a massive SharePoint site plus ever more stuff in Teams. Plus Moodle, plus other services. The MS services have not improved teaching at all. What they do, is fragment communications, and add ever more places people have to look, in hopes of finding things. But the administration loves them. "The bureaucracy is expanding, to meet the expanding needs of the bureaucracy."
- iamflimflam1 5mo agoTeams and SharePoint eventually infect any organisation that uses Office.
- pfortuny 5mo agoSpain here. Most of our public Universities have their IT stack on MS... I cannot fathom how much of our national budget goes to their pockets. Thankfully, I store my teaching materials on my personal non-uni webpage, and the student's marks in my office's computer (apart from the MS-based Uni system). Whenever something happens with MS, chaos ensues throughout the whose Uni and the students end up paying the consequences.
- tokai 5mo agoThere are plenty of European Canvas customers.