A student emailed me yesterday, in a panic, early afternoon. He was worried about his final project in my university course, which was due at midnight. When I saw the email, three hours had passed. By the time we got on Zoom to discuss the issue, another 90 minutes.
That’s when I learned about disconnection. Canvas, an online service used by about 40 percent of North American colleges, among them Washington University in St.a victim of a ransomware attack. Just as ride-sharing and ride-hailing apps replaced the actual act of hailing a cab, “apps” like Canvas have replaced many analog systems at nearly every college and university, now using tools to run classes, manage assignments, and handle scheduling. When the canvas comes down, college classes stop working.
My heart sank because I was already anticipating a million minor annoyances that would add a huge headache to everyone, as students worried about how to submit their work, if they would be penalized, if they could get an extension—and I was worried if I would have to rearrange my weekend to complete the grading by Monday. Students had already started sending emails—Submitting my project just in case. Better safe than sorry. I understand—I would threaten to reject late submissions, but only because I tried to push the deadline as late as possible in the first place, to give them as much time as possible. Of course, I wouldn’t hold it this against them, but I understood their concern. All students are worried, today. Every interaction begins and ends with anxiety.
Later in the day, while I was waiting for the crisis to be resolved, I watched an episode of Mad Men where Don forces Megan to eat orange sherbet and then abandons her in a room at Howard Johnson’s in Plattsburgh, New York. Communication in this era was simpler: pay phones, whose calls may or may not reach recipients. Ambiguity and uncertainty were embraced and understood. Some answers would not come immediately; you would just wait. I thought about how the longing for the 20th century is, in part, a longing for a time when human interactions felt more direct and therefore more successful, even when they failed. Now, people feel trapped by the tools we use, unable to interact humanly through them—and forced to do so less effectively.
But then, with the worried face of a student on my computer screen, I faced a more immediate problem. Having changed his project plans at the last minute, he wondered if his new video game program—the course was an Atari 2600 game development class—would backfire, and his grade worse. The question was reasonable. Students are encouraged to focus on success; The faculty has been advised to meet them where they are; college costs a lot of money and mainly serves students into careers, even when they are learning to program a 50-year-old computer.
But I couldn’t answer his question, despite wanting to. The reason was rubricthe name of the detailed liturgy of how the professor will evaluate the assignment. Rubrics are intended to prevent arbitrariness, but also accomplish other important goals: legalize “learning objectives” so that universities can assess “learning outcomes” for approval and other bureaucratic purposes. This, in part, justifies the use of software such as Canvas, which allows instructors to write rubrics and set scores against them, and (in theory at least) for evaluators to compile such results into reports and data. My assignment only existed within Canvas, and my rubric along with it. I couldn’t log in to see my grading criteria and therefore give my student advice on how to add the remaining seven hours until the assignment is due.
As the hours passed, I read more about the outage, which seemed dire. Hackers who had previously targeted Google and Ticketmaster had deliberately chosen now, when college finals are taking place, to threaten Instructure, the company that makes Canvas, that they would leak the personal information of 275 million Canvas users, including teachers like me and my classmates, if the company didn’t pay. The improvement was possible because many universities have outsourced course management – a concept that didn’t exist when I was a student – to a few companies offering it through cloud “software as a service”, and at great cost. Instead of the usual Canvas web page there was an image of robots repairing a cartoon rocket above the text, “Canvas is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance,” a message that appeared to be a hoax.
Neither Canvas nor my university was yet offering alternatives to how to close the semester efficiently and fairly, but I knew I needed it. Students are notorious for not checking their email, but I couldn’t figure out how to email them anyway; Communication between teachers and students is now managed in Canvas, which I could not access.
My heart ached again when I got the answer. Over the past five years, my college, like many others affected by the lack of IT systems first introduced in the 1990s or 2000s, has been used the hundreds of millions of dollars in Workday, the cursed but ubiquitous software that can torture you at work, run our admissions, registration and other student-facing systems. I recently had a conversation with a colleague in the provost’s office, wondering if we could get students to upload their photos to Canvas so that professors like me could use the thing as a face book of sorts. That feature is in Labor Day, he reminded me.
I logged into Workday and navigated to its foreign Teacher Training Dashboard to find my course and its catalog. I was able to email students through the odd and anonymous form of Workday. I didn’t know if it worked. My goal was not to communicate information, but to assure you: Don’t worry. I will decide what to do after the information is available. Noted in my message: Please don’t email me, because the last thing I need is 30 more emails asking the same question I can’t answer either.
It was 9:45 in the afternoon I navigated to Canvas out of curiosity. It worked! I sent out a Canvas Announcement, a private label version of email—a form of communication that I never received from some students. I extended the deadline from midnight to noon and informed them of this fact. I would have to adjust my schedule a bit, but this was the software-as-a-service life, a way of being that no one chose, but we all now suffer. I thought about the trip to the dentist earlier in the week, where, impatiently, I chided the staff for sending multiple text message reminders about my appointment, an act the dental office had never intended to do but was simply the result of whatever patient management software it had to use, similar to dental rubware assignment.
The next day arrived, with more emails from students. The canvas had come down again. Not the Canvas itself, of course – this time, my university had disabled access to it, out of an abundance of caution, that is to say, to avoid further trouble.
The university had promised to update by 9:30 a.m. It was now 9:40. In the faculty Slack, one of my colleagues in computer science reflected on the wisdom of many universities putting their faith in a single external software provider. A member of staff provided IT advice for submitting tickets regarding any Canvas/Workday issues. I could feel my blood boiling—more software was being installed to solve problems caused by other software. I composed and then deleted a Slack reply that would escalate the situation.
Now 9:45 am: Canvas was back! I logged in from my home office, which required two-factor authentication through Duo. Thanks to phishing attacks on Duo 2FA, the process now required entering a three-digit code, not just pressing a button. I created a Canvas Announcement emphasizing the noon deadline I had already decided on. I also sent the same message through Workday, just in case. In each message, I expressed my intention to send the same message through another software service. Why? Due to the abundance of caution, I think. Caution why? I didn’t know anymore.
I answered all the students who emailed me their work directly. “Please please submit to Canvas” – I had to ask this, because I get a grade in Canvas, because that’s where the rubric lives, that’s where the memories live, that’s where I hold everything in my head at once, if it’s bad. I hoped they wouldn’t answer. One replied, “I have already done that.” Except. From the abundance of attention.
Another emailed for the first time. His phone had stopped charging, he reported, and now it was dead. That meant he couldn’t get into Canvas, not because it was down, but because logging in off campus requires two-factor authentication, and 2FA requires a working cell phone. He attached the material to the email. Except.
I hit “Answer,” to assure him that I received it, that I understood, that none of us chose any of this, but that now we must live together in its murk. “What a world,” I typed, then pressed “Send.” I was briefly worried that this answer would not be interpreted with sufficient certainty, and that a follow-up asking for explicit confirmation would arrive. An hour passed without such a response, and I sighed, as a piece of complexity connected him and I, a tiny thread of human consciousness from a world driven by software.
