Following the ransomware attack on the Canvas learning management system that plunged thousands of institutions into a few days of chaos in the waning days of the spring semester, we have been assured by the world’s ed-tech consultants that “stopping” Canvas at the institutional level is almost impossible.
Grand strategy consultant Mike Corn said Within Higher Ed‘s Kathryn Palmer, “It’s a lot of work for an institution to change its learning management system, because we have thousands of classes that need to be transferred. It’s usually a two- to three-year process.”
Phil Hill, “an analyst of the education and technology market,” thinks that colleges will be “crazy” to build their own LMS technology infrastructure, because if theirs the system was hacked, they would be vulnerable to criticism. Obviously sticking to the herd as criminals target everyone is safer than standing alone and getting picked on.
I don’t have the industry experience of these gentlemen, but I put in my time teaching in college, before and after the advent of learning management systems, and I’m here to announce that it is possible to teach effectively without such technology.
Would I like to return completely to the predigital era? No, but over the course of two decades of use, I realized that some of the LMS features that I thought were highly desirable or necessary were actually preventing students from developing important skills.
This is my story.
When the LMS first appeared, I was excited to find an always-accessible repository of coursework, assignments and student grades, and later, a place for students to share their work with me and each other. I was nowhere near a power user, but very soon the routines I was doing—a semester schedule in a paper course, physical assignments given in class, completed assignments given to me—were completely replaced by digital communication and exchange.
I thought the convenience and accessibility was a good thing, and we saved a lot of trees, but over time, I believe I created an unintentional culture of inaction and not engaging with the needs of course planning. Maybe this seems small, but over time, it grew more and more like a problem.
For example, in class I would show the assignment guides on the projector, read them with the students, ask questions and remind them that they can always find them through the LMS.
After experiencing a repeated pattern over many semesters of students failing to follow the assignment guidelines in both major and minor ways, I looked at the LMS access logs and realized that less than half of the students ever checked the assignment. Was it like that back when I gave students hard copies of assignments? I had my doubts. The students stuffed those pages into a folder and then put them in their bags, uncovering the artifact when needed, it seems. More available in text online.
The same patterns repeated when I changed the assignment switch to digital only at the beginning of the class. When I needed a physical copy for the class, I got close to 100 percent completion (with the exception of students who had some immediate challenges). With only digital copies I can get 50 percent submissions, the other 30 percent “they just forget.” I started recording five minutes at the beginning of the class so students could follow along and bring in their files.
At the same time, the number of incomplete or unreversed shares increased significantly, to 10 to 20 percent of the total. Out of a 750 word assignment, I sometimes got a rough start of 300 words, as if I could upload. something in the program was the most important.
During my career, learning went from me handing out copies (through textbooks or lesson packs), to asking students to print copies from digital files, to receiving screen-reading texts. This made documents easier and cheaper to access, but the way we engaged with documents changed, not for the better. In fact, I believe a few Students read the texts ahead of time, thinking they will be able to keep them in front of them during class discussion.
I remember in my early pre-digital days loving the level of organization some students displayed with calendars/paper organizers. When they got my syllabus and schedule, they would copy every assignment and due date into the planner, making a bible of what they would have to do that semester. God forbid that this document should be lost, but the physical representation proved useful to many.
In theory, an automated, fully accessible calendar for an LMS should be superior, but I have come to believe that this very process of communicating the knowledge of students creating their own calendars reinforced the scope and rhythm of the work they would do during their studies.
The advent of generative AI and its ability to remove almost all friction from the creation of educational artifacts has given me a new perspective on these past issues. I now realize that my general lack of success in using an LMS has caused me to remove some conflicting points that may have been generated in terms of student engagement and effort.
Planning ahead to make sure you know your schedule for due dates or will have access to reading or a printed copy of the assignment requires attention and planning that is unnecessary in the digital space. When a student missed a class and the only way to access the assignment was to come to my office and pick up a physical copy, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with them about what was going on.
How many problems have I unknowingly started in 60 seconds of conversation?
When I pulled out the physical copies, I read and responded slowly, constrained by the limitations of my poor hand. Digital texts and comments greatly accelerated my assessment processes, but also proved a departure from the student texts I was reading.
When it came to LMS, I was skipping the M (management) part of the equation, causing me to miss some of the L (learning) aspects. Over time I began to scale back my use of the LMS, starting with an online gradebook to both de-emphasize grades and make students responsible for monitoring their performance if they wished.
At the end of my full-time teaching job, I stopped putting assignments in the LMS, and went back to handing them out in class or requiring a visit to my office to pick them up. I saved the schedule and syllabus as a document in the system but I didn’t put any dates in the course calendar work myself.
I won’t lie: This caused some trouble for the students, and if I had relied more on the students’ positive evaluations, I might have hesitated to stick to this move, but I was fully convinced that including this conflict required the students to practice skills that were useful to them.
By considering the power of an LMS through a lens other than ease of use, I had to think deeply about why I was doing a certain action or a certain method.
On purpose, I stumbled upon a “minicomputer” framework recently explored in IHE by Lee Skallerup Bessette, a longtime contributor and digital learning analyst and assistant director of digital learning at Georgetown University. Skallerup Bessette shared a small computer frame by Roopika Risam and Alex Gil:
- What do we need?
- What do we have?
- What should we prioritize?
- What are we willing to give up?
It strikes me that this framework is particularly useful as a lens for considering the use of AI in education.
I’m glad that I now have this framework to work from going forward, and I also see that I can come across some of its ideas myself.
Maybe we can’t really get rid of Canvas (or LMS), but it seems like an obvious good step if everyone up and down the institutional ladder looks at what this technology really helps.
