I remember circa 2010 a friend of mine at college was like “blackboard sucks, let’s build something new”. At the time I poo pood the idea and lo and behold canvas came out a year later. Outside looking in, they been crushing it.
One of my mentors created Blackboard. It used to be very very good, but he sold it to private equity, and they immediately fired all of the customer support and developers, 3xd prices overnight leading to the 'blackboard sucks' problem. This gave the opening for Canvas to eventually come on to the scene and dominate.
Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
661–670 of 690 posts
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#662Earlier quoted context omitted.
Organizations are made of individuals who I assure you regularly ignore or don't even read the policies they are "required" to follow.
I don't know what world you live in. Everywhere I've ever worked, that gets you fired. Real quick.
At IBM, vim was specifically banned by legal because of reputational risk because the license asks you to consider donating to children in Africa, and IBM didn't want to be called out for not doing so. Guess which editor pretty much everyone in my org used? We also weren't allowed to move furniture because of some union agreement, but guess how many people cared when furniture mysteriously moved from an empty office room into ours? None.
At the startup, people in our satellite office in Arizona openly mocked the California HR harassment training over lunch. It was also an open secret that one of the managers started dating a report. As far as I know many years later they've both moved on to other jobs and they're still together. Nothing bad happened.
Breaking some policies will absolutely get you fired, but that's mostly around doing things you shouldn't be doing, and even then usually only matters if someone else that has some power might themselves get in trouble/have more work/lose something because of what you did. Others no one will care about. Again, part of growing up is figuring out which policies have a purpose and which came from some busybody.
I also already gave the entire AI industry as an example. We know for a fact that Meta trained on pirated material, and it's pretty obvious that everyone else does too. It's blatant industry wide flouting the law. The realpolitik answer here is everyone knows that enforcing the law here would be the final nail in the coffin for China superceding the West, so it's not going to happen.
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#663Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of my mentors created Blackboard. It used to be very very good, but he sold it to private equity, and they immediately fired all of the customer support and developers, 3xd prices overnight leading to the 'blackboard sucks' problem. This gave the opening for Canvas to eventually come on to the scene and dominate.
Was that Matt Pittinsky?
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#664Perspective from the trenches: I teach at a university that uses Canvas. We are in our final exams period right now. We got our first email (from Academic Affairs) notifying us that it was down at 5:17pm EDT this afternoon, with little info; followup emails were sent at 6:24 and 6:57 with more info, but mostly about how we would be compensating for it and not about what actually was going on (other than, "nationwide…
Canvas is back up as of Friday US morning for me (HS student's parent). My kid got a few panicked emails yesterday from the teachers but it looks like Instructure got it resolved quickly. Canvas does provide a lot of value (all courses, teachers', students', and parents' contact information, all learning plans, schedules, room numbers, all grades, a lot of tests and assignments themselves, all upcoming assignments an…
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#665Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe a hybrid approach. Scramble to create a final exam/project and give them the option to do pass/fail or a real grade, their choice. And then wish for the death of saas and a day where you can deploy your own software you can control and modify as you need.
> day where you can deploy your own software you can control and modify as you need. Canvas is mostly FOSS https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
I partially solve this by using Thunderbird on my laptop. When I get emails on my smartphone (on the Gmail app), they unfortunately all go to the inbox. But the moment I open Thunderbird, it nicely organizes them for me.
Does Thunderbird have rules? I searched for this and didn't find them.
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#667Earlier quoted context omitted.
Digital literacy is important to every field. Email filters are not some arcane computer science concept, they are the modern equivalent of filing physical mail into the right folder/pidgeon hole/inbox/whatever. Biology is a great example because of just how important digital record management is to experimentation in the field.
I don't think you've seen many biology field data sets.
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#668Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it’s not like MIT gains anything from rolling their own LMS.
I went to a small liberal arts school where the IT department recruited CS students under work study to build the systems. It’s a good learning experience for students to be involved in constructing and maintaining the infrastructure that keeps the university running. I don’t mean this entirely as in cost savings, but because I like the idea of a university being self maintained.
As a system provider you take responsibility not only for maintenance, but also to tank the blame once something invariably goes wrong
Re: Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
Former 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.
I don't care how good you think it is, the fact that it (back when I used to be a TA) would break if two TAs tried concurrently grading different parts of an assignment of a student is bonkers. The workaround for that was to use a Google Sheet document so TAs just looked at the submission in Canvas, then filed in their grades and feedback on the sheet. The issue is that Canvas, as far as I could tell, did not support…
> it is not trivial software in the worst sense, it tries to do too much, while not being particularly good at any one of those things, and is way too rigid