If Canvas Goes Down Again, What’s the Contingency Plan?

In case you missed it, Canvas went down last week. A cybersecurity incident affecting the Canvas learning management system caused disruption to around 9,000 universities, colleges and K–12 schools. Instructors and students were temporarily unable to access course materials, assignments, announcements and student communications during one of the busiest periods of the academic term.

While Canvas has been restored on our campuses, we are still assessing and managing the broader blast radius of this event. Instructure, Canvas’s parent company, has yet to share the details of what exact data were infiltrated. There are after-action reviews to be conducted in several dimensions: academic business continuity, major cybersecurity incident management and major platform incident management.

But here’s what we do know.

Faculty and administrators across the country, shaped by their experience adapting instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, knew what to do last week. Shifting the modality of instruction is not new for us. Instructors quickly improvised alternative assignments, delayed quizzes and exams, populated offline course materials, and adjusted timelines in order to keep learning moving forward.

When it came time to notify students of these adjustments, however, a more fundamental issue became apparent. Many instructors came to discover they had no reliable way to contact their students outside the learning management system itself. Some did not know how to access their course rosters outside Canvas. Others teaching large online lectures encountered institutional email delivery limits. Many had no established communication pathways beyond LMS announcements.

That should give all of us pause.

Higher education has spent decades developing strategies for optimizing instruction for digital environments. The pandemic accelerated that transformation dramatically. Institutions learned how to pivot online at extraordinary speed. What many institutions have not developed with equal rigor are plans for moving in the other direction: from digital dependence back to resilient, low-tech or distributed alternatives during disruption. What higher education now needs is bidirectional academic continuity planning.

That does not mean abandoning technology. Digital systems remain essential to modern higher education. Nor does it mean romanticizing analog teaching practices or pretending institutions can function without complex infrastructure.

But resilience requires more than technological sophistication.

In the wake of the incident, we have heard some suggest that institutions should maintain multiple LMS platforms for redundancy. Certainly, redundancy matters in cybersecurity and enterprise IT planning. Yet we are not convinced that adding more technological layers is the best response to a problem rooted only partly in technological dependency.

More systems can also create more points of coordination failure. Multiple platforms require additional training, support, integration management, security oversight and crisis communication structures. And multiple learning management systems make for friction in the user experience. During an emergency, complexity can also become a vulnerability.

Turning away from software as a service solutions and developing home-grown ones has also reared its head again over the last week. However, the speed with which institutions were able to restore Canvas is testament to the standardization that comes with a SaaS solution. Last week, institutions restoring Canvas weren’t going it alone; we worked together.

Instead of adding another platform, institutions should consider some lower-tech options for building more resilience into the system. These include:

• Ensuring faculty have easy access to downloadable course rosters and contact information outside the LMS environment. If an outage occurs, instructors should not lose the ability to communicate with students. Many instructors already have this ability through their department or faculty self-service portals, but may need reminders about where those tools exist and how to use them quickly during a disruption.
• Empowering multimodal instructional continuity planning. This is not to say that every instructor should maintain parallel versions of their course outside the LMS. But it may mean encouraging faculty to identify a small set of “minimum viable” continuity practices: downloadable syllabi, offline assignment options, locally stored grade records or simplified assessment alternatives that can temporarily sustain instruction during disruptions.
• Examining whether increasing technological complexity is inadvertently increasing institutional fragility. Many campuses now operate extensive ecosystems of interconnected tools and plug-ins layered onto the LMS. While these systems can improve learning experiences, they also expand the operational surface area vulnerable to outages, integration failures and cybersecurity incidents.

These are not particularly glamorous innovations. They are operational ones that allow technology, when it fails, to fail with grace.

A resilient teaching ecosystem is not one in which disruption never occurs. That is unrealistic. Cybersecurity incidents, cloud outages, authentication failures and vendor disruptions are now part of the operational reality of digital education.

The goal should be maintaining enough flexibility, communication capacity and institutional coordination that learning can continue even when core systems are temporarily unavailable. Importantly, this is not solely an IT problem.

Instructional resilience sits at the intersection of academic affairs, educational technology, faculty development, cybersecurity, student support and institutional leadership. Too often, these conversations occur in separate organizational silos. The Canvas cybersecurity incident demonstrated how interconnected they actually are.

Last week’s outage offered a useful warning. The institutions that respond most effectively may not be the ones that simply add more technology, but the ones that build stronger instructional resilience around the technology they already have.