Canvas Crash

Logo of the site Canvas. | Wikimedia Commons

As of May 7 college students struggle to complete work as Canvas experiences a major outage. For students who use it, Canvas is not simply a website, its just about their entire life. 

It’s where assignments are viewed, submitted, graded, where a student can look at their overall grades, or take a test, and where communication occurs between students and professors. All this to say, when Canvas goes down, as it did recently, students find themselves practically helpless. 

The outage caused unimaginable stress and confusion for countless students who rely on the site to stay on top of their work. The stress was only heightened with the oncoming of finals week shortly after the outage. 

Bella Piskun, an environmental science major, said that specifically Saddleback students are heavily reliant on the site because it offers “help and support with their classes,” she said. 

According to her, the outage created such significant anxiety because students could no longer check grades or assignments. Fortunately for her, however, she was able to print out the materials beforehand which helped her stay somewhat prepared. 

Another student, Reyhan Girgin, a psychology major, said that the outage had a direct impact on her ability to complete work. 

“It delayed my ability to work on assignments and get stuff turned in on time, causing me to stress out about my grade,” she said. 

She added that arguably even worse, she also missed information about an upcoming exam because the only platform with the information was inaccessible. 

“It took me an hour to realize Canvas itself was down,” she said. “My first reaction was worried and stressed because I could not see which assignments I had coming up or that were due.” 

Despite such a significant amount of stress, Girgin explained that many of her professors were understanding and did not mark off any late points. 

Even so, some still think the system could be improved should something like this happen again. 

Alexander Cutting, a business management major, suggested an automatic text thread sent out by universities so that professors might still be able to communicate effectively with their students, arguing that most students do not check their email frequently enough for that to be an effective method of communication. Cutting went on to express frustration at not being able to access necessary materials. 

“I was prevented from using my resources like the lecture slides and information on Canvas,” he said, describing the outage as “dysfunctional.”

Clearly, the weight of the outage fell heavy on the emotions of students. Zoe Given, a child and adolescent development major, emphasized her frustration and disdain for the entire situation.

“The most frustrating part was knowing I had things that needed to get done but could not work on them,” she said.

She described her time during the outage as her sitting anxiously and waiting for the site to go back up so that she could submit an essay before the due date. She also noted that she had experienced outages before, but nothing as long as this one, as it lasted almost half a week. 

Canvas went back up for Saddleback students the following monday although the long outage only revealed how integral online platforms have become to a college student’s life. 

Comments

comments