Canvas shuts out students with shutdown
PHOTO: Graphic by Jamie Kang
Article by Leela Davis
BlueDevilHUB.com Staff–
Today, Canvas experienced a nationwide shutdown due to Amazon Web Services (AWS) experiencing an outage.
AWS is a host for Canvas’ cloud infrastructure; nationwide, students and teachers have been unable to access Canvas and numerous other applications like College Board.
AP U.S. History and Race and Social Justice teacher Kevin Williams was unable to grade his students’ work, including his AP students’ Document-Based Questions assignment on College Board.
“There’s really nothing I can do. It kind of stressed me out,” Williams said. “I’m having a hard time making sure (students) know what they have to do for homework.”
Williams found a workaround by sending his AP students a Google Doc link via Minga.
“I just used the Minga texting because we can directly message students,” Williams said.
Other students like senior Piper Donald, a student in Bill Williams’ AP Government class, had to move her assignment from online to paper.
“(We) won’t have to make it up, but it forced teachers to pivot,” Donald said. “I thought it was just a DJUSD maintenance problem, not a national problem.”
A different student, senior Owen Guyer in Eileen Guerard’s AP Literature and Composition class, wasn’t able to turn in an assignment, leading Guerard to postpone it.
“That was a pretty big inconvenience. I think we’ll just have to submit it late,” Guyer said. “But I’m sure Ms. Guerard will accommodate us.”
Guerard, like Williams, wasn’t able to grade anything, and hoped to ask the administration for an extension on submitting final quarter grades if it were to continue for too long.
“I am frantically grading everything else, but the essays are big-ticket items and I sort of wanted to make a good dent in them,” Guerard said.
AP Government teacher Kristin Swanstrom didn’t use Canvas in her classroom instruction, but her students needed Canvas to review materials for a unit test.
“Sounds like it’s an Amazon issue, not a College Board issue or a Canvas issue” Swanstrom said. “Which kind of makes you wonder, maybe we don’t want our entire universe to be running on one company’s servers.”
Canvas was back online by 3:46 p.m. today, according to the Infrastructure Status Website.
