Canvas by Instructure

“Those are a lot easier to work with than, say, having to load exams onto a machine accessible on a private LAN.”

“Canvas had to have made themselves vulnerable to a ransom demand in the way that they designed their own product.”

“Canvas et all has made it harder to get course materials, since everything is behind a paywall”

“their pedagogical infrastructure has been freely outsourced to a big private corporation”

“They merely serve to entrench educators into using the canvas system but they offer no added functionality to education.”

“it tries to do too much, while not being particularly good at any one of those things, and is way too rigid”

“I couldn't even get a development environment setup because of their storage space requirements.”

“Canvas is decidedly, not fast, fails to display even trivial files (such as source code)”

“Canvas does provide a lot of value”

“These services also do everything they can to encourage you to work within the online platform rather then working offline and then uploading.”

“Canvas is not at all just a crud app.”

“it's some of the worst written software I've ever used. It's slow, buggy, with an atrocious 2001-era UI.”

“Canvas is not trivial software. You can see for yourself as it's AGPL”

“For what they charge for these LMSs, they should definitely be able to sent some emails.”

“they were under no obligation to adopt this garbage technology regardless of whether it's available”

“You don't need to roll your own LMS—you can self-host Canvas”

“Canvas is open-source and can be self-hosted.”

“We moved from a circa 2011 BB instance to Canvas in 2022, and it was hands down superior.”

“instructure is slightly better”

“It worked Ok. Work distributed, grades posted.”

“After the first issue a few weeks ago Canvas should have upped their security and prepared for another attack.”

“I'm sure the engineers at instructure are not capable of building systems that can do that.”

“They're also apparently poor at communication during highly interesting events as well”

“universities are demanding that all professors put all of their materials on Canvas, without exception”

“Canvas kind of sucks. And their development is slow. And they are poor at communicating during mundane events.”

“It has been over 5 hours now and there has not been any communication about this being an attack”

“The "Scheduled Maintenance" is just total B.S. and just honestly makes them look worse.”

“it did it better than many of its predecessors”

“Culture seems to be full of themselves due to market position.”

“Canvas generally is the 'easiest' to use, and the 'cleanest' looking one”

“The actual product is a radioactive dumpster fire that is simultaneously hostile to students, teachers, and parents.”

“It should be illegal to host insecure services, especially when you're dealing with PII.”

“my professors seem to have better luck laying out their course on blackboard than canvas”

“it's definitely gone downhill (compared to the days where I originally used it ~20 yrs ago in college; tracker-riddled, slow)”

“It is really convenient and stays out of the way.”

“Outside looking in, they been crushing it.”

“it's far, far preferable to a world without it”

“I vibecoded a pretty extensive CLI for Canvas and using it is very pleasant”

“canvas "instances" may not be quite as isolated /segregated from each other as they're supposed to be”

“Canvas (the LMS used at Georgia Tech) does expose an ICS you can subscribe to, but there's also a bunch of noise”