| ▲ | Gabriel54 7 hours ago |
| I'm surprised how few comments there are on this thread. This is probably affecting millions of students at the most stressful time of the year. Incidentally I've always hated Canvas and probably every other LMS provider, but what is particularly amusing about this current outage is that it is occurring at exactly the time when universities are demanding that all professors put all of their materials on Canvas, without exception, due to ADA compliance regulations. It is explicitly forbidden for professors to, e.g., refer to pdfs posted on a personal website. Other commentators here seem not to understand that many faculty also do not enjoy being forced to use Canvas. |
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| ▲ | gchallen 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| They have not succeeded in forcing me, yet. But it's sad how many computing faculty apparently can't operate the basic online infrastructure needed to support their courses. Not that universities make it easy for us. And of course the other serious concern I have with Canvas is that they are likely using all the materials faculty upload to train their AI replacements. Many of my colleagues engage in dark humor about this but I haven't noticed much action. |
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| ▲ | onetimeusename 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Live streaming of class through Canvas is very popular. Quite a few people just watch from their dorms. So maybe people will have to come back to class, that will be entertaining. The class rooms are almost standing room only (sometimes they are) on the first day of class and then gradually thin out. Sometimes 10 or so people show up out of a class of 100. If Canvas is not back up soon I think it could actually be disruptive for that reason also. |
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| ▲ | ecshafer 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is awful to hear. The idea that students are just half assedly streaming the lectures is really just ruining things in the long run. This is a bit old manny, but showing up to lectures is good. You go to class, you get face time with professors, you can ask impromptu questions, you rub elbows with classmates, you talk on the walk between classes, you maybe run into a cute girl. Friction like walking to class and finding a nook in that annoying hour gap you have, are the things that make life enjoyable. |
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| ▲ | dang 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| (Comments were split across multiple threads and we've since merged them.) |
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| ▲ | altairprime 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not much overlap between students and HN these days, though? I’m an extremely rare outlier afaik :) The administration has so far opened with one “Canvas said” and then an hour later one “Canvas is down indefinitely” email noting that they’re aware it’s serious. (Canvas is a glorified wiki for teaching students, with quizzes and such, for those unaware.) |
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| ▲ | dang 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Not much overlap between students and HN these days, though? That's my biggest fear. | | |
| ▲ | gucci-on-fleek 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | FWIW, I'm a student, so there are at least a few still here. Feel free to ask me any questions (either via email or via replies to this post) and I'll try to answer them. | |
| ▲ | byronsharman 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm an undergrad student in computer science and I come here regularly. Many of my friends do the same. Of course, that can't be extrapolated to students globally, but students who love what they do are not extinct! | |
| ▲ | strix_varius 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Is there any internal data on where students are going instead? | | |
| ▲ | dang 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not much, but I do ask the youngest founders what their friends read if they don't read HN, and the only consistent answer I hear is Twitter. (and btw, they do say "twitter") | | |
| ▲ | AuthAuth 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Many of my sisters friends do everything entirely via tiktok. They look at what trends are popular and they target that fully on platform. This is for stuff like building niche targeted apps, selling beauty products/clothing brands, restaurants. |
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| ▲ | DaSHacka 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You honestly don't wanna know If my peers are any indication, a whole lot of TikTok, Reels, Twitter, Discord, and other such mind-numbing platforms. The types of platforms I would consider 'substantive' (or, at least, more substantive than those platforms) are definitely on the way out. The few times friends have seen me browsing Hacker News or a certain Mongolian basket weaving form, the first thing they comment on is how confusing the interface is, and how old the site looks. I truly don't understand the mentality, but if your site doesn't take three seconds to buffer a simple text drop down menu, and have JavaScript elements load in mid-scroll that bump elements around the page making you just barely miss that button you were trying to click, then your site is seen as 'inferior' or 'sketchy'. Perhaps I've just had a bad sample, but I've experienced a variety of different environments by this point, and by and large, I've seen more people in my generation act in that manner than not. | | |
| ▲ | dang 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is actually reassuring. We don't need all your peers! We just need you and whatever smart cohort you're bonded with. It's true that HN looks old - it looked old before you were born, probably - but (a) I have no idea how to change it, and (b) the whole of HN is a long bet on plain text. If the smartest young people lose interest in reading, I'm ok with HN dying for that reason. I just don't want it to die for any cheaper reason. | | |
| ▲ | gsquaredxc 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I would like to offer some additional reassurance: I send my friends articles I see on HN that might interest them. A (in my view) very good litmus test is when someone asks where I saw it, because this demonstrates some desire for continual learning. I find that anyone that asks that question seemingly trusts an interface like HN more because of it. My suspicion is that this is probably because at a certain point you see stuff like Agner Fog's work, LWN, or a number of other minimalist websites and realize that a website that is popular despite the lack of overindulgence in UI must be popular because of the content. It doesn't hurt that the best courses in my university experience have had websites that have not changed much since the late 1990s (one did change the lime green text on turquoise background on their page after the recession to a color scheme that didn't cause headaches in students). I do find that my peers that now read HN used to be judicial about curating a Reddit feed and mostly otherwise limited on other sources. Short-form content is addictive and as nearly as unavoidable as sugar, but many of my brighter peers work on reducing that intake. Long-form YouTube is also something I find to be a marker of someone who is seeking knowledge. Many of my peers do scroll Twitter and TikTok all day, but I find that those who are easiest to chat with are those who have already scrolled HN today and want to discuss a particular article they know I would have seen. I've had conversations that start with "Did you see that TikTok?" and conversations that start with "Did you see that article on HN?" and the latter is always more engaging. |
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| ▲ | tailscaler2026 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Discord is just chat, I wouldn't call it mind-numbing, reminds me perfectly of IRC from a utility perspective. That said, it's a commercial closed-source single point of failure. | |
| ▲ | Kiro 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How is Discord mind-numbing? |
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| ▲ | Ronsenshi 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Perhaps some interest-related Discord servers. Tragically, Discord is just another locked down silo without publicly accessible front on the web. |
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| ▲ | altairprime 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Drop me an email if you like — it’s not really topical to Canvas but I’m happy to discuss further. |
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| ▲ | cocoto an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Replace your material content with lorem ipsum or garbage LLM content and upload it to Canvas to test the accessibility of your documents if required. |
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| ▲ | isityettime 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What? What makes Canvas accessible in a way that HTML and PDF files are not? It's true that PDF readers aren't the best for screenreaders, but surely you can just upload a .html copy as well. |
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| ▲ | Gabriel54 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Canvas has an easy way of checking if a pdf or other course material is accessible, so many universities are forcing faculty to put all their materials on Canvas. That way if a pdf or powerpoint is not compliant it is immediately flagged. The goal is to reach a "100% accessible" metric. Note that little of this really helps the students that it is supposed to help, because as you wisely point out, raw HTML is almost by definition extremely accessible. I work in a field that uses Latex and the source code of Latex should also be considered more accessible than the compiled pdf. But for university administrators the only important thing is that the accessibility metric that appears (or used to appear, before today!) on Canvas shows 100% accessible. | | |
| ▲ | isityettime 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | That really sucks. I'm visually impaired and many members of my family are/were blind. I think accessibility is really important, but it's so painful to me to feel like people's limited energy is being directed towards performative measures, useless rituals, vanity metrics, etc. Nobody has infinite energy, and disabled people don't have infinite social capital. It's a shame when energy from that shared pool gets spent on things that don't really impact meeting people's access needs. And the other thing is that everyone's access needs are different. It can certainly be useful to try to set a baseline or propagate common guidance. But the most important thing, especially in a university setting, is for instructors to be flexible and responsive and for classes (and non-teaching workloads) to be structured in a way (e.g., small enough) that supports that. I think metrics like "100% accessible" might even be dangerous. It makes it easy for able-bodied people who aren't in direct contact with disabled stakeholders to pat themselves on the back without actually knowing what's going on. Bleh. Good luck doing right by your disabled students and disabled colleagues, and good luck resisting the bullshit. | | |
| ▲ | Gabriel54 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I was only a lowly TA so I saw these issues from afar, but I would add that, on a more optimistic note, I don't think I've ever met an instructor who wouldn't do whatever he or she had to do to support someone with special needs. As you suggested, metrics do not tell the whole story and certainly metrics for the sake of metrics are not helpful and may in fact be dangerous. That said there is certainly a lot more work that needs to be done in this area. Hopefully these regulations over time bring out practical positive change. Time will tell. |
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| ▲ | Loughla 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Are you saying that making sure your courses are fully accessible to your students by following disability regulations is a bad thing? |
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| ▲ | sellyme 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Putting aside the "So you hate waffles?" non-sequitur, surely the entire topic of this thread should be a bit of a hint that this misguided policy has not, in fact, "[made sure] courses are fully accessible". | | |
| ▲ | Gabriel54 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well, to be fair, it has made every course hosted on Canvas equally accessible to everyone. ;) |
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| ▲ | yard2010 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not GP, Incompetent policy makers are the bad thing. | |
| ▲ | Gabriel54 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Accessibility regulations, implemented with feedback from faculty and with the support of university resources, are certainly a good thing. But that is not what is happening in my experience. |
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