Canvas Catastrophe

Canvas is an online website that the Park City School District uses to help kids keep up with their class assignments. It shows the students’ classes, what the agenda is for the week, upcoming or late assignments, and you can also turn in an assignment through Canvas. Canvas is how students become aware of their assignments. Sounds like a great luxury, right? Canvas might sound like a great website for school purposes, but there are some issues that make Canvas more unhelpful than helpful.

Canvas is a website, meaning it’s only accessible online on a phone, computer, or tablet. The Park City School District gives every student enrolled in the school district a MacBook Air, so it’s not an issue finding a device to access Canvas on. The problem is that computers and technology is not always reliable. For example, if a student is working on an assignment online and they have to turn it in on Canvas, what if there’s a power outage? What if the internet crashes or there’s a problem with the internet service the student uses? Power outages are pretty common in Park City, Utah, and when this happens students usually go down to a Starbucks or library to get connection. But, a lot of the times, students don’t get back from their extracurricular activities until it’s pretty late, so most parents don’t want to drive their kids down to Starbucks at 10 o’clock at night. Sometimes, phone companies’ cell phone towers can go out, cutting out connection from everybody who uses that phone company. When this happens, there’s nothing a student can do about it, they just have to wait until the problem is fixed which can take hours. This results in the student being unable to complete their work for reasons that are out of their control.

When students tell their teachers that they were unable to complete their assignments because of internet or power issues, the teachers usually respond by saying the students should have been more responsible and printed out their assignments before the internet went out... but how can students know when their internet is going to crash? Also, not everyone has a printer, so how can students all expected to print it? When the internet goes out, students with printers still can’t print their assignments because they’d have to go on Canvas to print their assignments which is obviously inaccessible in this situation. Even though power outages and internet crashes don’t occur every week, when they do happen, they can put students behind in their schoolwork and affect their grades.

The idea of Canvas is to be updated about the upcoming agenda in your classes. This sounds great, but teachers don’t always get around to updating their Canvas page. When this happens, students are unaware of their assignments and the activities they are doing in class. Some teachers don’t get around to updating their Canvas page until the last minute on Sunday night. There’s no point of Canvas if it’s not used consistently and it’s just confusing students.

In conclusion, Canvas can be very helpful at times, but it also has a lot of flaws. Some of the flaws with Canvas include unreliable internet and inconsistent updates, which make it harder for students to keep up. If Canvas was used appropriately and wasn’t affected so easily, then it would be a great website; as it is, though, it is more unhelpful than helpful.

By: Mia Rapella and Hali Weaver