After a year at the writer’s desk, my previous two decades in a college classroom already feel like a dream. Twenty-one years. More than 2,000 students. Innumerable committee meetings. One of the things that made my experience unique was that, from the start, half my teaching load was online.
When I started in 2004, online education was not new, but new enough that it still had a large number of skeptics. I had researched online education as a way for colleges to reach more students and deliver more diverse curriculum. Thus, I became an early adopter and proponent.
By 2025, that argument was over. Students couldn’t get enough online credits. More convenient for work and activities, online offerings filled immediately. Meantime, we struggled to put butts in the seats of our actual classrooms.
Today’s column (gift link) is about the recent hack of Canvas, one of the nation’s biggest learning management systems. These LMS platforms are how colleges big and small deliver online courses to their students. Minnesota State, the system where I worked, uses one called Brightspace. On May 7, hackers hit Canvas. The resulting outage allowed hackers to briefly take over the platform and extract student data from colleges across the country.
This might seem another one-off data breach. Perhaps just the next of many to come as our privacy becomes a commodity on a web that grows darker by the day. But today I argue, with some experience behind me, that the bigger problem is the homogenization of content and delivery that comes with the “freedom” of online learning. A system that can be stopped cold during finals week by some guys is not the robust educational progress we were promised.
Read “Canvas hack exposes a dangerous weakness in online education” in the Tuesday, May 12, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.
One response to “The finals week hack heard ’round the world”
As a graduate TA, every finals week I was responsible for the deaths of numerous grandparents,sudden catastrophic illnesses and random car accidents. I felt as if I were the grim reaper.