Students and instructors are starting to get some classes back on their Canvas dashboard after the learning management system was down for more than eight hours.
Students and staff noticed that Canvas was glitching early this morning and went down shortly after. Students were unenrolled from their classes and instructors lost access to their class content.
At around 11:47 a.m. an email was sent out to instructors by the TCC OneIT Team saying:
“We have begun the process of restoration. We are estimating that it will likely take 5 to 6 hours to fully resolve itself. We will keep monitoring it throughout the day and will let you know when the data is fully reloaded. We are also working on ensuring this does not happen again. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Courses all disappeared from the dashboard and Instructors have not been able to do their grading. Those teaching weekend classes struggled to deliver content to students.
“I had a slide prepared with instructions for how to start on the next three backgrounds of our mixed media sketchbook pages,” said art adjunct instructor Amy Edwards. “I had to switch things around on the agenda. So, we’ll probably be doing that next week.”
Students said they are troubled by the incident because they use weekends to catch up and study for tests.
“It is Saturday, and I only have like two days to complete it,” said South Campus student Bianca Lira. “Then again, I have till midnight on Monday. So, I’m hoping that it’s just one fix and then we’re good because that’s what usually happens, especially when it comes to the power outages at TCC.”
After the Initial announcement to faculty, TCC could not provide an ETA for when classes would be back on the dashboard.
Homer Hensley, TCC manager of user services, said there was an unexpected failure with the process used to update student data, and the data still existed in both our systems and in Canvas. It essentially caused the data to become out of sync. TCC is working with the vendor to ensure all student data is fully restored, he said.
“Most of the changes we will make will be internal to IT and won’t be publicized for security reasons,” Hensley said.
An update released by district director of user support James Abbott said the Canvas enrollment was restored before 9 a.m. on Oct 21, with the only remaining issues revolving around groups within classes.
“We just now got an update from Instructure on the effort to resolve this issue, and these groups within classes have been restored. Both teams have spot checked a couple dozen and we look good moving forward,” it read. “Faculty and Students should now be able to return to their work normally at this time.”
Alex Hoben contributed to this report.
