For many SMC students, Canvas is a convenient one-stop home where they can attend to the many aspects of their semester classes. Despite the convenience, Canvas may be less of an aid and more of a roadblock in the pursuit of knowledge.
Every SMC student knows what Canvas is, it’s the place where we do school. More generally, Canvas is an "LMS", a Learning Management System. Many schools use LMS’ like Canvas, Blackboard, Desire 2 Learn, Moodle, and others. With Social Media, we all know that the convenience they offer comes at a price to our privacy. But are we aware that LMS also come with a price? Not to our privacy, but to our freedom. To our access to knowledge.
A student enrolled in an SMC class this semester is allowed in the Canvas gate for that class. The student has access to all the rich content of that course’s Canvas pages. This also means that the student has no access to the rich content of all the other thousands of courses being taught at SMC this semester. And after paying the course fees and doing the course work this semester, the student won’t even have access to the resources for that class next semester.
In part, the problem is that Canvas conflates privacy and freedom in unhelpful ways. Clearly, things relating to individual students should default to privacy. It makes sense for grades and assignments turned in to be private materials. But the rich course content has no such requirement. Why can’t materials produced to educate the citizens of California be as widely disseminated as possible? By sweeping all knowledge into narrow silos Canvas inverts and defeats the traditional role of college as a fountain of knowledge.
Colleges like SMC must first and foremost be about sharing knowledge as widely as possible. If education is power, why should it be denied to anyone? Eighteen years ago the Massassachusets Institute of Technology (MIT) launched the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative, a project to publish all of the materials from MIT’s undergraduate and graduate courses online, freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere. Since then over 250 other colleges have chosen to make their course materials available to anyone, anywhere, thirsty for knowledge. Sadly, SMC is not one of those colleges.
Access to knowledge is a basic right that belongs to every member of humakind. The United Nations has declared "the ability to participate in culture" as a basic human right. But you can’t participate in culture if you lack access to knowledge. It’s time for SMC to dump the restricted access model of knowledge as emblemized by knowledge trapped in silos like Canvas.