I don't care how good you think it is, the fact that it (back when I used to be a TA) would break if two TAs tried concurrently grading different parts of an assignment of a student is bonkers. The workaround for that was to use a Google Sheet document so TAs just looked at the submission in Canvas, then filed in their grades and feedback on the sheet. The issue is that Canvas, as far as I could tell, did not support mass uploads from a csv, so we had a script which would read every entry on the csv, map that to the student's ID and grade them, which made it look like the TA which had generated the API key graded all of the students (and would get all the backlash from poor grades).

I completely agree that it is not trivial software in the worst sense, it tries to do too much, while not being particularly good at any one of those things, and is way too rigid for how diverse the needs of different courses might be even inside a single faculty. And saying "It's AGPL, just self host and add your requirements to it" is not really useful, that would mean way more money and effort than what a university's overworked IT dept. is capable of.

I didn't say instructure engineers were bad.

What I meant is they aren't capable of building AI capable of replacing professors. I still consider it a reasonable assumption, as it has nothing to do with how well engineered canvas is. It's a different competency than instructure would have, and I've heard from insiders instructure has been spinning their wheels on way more trivial AI challenges. I also understand well how hard it would be to create AI that replaces professors and how the current best AI from Google, Anthropic, OpenAI is orders of magnitude away from being able to do that.

An engineering culture can change a lot in 10 years, and a company's engineers' ability to do stuff depends both on the individual engineers abilities as well as the company systems and culture.

> some of the best engineers I've ever worked with were at INST.

> You can see for yourself as it's AGPL and I assume you looked at the code

Can you look at any codebase and tell me it's written by some of the best engineers and it's not trivial?

I've been using Canvas for years and it's some of the worst written software I've ever used. It's slow, buggy, with an atrocious 2001-era UI. It's a CRUD app that has no excuse for being so cumbersome. I'm not surprised at all that their security is just as bad as the rest of the product.

A bright undergrad could build a superior replacement in a few months, even without AI.