Britt Paris, Rebecca Reynolds and Catherine McGowan write:
In 2018, Rutgers University made a move that hundreds of other universities before it had made: It switched its online learning platform from Sakai—a free, community-sourced system—to Canvas, which is owned by a company called Instructure.
The switch was significant: Now the university was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a product that didn’t have to be transparent about what it did with the information and data it was mining from its users. Such systems are constantly recording users’ interactions with it—how long it takes a student to complete an assignment, for example, or her deleted words and keystrokes, and users’ IP addresses.
Read more on The Nation.