Either way, they were under no obligation to adopt this garbage technology regardless of whether it’s available, so this is 110% on them.
You are aware that you are posting on Hacker News, a forum for people who make their living selling software and the expertise to host it?
Edit: No idea why this was down voted so much. I'm not defending Canvas, just wondering what the alternative would be.
I worked at a university which did exactly this, in the UK.
It was a bespoke platform which integrated incredibly well with the rest of the systems the university used because it was designed from the ground-up to meet the institution's needs, there were regular user groups involving academics to understand what features needed to be built/worked on etc. At one point it was all OSS on GitHub too, in case other universities could've found it useful. It handled plagiarism detection (integrating with Turnitin), marking, exam grids, coursework submissions and feedback, seminar allocations, personalised timetables & mitigating circumstances.
The in-house dev team was vastly cheaper than anything SaaS would've cost, as well. It also maintained software for on-campus parcel deliveries, online exams, opinion surveys, a mobile app for students/staff, the SSO system, the course catalogue, car parking permits, a content management system and more.
My (also UK-based) university has been working on a new student records management project for years that's been incredibly ill-fated. It's destined to replace all their current systems and the first module module was meant to launch last year, except it thoroughly failed testing and nobody has heard anything about it since.
No idea how long it'll take to pull through. I don't believe it's an in-house effort.
https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/wiki/Production-St...
Or maybe consider not following the herd, and use a much simpler but sufficient system that can be self hosted, if available.
But you do then have to have a sysadmin capable of managing an enterprise grade LAMP stack.
