College as To-Do List

As I put the finishing touches on my syllabi for fall 2024, I am torn. I usually spend a lot of time crafting a beautiful syllabus with graphics and colors, inviting students on a learning journey in a community of learners. My syllabi are “liquid,” changeable, to be altered as we discover new things that we want to investigate and build our understanding and curiosity. I am lucky in that my syllabi don’t have to be a terms-of-service legal contract, though certain technical things are encouraged.

But I wonder: Is it worth it, if students will glance once at this document, then default to their to-do lists?

Until spring 2024, I had not used Canvas, the learning management system on my campus. This decision has to do with my emphasis on student-centeredness and variation, with their power and choices, not on enforcing compliance. (My classes are ungraded, active, participatory.) It seemed to me that Canvas was the most schoolish dimension of college: everything is self-contained, divorced from the rest of the world (alienated), imposed from outside—filled with points, metrics and tasks, like a game in a box. (I recognize my privilege to make this decision. On many campuses, faculty are obligated to use the LMS.)

Students had written on our evaluations and shared aloud their confusion about why the course wasn’t on Canvas. I noticed as students were working that many had Canvas open on their laptops. It occurred to me that maybe I could somehow use it minimally and make things a little easier for the students.

So I put out an inquiry about how to use Canvas in ungraded classes. Several faculty members from around the country responded: one person sent me her video explanation and her syllabus, which was annotated by the students, as she explained her version of Canvas. Another person zoomed with me and showed me how she organized it.

I also reached out to my students from the fall 2023 semester. It was winter break, and I had no idea if students were even checking their email, because I have learned that students often don’t check email when they don’t have to. One student responded. She and I zoomed for half an hour. I asked if she could show me her screen and walk me through what Canvas looked like from her perspective.

I wanted to know—and I’m an anthropologist, so this is really ethnography—what it was like from the students’ perspective or from “the native’s point of view,” as American anthropologist Clifford Geertz puts it in his famous piece about the Balinese cockfight, in turn quoting Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowsky.

So the student showed me her screen. And it was overwhelming. And, wow, was it illuminating.

She had Canvas sites for every course, every lab, every study-abroad preparation course. Each Canvas site had multiple tabs, but they weren’t all the same, nor did all faculty members use the LMS in the same way. So she defaulted to her calendar, which gave her a list of the to-do items. I asked her to show me a course that she thought was well organized and a course that she thought was not well organized. I asked her why. For the latter, she said she had trouble finding things. She’s a very good student, and she said that her method is to download the syllabus for every class and then use the dashboard and calendar.

So when we were in the “unorganized” class, I asked her about all the tabs on the left and what they were. In particular I asked her what the Modules tab was. I had already begun doing my own course (though I hadn’t completely decided if I was going to go ahead with it), and I was having trouble getting the Modules tab to integrate with the Assignments tab. In fact, it worked for one course and not the other. She said she didn’t know; she’d never looked at the Modules tab. When she opened the Modules tab, the whole course was laid out there. It was beautifully created, crafted with organization and embedding, and everything was there: the assignments, the reading, guidelines, rubrics. Everything was perfectly organized.

But this student, an excellent student by any measure, never consulted it. And I can see why.

Everything is just too overwhelming. I can see the temptation simply to go to the to-do list, the dashboard, the calendar. Why read a long, boring syllabus, or even a beautiful one, when you can easily just get your tasks for the day enumerated in small chunks on Canvas?

It occurred to me that given the dominance of the LMS, all of schooling is now a big to-do list.

It’s been this way for a while, with the requirements and the credit hours and the distribution and the majors and the minors and the prerequisites. But that’s at the level of structure.

This is at the level of day-to-day, hour-to-hour activity. And given that many students have many other competing responsibilities—whether it’s a job, a family, medical arrangements, clubs, athletics, social life—life is very busy. So it’s very convenient to have it all as one big organized, centralized to-do list.

But if college is just a big to-do list, where is the adventure? The joy? The meaning?

In my own classes, I try very hard to call students’ attention to the possibility that learning is an adventure—that it can be fun, joyous, meaningful and feasible.

I’ve written previously about school—that is, college—as a game, the game of school, where everything is kind of self-contained in a box, batteries included. My new book, Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning, talks about it that way, too.

Around my university, I see signs that say, “I can do hard things.” But I don’t emphasize the difficulty in my classes. There’s enough of that everywhere. “Rigor.” Standards. Rubrics.

I try to invite, entice, welcome my students into a community of learners engaged in the adventure of learning. But my several-month acquaintance with Canvas has shown me how very challenging that view is. Because how many points is that engagement, and at what time is it due? When does the window open for joy, and when does it close?

I mentioned this to two colleagues, both of whom said, “You can get the student view in Canvas.” I said, “Yes, you can, but only for a particular item.”

Now that I see the big picture from students’ eyes, I’m even clearer about how this whole schoolish enterprise works against itself. Just as I saw a decade ago that we can’t say, “Don’t worry about grades” and then give grades, we can’t say, “Just learn for its own sake” and “be an independent learner” and then lament the fact that students are willing to use shortcuts to attain their points. Maybe we can even understand why students love learning but hate school.

And as I get back to work preparing as simple and as inspiring a map through the course as I can, I keep this conundrum in mind.