To teach with Canvas is to facilitate genocide

The Canvas data leak may have ended without further damage, but for assistant professor Niels Niessen (Culture Studies) that does not settle the matter. The platform’s investors are tied to Israel’s war on the Palestinians, he writes. For him, that is reason enough to stop using it.

It is good news, of course, that the student and teacher data that the ShinyHunters hackers stole from Canvas will now likely not be made public. There are still good reasons, though, to not want to work with Canvas anymore, namely its investors’ contributions to Israël’s ongoing genocide on the Palestinian people.

Canvas has been developed by Instructure, which was founded in 2008 by two students from Brigham Young University in Utah. In 2011, Instructure launched its learning management system Canvas. Canvas is open source, but Instructure also sells Canvas as a service. In 2020, Instructure was acquired by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo. In 2024, it was sold to the investments groups KKR and Dragoneer.

It is KKR that is the problem, because other than in ed-tech KKR also invests in Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians. As news outlets including Follow the Money have reported, KKR has investments in the Israeli tech sector (which has close ties to the Israeli military), Israeli settlements, as well as US weapons manufacturers and the Coastal GasLink pipeline in British Columbia.

In 2025, KKR also bought the music festival operator Superstruct Entertainment, whose portfolio includes festivals like Sziget, Boiler Room, and—in the Netherlands—Mysteryland, Milkshake, and Zwarte Cross, to just name a few. For many artists these ties with KKR were reason last year to cancel their performances. As the Amsterdam punk bank Hang Youth commented on its cancellation from Zwarte Cross: ‘Don’t be misled by KKR’s charm offensive. … The problem was always that the festival’s revenue goes to the Palestinian genocide and other sorrows.’

This also holds true for the revenue that KKR makes from Canvas: teaching and learning with Canvas is connected to genocide. Until a few days ago I didn’t know the ties between Canvas and KKR, but now I do, and for me this is reason as an instructor to not want to work with Canvas anymore. I hope the same holds for other instructors, in Tilburg and at other Dutch institutions of higher education using Canvas (including the University of Amsterdam, Twente University, Erasmus University, Vrije Universiteit, Avans Hogeschool, and Fontys Hogeschool).

That is for the short term. For the longer term, I hope that these institutions will cease their business with Canvas and instead choose a more ethical alternative, or develop such an alternative themselves. That ethical alternative is definitely not Microsoft, another company with ties to the Palestinian genocide.

The most logical step for Dutch universities and universities of applied sciences is to indeed further intensify their collaborations with and through Surf, which since 1987 has been the driving force behind digital innovation in Dutch higher education (and which for example also has developed Eduroam). It is bizarre actually that Dutch institutions now all work with American platforms like Canvas and Blackboard, instead of working with and through Surf on more public alternative.

For instructors who already want to start with boycotting Canvas now, the easiest workaround is probably Surfdrive (which is based on Nextcloud). Surfdrive allows the sharing of folders through password protected public links that can be sent to students’ email addresses (found on Canvas). In order to access these folders, students don’t need to have a Surfdrive account themselves.

These folders can be read-only (to share course materials), write-only (to upload assignments), or collaborative (though that functionality doesn’t always work as smooth on Surfdrive). It is not a perfect solution, but at least it is genocide free.

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