As I put the finishing touches on my Fall 2024 curriculum, I’m torn. I usually spend a lot of time creating a beautiful curriculum with graphics and colors that invites students on a learning journey in a community of learners. My curriculum is “fluid,” changeable, and can be changed as we discover new things to investigate and strengthen our understanding and curiosity. I’m fortunate that my curriculum doesn’t have to be a legal terms of use contract, although certain technical things are desired.

But I wonder: is it worth it if students just glance at this document and then automatically move on to their to-do list?

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 variety, on their power and choice, not on enforcing conformity. (My courses are ungraded, active, and participatory.) Canvas seemed to me to be the most school-like dimension of college: everything is self-contained, separated from the rest of the world (alienated), imposed from the outside—full of scores, metrics, and tasks, like a game in a box. (I recognize my privilege in making this decision. On many campuses, faculty are required to use the LMS.)

Students had written our evaluations and expressed confusion as to why the course was not available on Canvas. As I was working, I noticed that many of the students had Canvas open on their laptops. It occurred to me that maybe I could use it minimally somehow and make it a little easier for students.

So I put out a request about how to use Canvas in ungraded courses. Several faculty members from across the country responded: One person sent me their video explanation and syllabus, which was annotated by students while 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 learned that students often don’t check their email when they don’t have to. A student responded. She and I Zoomed for half an hour. I asked her if she could show me her screen and explain what Canvas looks like from her perspective.

I wanted to know – and I am an anthropologist, so this is actually ethnography – what it was like from the students’ perspective, or from “the natives’ perspective,” as the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz puts it in his famous article on Balinese cockfighting, quoting the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowsky.

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

She had Canvas sites for every class, every lab, every study abroad prep course. Each Canvas site had multiple tabs, but they weren’t all the same, and not all faculty members used the LMS the same way. So she defaulted to her calendar, which gave her a list of things to do. I asked her to show me a course she thought was well organized and a course she thought wasn’t well organized. I asked her why. On the latter, she said she had trouble finding things. She’s a very good student and said her method was to download the syllabus for each course and then use the dashboard and calendar.

So when we were in the “unorganized” course, 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 started my own course (though I hadn’t quite decided if I would continue with it) and was having trouble integrating the “Modules” tab with the “Assignments” tab. In fact, it worked for one course and not the other. She said she didn’t know; she had never looked at the “Modules” tab. When she opened the “Modules” tab, the entire course was laid out there. It was beautifully designed, designed with organization and embedding, and everything was there: the assignments, the readings, guidelines, rubrics. Everything was perfectly organized.

But this student, an outstanding student in every way, never consulted it. And I can understand why.

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

I have noticed that, given the dominance of LMS, the entire school education has become one big to-do list.

It’s been that way for some time, with the requirements and the credit hours and the distribution and the majors and minors and the prerequisites. But that’s at the structural level.

This affects daily, hourly activities. And since many students have many other commitments – be it a job, family, medical care, clubs, sports, social life – life is very hectic. So it is very convenient to have everything in one big, organized, central to-do list.

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

In my own classes, I try hard to draw students’ attention to the fact that learning can be an adventure—that it can be fun, enjoyable, meaningful, and doable.

I have written before about school – college – as a game, the game of school, where everything is somehow self-contained in a box, batteries included. My new book, Schoollikeness: Alienated education and the search for authentic, joyful learningalso talks about it like that.

At my university, I see signs that say, “I can do difficult things.” But I don’t emphasize difficulty in my courses. There’s enough of that everywhere. “Rigidity.” Standards. Rubrics.

I try to invite, entice and welcome my students into a community of learners who are embarking on the adventure of learning. But my several months of acquaintance with Canvas have shown me how challenging this view is. Because how many points does this engagement bring and when is it due? When does the window of joy open and when does it close?

I told two colleagues about it and they both said, “You can get the student view in Canvas.” I said, “Yes, you can, but only for a specific element.”

Now that I see the big picture from the student’s perspective, it’s even clearer to me how this whole school enterprise is working against itself. Just as I realized 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 complain that students are willing to take shortcuts to achieve their goals. Maybe we can even understand why students love learning but hate school.

And as I get back to work preparing the simplest and most inspiring map through the course possible, I keep this puzzle in mind.