Learning Management Systems (LMS) are an unavoidable part of every college student’s career. They streamline our classes, provide us instant access to our grades and, most importantly, are the single-stop hub for nearly every assignment we complete.
Blackboard, an LMS founded in 1997, was the household name for systems like these for nearly two decades. These days, you’re much more likely to use Canvas (the sponsored LMS of NEU). However, some students find that they work both for us and against us. Blackboard was slowly pushed out of the picture due to its many outdated systems — such as its inability to access the cloud or its clunky user interface. Canvas, while still steadily the dominating force in the LMS business, has also been receiving its own fair share of complaints.
In 1997, the co-founders of Blackboard hosted an early version of their website for educators across America to use completely free-of-charge. It was a simple idea: digitize the extremely arduous process of education management. This drew a lot of attention from colleges, who were starting to look into ways to revamp their education systems to fit the rise of computers and the internet. Just nine years later, in 2006, Blackboard was implemented by 65% of all American colleges. Around this time, Blackboard also acquired its largest competitor, WebCT, which only spread its influence even further. In its earlier versions, Blackboard looked like little more than a simple set of folders, with links to different useful resources for students — they could access digital versions of syllabi, check on assignments, and even look at their grades instantly! At the time, the concept was mind-blowing. In later versions, it became closer to what NEU students might recognize as Canvas, albeit without one key feature: the cloud. This is, at least in part, what led to Blackboard’s slow decline in popularity — a process that took nearly a decade.
One of the many reasons Blackboard eventually lost dominance in the market (around 2018) was due to competitors innovating faster than it could. Whereas Blackboard was a lot quicker than the traditional method of pen and paper, it was also expensive to maintain. Storage at the time was mainly done through on-premises servers — but services like Canvas offered an easier, cheaper, and more secure approach: the cloud. While the term “the cloud” gets thrown around often these days, it might be difficult to remember what it actually is.
The cloud, in simple terms, is a series of servers in data centers across the globe. It’s what allows you to access files on different computers, instead of saving everything locally. Canvas was cloud-native, meaning that it used this strategy to sort and organize massive amounts of information from its conception. This was appealing to colleges looking to save time and money. Canvas also had many exciting and unusual features: seamless mobile use, integration of other platforms (for example: many browser extensions) and updated dashboards and analytics that were easy to understand for students and educators alike. It became apparent that Blackboard was not the giant it had come to be known as for its cutting edge R&D — but rather, its ability to acquire its competitors.
What happened next was no surprise: Canvas surpassed Blackboard within about seven years of its inception. Since then, it has remained the most used LMS in the US. However, even though it has enjoyed many years of comfortable dominance, it may soon be facing an era of erosion. Similarly to how Blackboard took ample time adapting to a cloud-based world, Canvas is now staring down the barrel of AI in classrooms; and it isn’t exactly taking a clear stance on how to address the issue.
In July 2025, Instructure (the creators of Canvas) announced a partnership with OpenAI — one that seeks to save time for instructors by adding features like AI-suggested content generation, or even an educator-created GPT that specifically manages assignments/modules for their classroom. While certainly unique, some say this is just automation for automation’s sake, and could even harm educators. Kate Lindsay, former Head of Technology at Learning at Oxford University, worries this choice might have unintended consequences. “Will educators truly be supported as learning guardians, or will institutions use AI to justify staff reductions?” she writes in her blog, Teaching In Digital Spaces.
This also completely ignores the rampant cheating epidemic in higher education — sources like The Guardian report that over half of all college students have used AI to supplement, or in some cases, completely rewrite everything they submit. Whether this is considered cheating depends on the professor, as some openly encourage the use of AI or even use it themselves to create content for classes. Beyond personal opinions, however, it’s no doubt that there are students who will, without thinking, copy and paste a prompt into their preferred AI engine, and paste whatever the result is into their assignment. This does not facilitate learning, it facilitates convenience. Canvas’s choice to partner with OpenAI makes some feel like a degree is now more transactional than ever, making hard work totally optional. This brings to mind a somewhat disturbing image of the future — one in which both the educators and the educated are majority AI-generated — a degree barely holds any meaning.
Should Northeastern, then, consider switching from Canvas to a competitor? Out of five random Northeastern students surveyed, four said no. Despite all five having stated they never used Canvas prior to college, and all of them being familiar with competitors (such as Powerschool or Google Classroom), it seemed as though the sentiment was to “tune up” Canvas in place of removing it altogether. As for what exact changes should be made, however, it seemed as though most agreed the user interface needed a serious optimization makeover. 60% of those surveyed stated they disliked both the calendar and to-do list feature, and all longform responses contained at least one reference to reducing the amount of tabs Canvas has.
One student who wished to remain anonymous stated, “I honestly think Canvas really sucks, but at this point I feel like we’re so deep into it that…switching to a whole new system would make things even worse…I don’t know if there’s really a clear cut answer.”
While it seems unlikely that Northeastern will switch to a Canvas competitor anytime soon, that doesn’t mean that Canvas will remain around forever. Larger changes to the world like AI, or advancements in competitors, might cause the giant to eventually topple.