During these troubling times, where social distancing has made it necessary for every UMD educator to move their classes and their assignments online, ELMS-CANVAS, the default CMS of the University of Maryland, has shown that it is not able to support distance learning.

For years, CANVAS has had problems that have not been addressed, ranging from quizzes that end or freeze prematurely, mathematical equations not rendered in tablet or phone devices, file uploading that either crashes midway or shows no output. Egregious problems such as tables not showing and several dropdowns not being clickable have arisen, and cause hundreds of students to lose credit without understanding why. The inability to tune timed quizzes to the individual or a group makes the instructor have to write exams several times, and this helps propagate errors. Incoming students find the platform increasingly hard to use and are thus challenged in their learning by non-academic reasons that should not be there. 

We are instructors and students of Computer Science in the University of Maryland. We do not think that Canvas' broken code base is in any way able to be fixed. We ask of both DIT and TLTC to replace ELMS-CANVAS with a functional CMS that is easy to use. Platforms like Gradescope and CampusWire are kicking out updates at a very fast pace, adhering to the modern software engineering lifecycle and the constantly evolving needs of the academic community. The business model of Instructure, seen not just in this university but in several others too, is one that has updates shipped every 6 months to an increasingly broken product. It is not an appropriate business model and it does not have our best interests in mind.

We do *not* believe that replacing ELMS-Canvas is in *any* way logistically impossible, because:

(1) Over the last few weeks, worldwide, billions of people have been confined to their homes. That was "logistically impossible", but it was done. When there's a will, there's a way. 

(2) Within the Department of Computer Science, we have experts that can define the needs of and create a CMS better than ELMS within a few days. We only need to be queried to offer very valuable feedback on web standards, accessibility and software interoperability..

Please get rid of ELMS-Canvas for the sake of the mental health of the entire faculty and student body of the University of Maryland, College Park.

Instructors and students of CS UMD