The Unseen Work: The Whole Watershed

One is an anomaly, two is a curiosity, three is a trend.

I’ve said that for about a decade. It’s pattern recognition distilled into nine words. And a few times a year — often at the start of a new academic term — the student emails arrive in a cluster. An old course still haunting their dashboard. They weren’t expecting to see it. They’d like it gone. The first one is an anomaly. The second one raises an eyebrow. By the third, I’m no longer looking at individual emails. I’m looking at a trend.

If you want to know how I handled the individual emails, that’s Essay 14. This essay is about what happened when I decided one at a time wasn’t good enough.

The thing about a cluster of emails is that it carries a warning inside it. Three students found the problem and wrote to me. How many didn’t? If you were to average 20 students enrolled in a typical university course, that’s well over 100 students with outdated courses still in their dashboard. How many just quietly assumed that Canvas always looks like this — cluttered with ghosts of terms past — and went about their day? How many faculty members were sitting on the same issue without a single student ever mentioning it?

The cluster wasn’t just a workload. It was a signal. And the signal was telling me something larger was out there waiting.

So I did what I always do when a problem needs thinking rather than doing. I walked away from the screen. I sat down on the sofa with some quiet music and a beverage. And I visualized.

This is not a minor detail. The sofa is part of the process. The beverage is part of the process. Thirty years of technology support has taught me that the best solutions don’t come from staring harder at the screen — that only gives you eye strain and a headache. The best solutions come from creating enough mental space for the answer to find you. I let the problem sit in my mind without forcing it. I walked through the landscape of the LMS the way you’d walk through a building you know by heart, looking for the door you hadn’t tried yet.

Eventually it appeared. A course report.

Every Canvas administrator has access to a set of reports in their admin zone. One of them — a Provisioning report — can generate a complete list of courses for a given academic term, exported as an Excel file. I’d used it before for other purposes. But sitting on that sofa, I realized it was exactly the instrument I needed.

I pulled the report. Opened the Excel file. And then came what I can only describe as my hyper-clicky phase — sorting columns, filtering data, cross-referencing term dates against course settings. It’s not glamorous work. It’s the data equivalent of turning over rocks. But after a few minutes of methodical sorting and discovering, the answer emerged: five, six, maybe nine courses from a past term still sitting open with no end date. Ghosts in the machine, every one of them.

From there, the execution was fast. Keyboard shortcuts to locate each course in my admin zone. Four clicks per course. Participation field switched from Course back to Term. Update Course Details. Next tab.

Wash, rinse, repeat for each academic term, going back in time just like that Huey Lewis & the News song.

Eight academic quarters. Two years of institutional back doors opened. Closed in thirty minutes.

Think about what actually happened in those thirty minutes. Every student across all those courses — none of whom had emailed me, none of whom knew they had an advocate, none of whom were aware that a past-term course was still following them around — now had a clean dashboard. The faculty members whose courses I quietly concluded never received a confusing email asking for permission to fix a settings oversight from eighteen months ago. The cluster of student emails that had been building toward a flood simply... stopped coming.

The Keeper of the Springs, John Ortberg writes, traveled from spring to spring in the hills above the village, removing debris no one else saw, keeping the water clean. The town was healthy because of work nobody could see or measure... or put on a spreadsheet.

What I did on that sofa — and in the thirty minutes that followed — was to stop tending the springs I stumbled across and to start mapping the entire watershed. Same ethic. Larger canvas. Different costume.

The student emails stopped. The dashboards cleared. Kids kept playing in the playground.

Give thanks for the unseen work.