Jeff Dillon

If you'd polled college students on Tuesday last week what they wanted most, Canvas outage would've cracked the top three. Finals week timing? Undefeated. No quizzes submitted. No grades posted. No professor emails about incomplete assignments. Then ShinyHunters made it happen. Thousands of students were redirected to an extortion demand instead of their course materials last week, the Canvas breach became a problem about more than data. It became a problem about trust—and Instructure...

Sterling College sits on 130 acres in rural Vermont, its isolation both its greatest strength and its greatest vulnerability. There are no cell towers and barely any passing traffic. For students, that remoteness can feel intentional, a refuge from the scale and pressure of traditional universities. But in today's digital-first college enrollment ecosystem, isolation doesn't just mean distance. It means invisibility. Sterling recently announced it would close at the end of the semester,...

One art-and-design institution's deliberate approach to interoperability, AI-powered search, and mobile-first experience offers a replicable model for digital leaders across higher education. A modern university technology stack should feel less like a collection of products and more like a well-composed experience. Higher education rarely gets to start from a blank page, though. Most institutions carry years of inherited systems, fragmented ownership, and siloed content. The challenge is no...