by Lexey Burns, Editor-in-Chief
Kristen Lavallee is completing her first year at Laurentian University in the Indigenous Social Work (ISWK) program.
She was one of several students whose course material suddenly disappeared from D2L, a learning software used by Laurentian professors across programs.
Lavallee said that online content was deleted from two of her courses, one of them an Indigenous studies course.
“The deletion of resources affected my ability to finish my final paper knowing the exact course expectations,” Lavallee said.
“It could be a weird coincidence… but considering what is happening with the INDG studies program it feels more than coincidental to me.”
Lavallee says that she “will be affected” by Laurentian’s recent cuts as she takes multiple Indigenous studies courses for her program, which are currently in the process of being transferred from the University of Sudbury to Laurentian.
She has also seen several of her professors fired, including her current psychology professor.
Dr. Janice Leidl, professor of history, said in an email to Lambda, “I am obviously not a computer systems expert although I’ve used D2L as long as we’ve had it at Laurentian.”
Leidl confirmed that she was told of three programs – courses in Biology, Indigenous Studies, and also Psychology – where course materials were no longer available to students. She also said that the faculty members were not aware of the deleted information, which eliminated the idea of them having deleted it on purpose.
“These file deletions could have been user error on the part of the faculty member or have been caused by an outage on some parts of the subsystem,” Leidl said. “However, I am suspicious because this issue was only reported in D2L courses taught by professors who had been terminated (admittedly, not a small subgroup!).”
Leidl added that the university’s website “went through some cataclysmic changes last week” where a lot of information was taken down.
“Some of that could have been changing the status associated with terminated faculty members and perhaps the visibility of files associated with their ID,” she said, although that has not been confirmed by the university.
Leidl also mentioned that the pre-existing websites for the 69 programs cut on April 12th are no longer accessible.
“In the case of Histoire, it was briefly empty of details. Now it redirects to History… History is an unusual case where they closed the program in one language and not both – programs that were entirely deleted such as Geography and Philosophy no longer have any web presence,” she said.
Leidl said that the old URLs that originally connected users to the exact program page, now redirects to the main undergraduate program page.
“They belatedly even did this with Motion Picture Arts and Theatre Arts,” Leidl said, referring to two programs that were cut in the summer of 2020.
Leidl, in her position as the dean’s special advisor to students in the Motion Picture and Theatre Arts, said she continuously consulted those webpages for the past year, in an attempt to best help the students affected by the course cancellations.
“I mention these issues with the website and Datatel access because they corroborate that LU carried out some rapid changes to the computer system,” Leidl said. “While neither situation directly explains what happened on D2L, they add to my suspicion.”
Leidl says that an acknowledgement from President Hache or Laurentian’s administration of these online removals “would have done a lot to restore student faith. Continued silence does not!”