By Lukas Reyes | Reporter
After a class finishes at the end of the semester, its page often disappears from Canvas, along with all supporting documents, homework assignments, PowerPoints and course information. While students do receive the education they pay for through completion of the class, by removing online access, Baylor prevents them from looking back at past work and utilizing those resources. In doing this, Baylor shows students that each class they take is simply one to be completed, as opposed to an integrative part of a whole education.
On Canvas, there is a tab with prior course history. However, many students can only view a few classes. Despite being in my fourth year at Baylor and having completed 99 hours, I can only view eight classes. According to a representative from Canvas, if a class has been cleared or hidden from students, it is not due to the involvement of the company. Instead, it is a setting instituted by the university or the professor.
If students were able to access course material after the completion of classes, they would have access to the information they paid so much for when taking other classes. When a professor clears or hides course content, it pushes a narrative that classes are singular and disconnected and that there is no use for the information after they are done. If Baylor maintained access to course material, it would likely find that students could perform better in other classes, as they could reference related ones and find commonalities in the material they are learning.
Our world is interconnected, and navigating it successfully requires a multifaceted approach. However, we attend school in a system that tells us education is about completing individual classes instead of trying to see how they all connect with each other.
This problem has a very simple solution: Baylor should institute a policy for professors to not clear or hide course content from students.
The current system seems to want to make students forget what they have learned — or worse, disregard the importance of continued education — by not acknowledging the relevance of the information after the class has been completed. Assuming the average student attends Baylor for four years, they are paying expensive tuition to complete tasks instead of having a holistic education they can reference in the future.
