President Steve Johnson reported on a nationwide cybersecurity incident affecting Sinclair’s learning management system provider, Canvas, which temporarily took the system offline during finals week. The outage affected roughly 1,600 students, more than 40 courses, and over 100 sections, prompting Sinclair to activate its crisis response process, coordinate IT and eLearning, and manage communications and continuity for academic operations. The system was restored within a day with no identified data loss or compromise of personally identifiable information, and the college confirmed backups and began additional security reviews.The Board’s subsequent discussion on cybersecurity preparedness, system vulnerabilities, vendor dependencies, backup strategies, and risks of centralized platforms, coupled with mention that Sinclair is in the process of a learning management system transition, suggests potential demand for cybersecurity services, business continuity planning, LMS migration support, and resilience tools to harden their teaching and learning technology stack.

Sinclair is mid-transition between learning management systems; Canvas is the incumbent LMS provider affected by the incident.