UDP to the Rescue

Published May 15, 2026

Last week’s ransomware incident was more than your standard data breach. Nearly 9,000 educational institutions immediately discovered that day-to-day operations are impossible without an LMS. 

Over the past 15 years, the LMS has become the foundational operating platform responsible for maintaining academic continuity. It’s no surprise that for many of us on the frontlines of ed tech, finding a way to restore that functionality was job one - while others investigated the source of the incursion and its ramifications. 

In many ways, last week felt like March 2020 all over again. Information technology teams were at the center of the academic crucible.  Whereas it took weeks to fully pivot to remote learning during COVID, in just hours, Unizin members were collaborating on innovative ways to restore LMS data to mitigate the disruption to faculty, staff, and students. 

During the 36-hour crisis window, a new facet of the Unizin Data Platform (UDP) emerged.  We all know the UDP as a vast repository of LMS and SIS data.  With Canvas inaccessible, the UDP provided a reliable source of quarantined, up-to-date learning data. 

Having a redundant LMS data warehouse isn’t unique to Unizin. The challenge is in the utility.  From the years spent developing the common data model at the center of the UDP, we have an acute appreciation for the complexity of LMS data. 

Unizin’s common data model and expanding library of data marts gave members a roadmap to restore access to critical gradebook information their institutions needed to maintain day-to-day operations in the middle of finals week.

Chad Brassil, Faculty Director of Undergraduate Analytics and Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was in a department faculty meeting when the shutdown occurred. With graduation just two days away, faculty were in various states of assembling their final grades, with some completed, others in process, and several final exams still pending.  Being in a room with both faculty and administrators provided Chad with immediate insights into the situation. 

“While the dean had no additional official information to report, from my interactions with other Unizin members and from what my colleagues were hearing from faculty at other institutions, we knew this was global and that it might not resolve quickly,” he explained. “My colleagues in the room knew of my UDP expertise and started telling me what they needed to finalize grades.”

By the end of the faculty meeting, Chad had spun up a simple reporting dashboard and was already working to recreate a full Canvas Grades view for instructors.  A few hours later, using UDP data and a Tableau front end, Chad had tested and verified a restored gradebook, which also allowed faculty to download their entire gradebook as an Excel file to continue finalizing grades as they waited for Canvas to come back online.

By early Thursday morning, “Chad Brassil’s Dashboards” were being circulated across the university’s colleges and eventually to all deans via upper administration. 

“The faculty reaction was kind of amazing. People gave me hugs because I had unlocked their gradebooks,” said Chad. “I just happened to be in this unique position of having intimate knowledge of the structure of our data at-hand, the needs of the faculty at that moment and the trust of both faculty and our administration to launch something so quickly, at scale.”

Members have used the UDP for years to support various aspects of early alert systems, faculty teaching, and institutional and academic research. Last week’s incident illuminated a new use for the UDP: disaster recovery in support of academic continuity. 

“The UDP by design is flexible. We have talked about the value of the SIS data in the UDP in a disaster recovery scenario. We hadn’t really considered the LMS data in the UDP as a data source that could be applied to academic continuity scenarios, but it really shined last week, as members rapidly built interfaces and workflows that validated and delivered detailed gradebook data to faculty while Canvas was unavailable,” said Bart Pursel, CEO of Unizin. “We are already working on more intentional UDP assets specifically designed to support academic continuity. And the beauty of our common data model is that these assets aren’t limited to schools using Canvas; any LMS that we map to our data model, we can support in this fashion.” 

Unizin Communities Collaborate in Crisis

Chad was operating independently in Nebraska, but he was not alone. Days before the shut down, the Unizin community was actively sharing news concerning issues with Canvas data. When the platform was taken offline, a marathon Slack session ensued with Unizin members and staff sharing updates and insights, devising and debating response strategies and contingency plans and collaborating on solutions and restoration activities. 

“In the moment, Unizin was an invaluable partner to Rutgers and our fellow members,” said Charlie Collick, Director of OIT for Rutgers University. “They were there to answer every call, to chase down every idea, and, most importantly, to serve as a conduit and facilitator between member institutions. Community is vital to our shared success, and Unizin exemplifies community.”

For over a decade, Unizin has remained committed to our founding tenet that together we can go far. In times of crisis, technology can be a powerful tool to restore systems and ensure continuity. But community is the accelerant. By sharing ideas and insights, learning from one another, and working together to find the best way forward, we all become stronger, more resilient and – like our students – better prepared to face the future.