This article responds to EndVertex’s video “For-Profit (Creative) Software,” embedded above.

Somewhere along the way I became the Canvas person. Colleagues introduce me that way, districts call me for that reason, and it isn’t wrong. What bothers me is what it leaves out. The pedagogical judgment and the learning design are the parts of the work I care about, and they’ve been quietly overshadowed by expertise in a product I don’t own and can’t control.

EndVertex’s video is about 3D artists rather than educators, but I recognized every beat of it. Artists who spent years mastering software like 3D Studio Max found themselves locked out when the tool moved to a subscription or disappeared into an acquisition. The line that stayed with me is the one about losing access and finding that “a big chunk of my heart or knowledge was gone.” That’s the expertise paradox, and it applies to anyone whose professional value has attached itself to a product.

The subscription trap in education

Canvas, the platform I’ve specialized in, has grown from an educator-friendly tool into a tiered ecosystem with recurring costs that strain district budgets. As districts build content, assessment structures, and workflows inside it, the cost of leaving rises with every year of investment. That’s the same lock-in EndVertex describes with creative software, with one difference: a 3D artist can, in the end, walk away, while a district that has migrated its curriculum has a much harder time. I wrote about the broader pattern in Paywalls, Lock-Ins, and Bugs in Educational Technology.

I’ve watched this from close range. Large state entities adopt a platform with real investment in migration, training, and curriculum development, and then face funding instability a few years later. Having committed their infrastructure to something that requires ongoing payment, they’re caught between an unsustainable cost and the disruption of switching. What began as a strategic technology decision becomes a financial vulnerability that lands on teachers and students.

My own investment came the usual way: evenings troubleshooting integrations, weekends learning new features, and years of building trust with district technology leaders. That knowledge sits in a precarious spot, vulnerable to the next acquisition, pricing change, or strategic pivot, none of which I get a vote on.

The paradox, from the inside

I didn’t set out to become a Canvas expert. It happened gradually, as I developed professional development for teachers and built workflows that made online teaching manageable for them, so the expertise was a byproduct of trying to be useful.

The trouble is that it doesn’t transfer. When I consult with a district on a different LMS, I feel something like what EndVertex describes: years of accumulated knowledge suddenly inaccessible while I’m still expected to deliver expert guidance. And the more that tool-specific knowledge defines how people see me, the less room there is for the identity I’d rather have, which is an educator and a designer who happens to know one platform well.

What am I trying to do about it?

The first move has been to design for platform independence: learning objectives first and implementation second, content kept in neutral formats, and pedagogical decisions documented separately from the technical build so that the reasoning survives a migration even if the pages don’t.

The second has been to argue for simplicity when I consult, which in practice means 1) plain HTML rather than platform-specific interface elements, 2) fewer integrations, since each one is another dependency with its own pricing and its own shelf life, 3) content stored as Markdown, HTML, or PDF, and 4) assessments built from question types that exist in virtually every LMS. I’ve watched too many districts rebuild entire courses because a third-party tool changed its pricing or disappeared, and the courses that survived were usually the ones built from the simplest parts.

The third is about what to learn. The skills that hold their value are the ones that aren’t tied to a product: understanding the principles underneath educational technology, structuring content well regardless of where it’s delivered, designing assessments that align with what we know about learning, making materials accessible across platforms, and building learning communities that don’t depend on a particular tool. When I look for collaborators now, those are what I look for. Knowing why an approach works in a digital learning environment is worth more than knowing where the buttons are in this year’s interface.

When is walking away the only option?

EndVertex ends on resignation: once trust is broken and the extraction begins, “all we can do is walk away forever.” Even if the companies cut their prices to a dollar tomorrow, the video argues, we know what they’re ultimately after. The major LMS providers follow a recognizable version of that playbook, acquiring competitors, shifting from improvement to monetization once dominant, and replacing innovation with extraction.

The practical advice in the video applies without much translation: 1) learn the universals that transfer between platforms, 2) support open-source alternatives, 3) join the communities that help people move away from proprietary tools, and document what you learn so the next person doesn’t start from zero, and 4) recognize when a platform has become hostile to educational values, through predatory pricing or feature degradation, and when the honest response is to leave regardless of how much expertise you’ve accumulated.

Final thoughts (for now)

EndVertex commits to being more selective about what to learn and more open about sharing that knowledge, and I’m making the same commitment. The expertise that matters in educational technology isn’t knowing every Canvas setting so much as understanding how technology supports meaningful learning regardless of platform.

I’m still the Canvas guy, and I will be for a while. What I can choose is what that title rests on.

If you’ve found yourself known for a tool you don’t control, I’d like to hear how you handle it. You can reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and there are more tools, articles, and resources at bradylicht.com.