What I Did on my Summer Vacation (2026 edition)

(The only good mosquito...)

Here's my annual look behind the scenes at the exciting (?) summer I apparently had. Of course, I have to start with the rain. So. Much. Rain. The wettest summer ever recorded in Edmonton. How wet was it? It was sooooo wet...
  - Yellowhead Trail was renamed Yellowhead River
  - basements were converted to indoor pools
  - the Telus World of Science included underwater exhibits

Ouch. Okay, here are some numbers. Over 580 mm of rain fell from June to August, making it the wettest summer ever. In June alone, we got 263.9 mm of rain, shattering the previous record set in 1912. July saw an equally impressive 264.7 mm. We had to rescue our kids from outdoor concerts at both Neon Skies and KDays during extreme thunderstorm events. At least I got this cool certificate:

(Thanks to meteorologist Josh Classen.)

Rain, of course, brings mosquitoes. So. Many. Mosquitoes. And they all seemed to want to get into my house. (When I say "get into my house," I don't mean standard bugs flying in through an open window. I mean aggressive, organized swarms equipped with tiny wire cutters and a coordinated breaching strategy.) We killed hundreds of them--over a dozen one day. I started to document my kills as art pieces on Instagram (see above).

It was with much delight that we left E-town behind for our Canada-centric vacation to Ontario!

(Note: we did not visit TORNOOT.)

 

(But we did, however, visit Toronto.)

Toronto is a city famous for its vibrant culture, epic traffic jams, and millions of residents who secretly wish they were living in New York. Even more exciting than Toronto (a low bar, I admit 🤣) was Niagara Falls (the Canadian side only!). Here are obligatory gorgeous photos of the falling-water thing they have there: 

 

If you are not aware of Niagara Falls, there is more to do than stare at water being affected by gravity. You can see butterflies and birds! Rides and attractions! There are (multiple) wax museums!

(I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.)

Coming home was its own adventure. On approach to YEG, there was a severe (orange) thunderstorm in our way. Because of course there was. Sigh. Now that there's Wifi on flights, I was able to listen to the pilot talking to YEG ATC (via LiveATC.net). It was pretty cool hearing what was happening in real time. Kudos to the WestJet flight crew for deciding to divert to Calgary, after holding for a few minutes. Yeah, the trip ended up being longer, but--safety first! That said, as an Edmontonian, being forced to land in Calgary feels like a subtle personal insult from the atmosphere.

      

(Orange alert! Looping around, getting dizzy!) 

Family time was a priority this summer. My youngest daughter graduated high school and will be going to the U of A this fall. We're all going to be super busy and won't be able to spend much time together. Unfortunately, we...er, did not include her when the rest of us went to Banff. (In our defence, she was on a band trip to Whistler.)

(I walked all the way up here, for all you know.)

We did all go on the High Level Bridge streetcar. Slow, quiet, and relaxing. Bonus: no severe thunderstorms!

(Who doesn't love trains?)

My parents recently downsized, meaning that I finally had to move all of my remaining junk out of their house. I had been putting this off for 29 years, but I can finally say that I have moved out of my parent's basement. Aside from a startling amount of collectibles, I also had to take my large, poorly organized comics collection. It took a few weeks, but I finally sorted, organized, and cataloged all 3,804 comics. The bad news is that I haven't been able to find a buyer yet. So although I am now a Mature Independent Adult, my comics and collectibles are now cluttering my house instead:

     

In the spring, I picked up another teaching award. It's not a big deal.

(Okay, maybe it's a bit of a big deal--look at that hunk of glass!)

In between all the fun, there was still: work. For example, inspired by a student who took an independent study course with me, I worked up a new lecture topic on naturalistic decision making and the Recognition-Primed Decision Model. (Honestly, it's way more exciting than it sounds.) After the work overload of last year, it was nice to have a better work/life balance.

Hopefully, you had a chance to relax and recharge over the summer! 🌞

Why aren't you studying?

The Canvas Hack

[publicdomainpictures.net]

In Spring, 2026, the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) was hacked. Reportedly, 8,809 institutions were hit, over 3 terabytes of data were exfiltrated, and about 275 million users--students, staff, faculty, and administrators--were affected.

What happened, and when?

• April 25: criminal cyber-extortion group ShinyHunters breached Canvas security.
• April 29: Instructure, the makers of Canvas, detected unauthorized access in their systems.
• May 1: Instructure publicly acknowledged this incident, and claimed that it was “contained.”
• May 7, shortly after 2:00pm MDT: Canvas was hijacked in a ransomware attack by the threat actors; when users logged in, they saw a message posted by the hackers. This message urged individual institutions to pay the ransom, otherwise academic and personal information would be leaked.
  

• May 7: the University of Alberta took Canvas offline.
• May 11: Instructure reported that it reached an agreement with ShinyHunters. It is rumoured to have paid US$10 million in ransom. As part of the agreement:
  - The breached data was returned to Instructure.
  - Instructure received digital confirmation of data destruction (shred logs).
  - No customers will be extorted as a result of this incident, publicly or otherwise.
• May 14: the Vice-Provost (Learning Initiatives) held an online information session, giving a little more information about the incident.
• May 15: the U of A Provost announced that full Canvas functionality would start being restored.

What are some unanswered questions?

• Was the attack vector vishing (voice phishing)? That is, did ShinyHunters gain access to Canvas by a social engineering attack, in which a ShinyHunters member called someone at Instructure on the phone and convinced them that they were an employee who needed access?
• Instructure did admit that the attack involved Canvas’ Free-for-Teacher product somehow, and that has been permanently discontinued. How exactly was this system involved?
• What is Instructure doing to prevent this from happening again? Employees are a notoriously porous attack surface, compared to hardware infrastructure and software. You can upgrade your systems; you cannot upgrade people.

How was my class affected?
My Spring term PSYCH 258 course was directly affected: Canvas was unavailable for about a week. Fortunately, though, learning was not brought to a complete halt. I teach in person, so classes continued relatively normally. I still provide my lecture notes on my own course website, which was unaffected the incident; I just emailed the class the course URL. (Bear Tracks allows instructors to send email messages to the entire class. I also have offline class lists in my marks spreadsheets.) My course website also has copies of the syllabus and assignment documents; this is redundant with my posting of these document on Canvas.

There were two components of my courses that were impacted. First, I was unable to do in-class Wooclap polls. Well, that’s not exactly true. I was able to run the interactive polls in class on Wooclap.com, but I was not able to synchronize the results with Canvas, which is how I give participation credit. So I just gave the entire class credit for those Wooclaps. In total, four polls were affected. I have no problem giving out free marks in situations like this.

The other component was a bit more substantial. With Canvas down, how could students submit the online lab that was due on May 8? Here, too, I had a workaround. Google Forms can accept file submissions. All I had to do was email students the link to the Google Form. Grading the assignment still presented a challenge. However, Canvas was soon available with limited functionality (no access to third-party plugins like Wooclap), so I copied the submitted labs over to Canvas manually. One by one. Fortunately, some students were able to submit their labs via Canvas. But copying dozens of files took almost an hour.

What did we learn?
I have received the occasional complaint from students about having some course materials on a separate website. I realize it may be a little bit confusing and different, if you are expecting everything to be on Canvas. But I do have a link to it on Canvas, so there is not a tremendous amount of extra effort required. This incident illustrated the advantages of redundancy. In case of a disaster, not everything has to come to a crashing halt. The cost is that it takes a little bit of effort on students’ part, and a lot of extra effort on my part. I think it’s worth it.

I’m happy that the University of Alberta did not have to pay any ransom. There is no money in the budget for that. I guess I’m satisfied that Instructure paid the ransom to keep everyone’s personal information from becoming public. It’s not like I have any deep dark secrets on Canvas, but I acknowledge that students probably do not want all of their grades made public.

Finally, everyone--corporations, institutions, individuals--have a long way to go to ensure privacy and security. Yes, enable encryption and passwords on your devices; keep them updated. More importantly, be suspicious. What if you were to get a late-night email from your instructor’s email address, pressuring you to send them your login ID and password because of [reasons]? Fraud is becoming an increasing concern. According to a new study:

Scams are now one of the most common crimes in the world. In the United Kingdom, for example, scams accounts for 40% of all reported crimes. A 2024 report from the Global Anti-Scam Alliance states that about half of the world’s population is faced with a scam solicitation at least once a week.

The cost of scams worldwide is estimated to be more than $5 trillion USD a year—roughly equivalent to the combined 2024 budgets for Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. But victims often do not recoup their funds, and for close to 90% of cases, victims do not report that fraud occurred.

Be wary!

Why aren’t you studying?

The SPOT (Spring, 2025)

I wasn't going to write a post about these student comments--after all, spring courses are pretty small and it's a unique experience taking a course over six weeks. But then I thought that that is the best reason to post these comments. Never taken a spring course? It's a completely different thing, as we'll see. Anyway, there aren't many comments because the classes are so much smaller. (When is that new Spider-verse movie coming? I need new pictures of The Spot.)

⚠️ Warning! As noted in my previous posts, content warning applies.

Course Design

the design of the concepts was quite confusing

Everything was super clear

Most well designed class I have taken at U of A.

Love your notes and teaching style, I wish I could take every class with you

Not enough time for review for final taught testable material till the last minute

(The last post is e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y common in spring term. No, there is not enough time. That's not a criticism of my course design, but of spring term itself. It goes by VERY quickly, and you need to make use of every minute. So, why don't I just redesign my course? I have. The content is different, the exams are shorter, and there are fewer assignments. But I can only do so much to compensate for the course being compressed into 6 weeks. It's a 3-credit PSYCH 258 course. I'm not allowed to make it significantly different from a 3-credit PSYCH 258 course offered in Fall or Winter terms.)

Course Resources

I mostly like the top hat textbook, but there were some annoying issues with it, particularly the top hat app.

the labs were certainly helpful in granting an extra understanding of the course concepts

I liked the labs and epolls

I was a little disappointed that we did not cover the language unit

the class got a 65 percent overall which is very low.

(The language chapter/lecture had to go. It doesn't serve anyone well to rush and cram more content in (see above comment). I recommend you read the language chapter on your own. It's pretty interesting! Yes, the mean was low. But my grade cutoffs are low, too. The median grade in the course ended up being a B, which is right where it should be for a 200-level course. And 16% of students got an A-level final grade.)

Graded Work/Instructional Approach

Very approachable and friendly :)

(So, sort of like a capybara? :)

The lab components and ePolls really helped show how I'm able to apply my learning. I get terrible test anxiety and perform poorly on every test I take, so having the chance to display my understanding in other ways is a HUGE win for me

Dr. Loepelmann was really engaging and funny, super kind, and went at a pace fast enough to keep you awake but slow enough to understand.

Perfect amount of workload for a course. Not too much, not too little.

Professor Loepelmann does a phenomenal job of introducing challenging concepts to the class. He provides really supportive and insightful examples for every concept and term, making the ideas easier to grasp. He very clearly cares about the success of every one of his students!

Dr. Loepelmann puts an immense amount of effort into creating interesting and engaging lectures.

Dr. Loepelmann's instructing style was my favourite component of the course. I greatly enjoyed how much he favoured class participation and included us in many of the studies, which helped me recall them much better. His delivery of the course content was so enthusiastic it reached a level of entertainment that I have never felt in a course before; it helped me digest and recall the material much more easily because it nearly felt like I spent an hour watching a psychology movie.

(First, thanks for your kind words. Second, compare all of these above comments to the ones for (basically) the same course when I taught it in Fall and Winter terms. Yes, I have selected the comments, so you're not getting the raw data, but I am trying to select representative comments that capture the essence of the feedback I get. As a scientist, I'd luuuuurve to know what accounts for this difference. It's not just a one-off; Spring is always viewed more favourably. Why?
  A) Students are different. You choose when to take your classes. Maybe students who take Spring term courses are different because...they don't have to work a fulltime job from May to August? Or in Spring you take fewer courses, so you can focus on them more, compared to Fall/Winter? I dunno.
  B) The course is different. Well, yes: there is less work, but that work is crammed into much less time. Why would that lead to a more positive experience?
  C) The prof is different. Nope. It's still just me. I even tell exactly the same jokes! 🙄)

Why aren't you studying?