Hall Attorneys Files Teacher/Educator Track Class Action Against Instructure Over Canvas Free-for-Teacher Shutdown

Salt Lake City, Utah – July 12, 2026 – Farah L. Vallera filed a putative Teacher/Educator Track class action against Instructure, Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah. Hall Attorneys, P.C., Parsons Behle & Latimer, and Federman & Sherwood represent the plaintiff and proposed classes.

The filing is a separate direct-account-holder track in the consolidated litigation captioned In re Instructure Data Breach Litigation, No. 2:26-cv-00374-RJS-CMR. The complaint states that its teacher and educator claims are distinct from the student-privacy and institutional-contract claims in the consolidated litigation.

A repository of educators' work

The complaint alleges Canvas Free-for-Teacher was both teaching infrastructure and a repository of substantial labor and intellectual capital. Educators allegedly used direct accounts to build course shells, lesson sequences, assessments, quiz banks, slide decks, rubrics, training modules, HTML layouts, discussion prompts, feedback libraries, uploaded files, and other reusable assets over months or years.

The complaint states that Free-for-Teacher supported approximately 76,000 teachers and 2.1 million courses worldwide.

Vallera is described in the complaint as a faculty member, instructional designer, curriculum writer, educational researcher, and founder and CEO of Mindful Learning Design, LLC. She alleges that she personally built and stored dozens of courses in a direct Free-for-Teacher account and did not receive individualized notice of the first recovery window.

The alleged recovery process

According to the complaint, Instructure permanently discontinued Canvas Free-for-Teacher after the May 2026 security incidents and opened a limited recovery period from May 28 through May 29. The complaint alleges Instructure relied on passive notice through a blog, its website, and the login page instead of emailing every direct account holder.

Vallera alleges she missed that window, requested access to her courses, and was told on June 4 that no further retrieval window was then planned. The complaint states that Instructure later announced a second and final window for July 28 and July 29, with support functionality disabled and without a promised individualized fallback if authentication or export fails.

The complaint alleges that a later successful export would not eliminate completed loss of use, professional time already spent pursuing recovery, reasonable rebuilding or migration costs, substitute-platform expenses, or interruption to teaching, training, consulting, and curriculum work.

Proposed classes and claims

The proposed nationwide class is limited to natural persons in the United States who maintained a Canvas Free-for-Teacher account between April 29, 2026 and the present, had course content or work product saved when the service went offline, did not obtain a complete export during the May 28–29 window, and remained unable to access or export all such content from May 30 through at least June 30, 2026.

The proposed Content-Return Subclass addresses members still unable to obtain a complete usable export after a demand or attempted use of the July window. The proposed Demand-and-Refusal Subclass addresses members who requested access, return, or export after May 29 and did not receive a complete individualized export within a reasonable time.

The complaint pleads negligence and gross negligence; breach of contract and, alternatively, breach of implied-in-fact contract and the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing; bailment; conversion; trespass to chattels; unjust enrichment and restitution; and declaratory and injunctive relief.

Relief requested

The filing seeks damages, restitution and an accounting, plus preservation of Free-for-Teacher content and records, account-level disclosure, effective individualized notice, complete export or return of recoverable content, and a reasonable fallback process if authentication or export fails. It also asks that return of educator-owned content not be conditioned on purchasing a paid Canvas product.

—Attorney Nicholas Hall is with Hall Attorneys, a Texas-based law firm focused on complex litigation. He can be found on X at @nicholashall.