Materia Status

What was updated during the December 2025 downtime?

Since 2012, Materia’s server application used a PHP framework called FuelPHP. As part of a broader modernization initiative to address technical debt, we’ve rewritten the entire application in a popular python framework called Django. In addition, we transitioned from the LTI 1.1 specification to 1.3, which is what we use to communicate with Webcourses. These two changes are meant to put Materia on solid technical footing for another 10+ years.

What changed for faculty and students?

While most of our changes are invisible to users, we’ve designed new course navigation landing pages for faculty and students, improved the robustness of LTI launches and gradebook sync, and fundamentally changed how widget access is managed in Webcourses. Previously, widget ownership was decoupled from course ownership: an instructor could own a course but not have access permissions to widgets within it. Now, if an instructor visits a widget they don’t have access to within their course, they are instead granted provisional access to view the widget in My Widgets and the scores the widget has collected within the course context.

I noticed something behaves weird or incorrectly since the update. Could it be a bug?

We did a lot of work to make sure everything functions as well or better than before, but Materia is a big project! We recommend reporting any issues you discover to Webcourses Support. These reports are a huge help to us, and you’ll be doing your part to make Materia a better experience for everyone.