DENVER — Across the country, as school districts launched the first day of the fall semester in remote learning, the often-used video meeting platform Zoom suffered an outage causing districts like Jefferson County significant problems.
"Yes, it's not working," Van Cole, a freshman at Arvada West High School, said.
Van is the son of 9News Photojournalist Tom Cole who had trouble getting into his remote classes.
"I don't think some of the teachers are able to get in," Van said. "I think it's sort of a representation of how this whole remote learning is gonna go."
Metropolitan State University of Denver Computer Sciences Professor Dr. Steve Beaty said the outage is due to the increased demand on Zoom as school districts around the United States started classes on the same day.
"The stress tests are hard to fake, if you will," Beaty said. "Until an event actually happens, it's very difficult to predict all that can go wrong."
But, Beaty did credit Zoom with good communication and a quick response to fix the outage.
"I will say, though, turning it around in 4 hours is pretty impressive and that in general, Zoom has had 10 times more traffic than it was essentially designed for," Beaty said.
In Denver, Denver Public Schools (DPS) spokesperson Winna Maclaren said it was a different experience than JeffCo.
"Everything went according to plan," Maclaren said. "I know there were some challenges with Zoom around the country."
DPS doesn't use Zoom and Maclaren said all the preparation the district made for the first day of fall remote learning paid off.
"I think that just the amount of work that went into planning this summer making sure that we had a really robust remote learning program, making sure we're doing everything we can to get devices into the hands of students," Maclaren said.
But, Beaty said devices and systems have limits. He expects more problems as remote learning continues.
"There's nothing perfect and computers aren't perfect and the people who write the software aren't perfect, can't be perfect," Beaty said. "So, there are going to be problems from time to time."
When asked about the remote learning problems, JeffCo Schools provided this response:
"Today we engaged in our first day of learning for 2020-21, and mostly, all went very well. We had 14,000 active classrooms in Google; 48,000 posts by educators this weekend and today; and, despite Zoom issues, we still had 1,200 users hosting over 3,000 meetings.
However, yes, we had a couple of different, but related, technical issues this morning that have been resolved or will be by tomorrow. We had some families report issues with logging in to Jeffco systems and viewing our website, and we had a couple of virtual class/parent meetings interrupted by "bad actors" who displayed various types of inappropriate material during these live sessions.
The reasons for these issues are:
• Both Zoom and Schoology had issues nationally this weekend and into this morning that caused them to not work.
o Some teachers and school staff, in their excitement to welcome students back and to ensure the learning began, implemented workarounds that unfortunately involved systems and protocols that were not in line with our official guidance and best practices for holding virtual classes and meetings.
• In addition, due to wanting to allow the most flexibility for our families to choose their learning environment preference (in-person/hybrid or remote only), many schools were still adjusting class rosters late into last week and even this morning. This caused some log jams in the systems that our registration and rostering program feeds and some families were not able to log in for lessons at designated class times.
Staff have been previously provided training and guidance, however we will be reinforcing the protocols, guidance, and best practices for conducting online classes and meetings today.
Additionally, we have a special help option for our educators that has been up since August 14 with all-day Ed Tech Support Office Hours - a virtual "hotline" for educators to get assistance with and troubleshoot issues with any Jeffco system staffed by our ed tech experts. We are reminding all staff of this option as well.
Along with those two reminders, we have stressed to all schools the importance of following all district guidelines and protocols for holding digital meetings, rather than implementing workarounds that potentially compromise the experience for students.
Again, as of now, most of these issues have been resolved and our first day of learning is nearly complete. We do not anticipate having further issues like today, at least with our own systems."
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