GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. — Many parents reached out on social media and to 11Alive reporting issues with Gwinnett County Public Schools first day of online learning.
A district spokesman told 11Alive that some 150,000 users--students, teachers and staff--were able to log in by late Wednesday morning; however, the district also had an undetermined number of users unable to get on-line.
GCPS is the largest school system in the state. In 2019-20, the school district served more than 180,000 students.
The district is using a staggered transition to bring students back to campuses for in-person instruction in addition to e-learning, so it is not clear as to how many students were set to begin the day on-line.
"Day 1 of bringing all of Gwinnett’s students on-line for digital learning presented some early challenges that made for a frustrating start to the new year for many students, families, and teachers. We regret the inconvenience and stress they experienced in the morning, and are pleased that efforts to resolve the issues were successful by mid-morning," they said in a letter to parents.
They said throughout the day their technology team worked to identify the problems and take action.
"Although the district ran tests on its systems, we could not replicate having tens of thousands of students actually logging on at the same time," they explained in the letter.
One parent said on the district Facebook page that her daughter’s first period teacher "gave up trying to access and just sent out an email that the students are responsible for the material on their own."
There were hundreds of comments on a district Facebook post updating the situation.
While many were frustrated, others parents have expressed their understanding.
Lauren Rogers Bower said on Facebook that they had some issues, but eventually got in.
"We kept trying and both of my elementary students got in between 8:35-8:40 and it’s been working very well for the last hour since they got in. We knew day one should be the trickiest 🤞🏼 Practice patience because our kids are watching our reactions 😆 Hang in there y’all," she said.
After troubleshooting, the district told 11Alive that the problem was likely with the process of logging into the system, not with the online classes themselves. That process of logging in - where students, teachers and staff enter their user names and passwords - operates on Gwinnett County School servers. But, once logged in, the e-classes that students learn in are hosted on separate, off-site servers, from an independent provider, which have more bandwidth.
As it is, the district said, all the students and teachers trying to log in just as on-line classes were beginning on Wednesday morning became a bottleneck. But, the district added that after students were able to log in - and they were then automatically switched from the district's log-in servers to the off-site digital learning servers - the on-line classwork proceeded with few, isolated and minor problems.
Moving forward, the district is working to expand the capacity of its log-in servers. In the meantime, the district is asking for all students and teachers to log in as early as possible every morning and not wait until their first classes begin. They said that with staggered log-ins, they can start the days smoother.
"We are committed to making digital learning a good experience for our students and families, and for the teachers who are the real heroes of this first day of school. They implemented back-up plans, prepared for the possibility of issues, and worked to make this a good first day for their students, despite the technology challenges they may have faced. We are proud of our teachers and applaud their professionalism and commitment to their students," they said.
11Alive spoke with Dr. Andy Green, an IT expert and professor at Kennesaw State University, about the issue. Dr. Green said it can be a lesson to other school districts planning to launch online learning.
“Gwinnett is just at the front edge of the wave, the wave is going to get bigger," Green cautioned. "We’re going to start seeing more schools coming on board with on-line learning, and they’re going to face the same, fundamental issues that Gwinnett did.... I would be shocked if any system had zero problems" in the first few days of beginning on-line learning instruction.
Dr. Green said that from what he can see, the Gwinnett school system is doing everything right in quickly identifying the problems with its log-in infrastructure in order to fix them.
"What they're trying to pull of is no small feat," Green said, "trying to handle bandwidth load for 150,000-plus users.... The third-party vendor (which is providing the eClass on-line learning instructional material) has plenty of bandwidth and plenty of space, and they can handle the load. But what actually happened was that the Gwinnett County authorization systems (the log-in servers) weren't quite ready for the level of activity that they saw today."
Green said it's notable that on Wednesday morning Gwinnett was able to work through the log-in "bottleneck" by 11:00 a.m.
"Obviously, it's not perfect. You would like to see zero problems like that. But the reality is, you're never going to know until the first day of business, and it sounds like within a relatively short window, four hours--and I know it would be frustrating for me, I would be irritated--it sounds like they were able to get that addressed pretty quickly."
Green said other districts can simply make sure their computer infrastructure has the capacity to handle thousands of users logging in at once - tough to test for in advance, but relatively easy to fix, he said, once they know where exactly they need to expand capacity.