Governor, school chief call it ‘unacceptable’ that system for online classes fails again
Both North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and State Superintendent Mark Johnson called it “unacceptable” that a statewide computer system used by students for connecting to online classes crashed twice this week.
The NCEdCloud system was down for several hours Wednesday morning after having been down for several hours on Monday as well. The system outages are hampering efforts by school districts that are opening the new school year with remote instruction due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
“It really is unacceptable to have those kinds of technical glitches when we’re trying to do remote learning,” Cooper, a Democrat, said at a news conference Wednesday. “That has to be frustrating to teachers, students and parents.”
Johnson, a Republican, said “blunt discussions” will be held with the system’s vendor about the repeated outages.
“It’s bad enough that so many students don’t have the option to attend school in-person, but malfunctions of the tool that so many schools use to access remote learning are simply unacceptable,” Johnson said in a statement Wednesday.
Johnson said that Identity Automation, the vendor for the NCEdCloud system since 2013, was extended grace on Monday by the state Department of Public Instruction for the problems. But he said that’s changing.
‘Blunt discussions’ will be held with vendor
“Parents, educators, and students are all doing the best that we can and deserve technology that works,” Johnson said. “While we are limited in terms of what we can do immediately, rest assured that DPI will be having blunt discussions about these failures with the vendor and NC DIT (Department of Information Technology) in the days ahead.”
Cooper said that DPI is responsible for the system, but DIT has offered assistance.
Identity Automation, which is based in Texas, did not return telephone messages from The News & Observer requesting comment.
NCEdCloud is being put under greater stress than normal because more than 70% of the state’s 1.5 million public students started the school year on Monday with online classes only due to COVID-19 safety concerns.
Teachers use NCEdCloud to access PowerSchool for student records. Some students and teachers also use NCEdCloud to access Canvas, a learning management system for online classes.
“It needs to be fixed because our students learning remotely need to have this kind of connection with their schools,” Cooper said.
The Wake County school system uses a different version of Canvas so it’s largely unaffected by the state issues.
This story was originally published August 19, 2020 at 11:38 AM.
