Statewide Online Instruction Tool Crashes On First Day of ‘School’

RALEIGH – Who could have guessed something like this would happen? It may be easier to count those who thought virtual schooling was going to go smoothly with no real glitches.

After Governor Roy Cooper prohibited schools from offering full schedule in-person instruction — a decision motivated by Pandemic Panic, not the actual science and data of the virus — many school districts followed suit and doubled down, choosing to offer ONLY remote education online, with no in person education at all.

Well, today is the first day of “school” for a lot of students across the state. And the main tool used to facilitate that online learning crashed in a matter of minutes.

From WRAL:

“[…] This online system, called NCEdCloud, was experiencing technical issues on Monday. North Carolina IT teams are working to resolve the issue.

The system experienced an overload because so many students were trying to login and access online apps at once. Monday morning, several parents and families across the state were not able to login to the cloud and access the online apps that North Carolina schools use for online learning. […]”

Gee, wonder why so many students tried to use the system at once, on the first day of school, after the state’s largest school districts forced their kids into remote learning only?

NCEDCloud is down across North Carolina. That means that students, teachers, parents and all other users cannot access Canvas, PowerSchool or any other NCEDCloud app at the moment. We will update you when this has been resolved.

— Guilford Co. Schools (@GCSchoolsNC) August 17, 2020

“[…] Guilford County Schools reported issues starting the online school year Monday morning. Winston Salem-Forsyth Schools told WGHP that this system is not used to access Microsoft Teams and Zoom — two resources that students in that district use and are able to log into aside from these technical difficulties.

WCNC reports that some parents in the Charlotte area weren’t able to access their Chromebooks last week due to issues with this cloud service.

Cumberland County Schools said their entire website is down Monday morning. It is unclear if that is due to the NCEdCloud’s system crash.”

Mind you, North Carolina currently uses a paper death certificate system. Major state agencies ran on Microsoft Dos until just a few years ago. The state agency that handles unemployment claims is consistently rated one of the worst in the nation because of antiquated systems.

But, yes, let’s force most of our public school kids to rely strictly on the State’s ability to leverage technology for their education.

Open the schools.