Riverdale Tech Team Responds to Recent Schoology Outages
Photos courtesy of Schoology and Veracross
Due to remote learning, traffic on Schoology and Veracross has increased greatly over the past year, causing frequent outages.
In March 2020, the switch to remote learning seemed smooth for students and teachers, thanks to the hard work of Riverdale’s tech team, who were working hard behind the scenes to adapt the community to the Covid-19 pandemic. The tech department began preparing very early, even though the possibility of holding remote classes seemed unlikely, according to Systems Administrator Mr. Jeffrey Gomez and Director of Technology Dr. Jonathan King. “We actually started to prepare for the possibility of remote school in December, when the pandemic was just beginning,” Mr. Gomez said. When there were inklings of a pandemic, the tech team did not take any chances.
Digital learning platforms such as Schoology were not as prepared. In August 2020, at the beginning of the current school year, Schoology experienced frequent outages. According to Academic Technology Specialist Mr. Matthew Ringh, this was because the site experienced a “700% increase in the number of users.” Schoology was not ready for this massive increase in traffic, therefore causing malfunctions and shutdowns on multiple occasions. Other school websites, such as Google Classroom and Canvas, also saw much greater demand over the course of the pandemic.
When Schoology realized it was underprepared for increasing dependence, it employed its lead engineers to fix the various problems immediately. Though Schoology was able to get back online, it had to, at points, temporarily suspend certain actions, like the ability for students to submit homework on Schoology via Google Drive and TurnItIn. Schoology now pays larger companies and websites to handle the traffic on its sites.
Since August, the company has been able to maintain stability - up until a couple of weeks ago. During report writing week, Schoology malfunctioned multiple times and the company was not sure of the root cause. This made writing reports especially hard for teachers who could not access their grade books. According to Schoology, a cascade failure of its backup system caused the recent outages.
The Riverdale community is so reliant on Schoology that, when it goes down, the tech team is aware right away and alerts Schoology’s team. Dr. King explained that “there is little the Riverdale team can do to fix [Schoology’s] problems. One of Schoology’s systems had a malfunction and stopped working. The Schoology team has backup systems for this, [but] the [backup] system made to fix the malfunction only made the issue worse.” This was an unexpected root cause, which is most likely why it took Schoology days to fix the failure.
Faced with Schoology shutdowns, as well as all of the other hiccups of remote learning, the Riverdale tech team has gone above and beyond to ensure that there are as few issues as possible concerning students and teachers. They have worked seamlessly to maintain the flow of school, while modifying and adding systems such as student schedules, attendance, and Ruvna Health. Mr. Ringh said that he is “really proud of the tech team,” and Dr. King added that he believes they did a “great job”. Remote school truly wouldn’t function without them.
