Hope dies last: The start of distance learning in Baden-Württemberg
Distance learning was supposed to start in Baden-Württemberg today. But overloaded servers prevented an orderly start to learning from home.
It is 7:30 a.m., I am sitting in front of my computer and waiting for classes to start for my course. If only it weren't for the problem that no student can access the Moodle learning platform. The servers are overloaded, completely so: not only is Moodle down, but also the mail system, the school website, and file access to the shared drives. And it was foreseeable that more students would actually try to access the services on the morning of mandatory distance learning, yet the Ministry of Education (or rather the Baden-Württemberg state university network) was still caught off guard by the rush on the servers.
From my point of view, the tragedy of the story is not that the servers are offline: I don't imagine it is easy to provide thousands of students with a learning platform, especially not when everyone is trying to access the content at the same time and hold video conferences via BigBlueButton. But that this would happen was clear from the outset, and as the Ministry of Education (at least in Baden-Württemberg) has always emphasized that students more often have problems with the technology and that this is why in-person teaching is preferred. So if the Ministry of Education had not from the very beginning blamed students for the bad experiences with homeschooling, I would view the server issues of the learning platforms much less critically.
I also wonder why Baden-Württemberg in particular is being hit so hard by the overload problems: Bavaria is also starting classes again today after the holidays and apparently has no comparable problems with the learning platform Mebis.
Do you still remember how, with the release of every World of Warcraft expansion, you had to wait for hours because the servers had crashed?
So, homeschooling has started again in BaWü...#twitterlehrerzimmer #twlzJanuary 11, 2021
It remains to be seen whether and when the servers will again have capacity for the students and how the Ministry of Education will deal with this in public.
Until then, the only option left is probably to start up World of Warcraft. In my old age (and server problems :)).
