Now that all schools in Singapore have shifted to home-based learning, many students have moved on to using the Student Learning Space portal developed by the Ministry of Education (MOE). But when students tried logging in to begin their online classes, the e-learning portal appeared to experience some technical difficulties.
Once news spread that the Student Learning Space (SLS) portal crashed on Wednesday (19 May), MOE has since apologised for the inconvenience.
Student Learning Space Portal Crashes, MOE Apologises
On the first day of home-based learning, the e-learning portal SLS faced technical issues for several students. Parents inform The Straits Times that the website was laggy starting from 8.20am.
Problems students were facing with the portal included issues with loading pages and submitting actions on a page. Parents also say their children were unable to access some of the site's sections. This problem lasted for 30 minutes to more than an hour.
MOE's information technology division’s divisional director Tan Bee Teck, also says there were students who experienced intermittent accessibility around between 8.55am and 11.50am.
"Subsequently, through further investigations, the team established that the issue was due to an error logging system process that unexpectedly caused some of the web servers to be overloaded," Mr Tan adds.
MOE has addressed the issue and apologised for the hiccup. By 10am, the ministry released a statement on their Facebook page regarding the problem.
They wrote, "We apologise to everyone who was affected this morning."
MOE Resolves The Issue And Deploys Additional Resources
Despite the rough start to home-based learning, the problem was fully resolved by noon. After 11.50, Mr Tan says there were no longer reports of technical issues from users. Online classes reportedly resumed smoothly for the rest of the day.
With the Student Learning Space portal crashing, MOE has also since deployed additional system resources. They are also preparing additional measure to optimise the system's performance going forth this period of HBL.
Mr Tan also explains that this issue was different from that of April last year when SLS crashed due to a high number of users. Back then there were teething issues – when students tried logging in.
How Students Reacted To The Site Crashing
Minister for Education Chan Chun Sing also addressed the problem in a separate Facebook post. Along with his assurance that MOE would review the issue, he shared a few reactions to the incident from a teacher. This is how a few students reacted to SLS crashing:
1. "One said he would go and do something else until the system was up."
2. "Another said he wanted to be an IT engineer in future to fix IT problems."
3. "A third said he would complain to MOE (or was it to the Minister?)"
To conclude his post, the minister added a reflection on the issues that day and writes, "If despite our efforts and things still don’t go smoothly, may we not let circumstances define us but let our responses define the outcome."
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