NC officials call repeated outage of online learning system 'unacceptable'

School systems in Durham, Winston-Salem and in Wayne County reported students unable to log in to NCEdCloud and asked for patience.

NCEdCloud runs both Powerschool, which is used to maintain student records, including attendance, course registration and student transcripts, as well as Canvas, one of the primary online learning platforms school districts are using this fall.

“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," state Superintendent of Public Instruction Mark Johnson said in a statement. "These are challenging times, and everyone is trying to extend more grace. That’s what Identity Automation, the vendor, got on Monday, the first time their remote learning tool went down."

After Monday's two-hour statewide outage, the state Department of Public Instruction said Identity Automation was investigating what caused the delays but did not report finding a reason or a solution.

On Wednesday, DPI, which contracts for NCEdCloud on behalf of many school systems statewide, alerted members to the problem at about 10 a.m.

"NCDPI is aware that users are experiencing issues when accessing NCEdCloud. The vendor is investigating this as an urgent issue," agency officials tweeted.

"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 [the state Department of Information Technology] in the days ahead.”

Gov. Roy Cooper also called the problems "unacceptable" during a Wednesday afternoon news conference.

"To have those kinds of technical glitches when you're trying to do remote learning, that has to be frustrating to teachers, students and parents," Cooper said. "Our students learning remotely need to have this kind of connection with their school."

Online classes are difficult for both teachers and students, he said, but schools really have few options during a pandemic.

"We have to make it work," he said. "No. 1, we need to keep our teachers and students safe, and No. 2, our students have to keep on learning."

Separately Wednesday, Cooper announced $12 million in grants to boost internet access in 11 rural counties, primarily in the eastern part of the state. The money is expected to bring high-speed service to more than 8,000 households and 250 businesses.

The governor said upgraded broadband service in rural areas has been a priority for economic development purposes, but remote learning has made it even more vital to those counties.

See which districts had students that weren't able to log into school Monday morning

NCEdCloud was launched a decade ago as part of the Race to the Top initiative for public schools. The state has paid Identity Automation $5.6 million since 2016 to maintain it.

According to the company's website, it provides service to 11 other K-12 school systems in addition to DPI, including Chicago Public Schools and the Austin Independent School District in Texas. Schools in most of the other states haven't started class yet.

Wake County schools has its own separate deal with Identity Automation.

A fact sheet shows the system routinely handled 231 million logins in 2018, boasting uptime reliability 99.998 percent.