Education authorities apologise after Learning Place crashes on first day of homeschooling

The LNP is calling for Education Minister Grace Grace to be sacked over the homeschooling debacle, claiming her failure to front media yesterday during the height of statewide outages was a “dereliction of her duty as minister”.

THE LNP has sensationally called for Education Minister Grace Grace to be sacked after the statewide online learning system outage yesterday, caused by an “unprecedented amount of traffic” to the website.

The Opposition’s education spokesman Jarrod Bleijie said Education Minister Grace Grace’s yesterday decided to “dodge cameras” and labelled the move a “dereliction of her duty as minister”.

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The LNP is calling for Education Minister Grace Grace to be sacked over the issues that have plagued online learning systems. Picture: Steve Pohlner

“When students mess up we tell them to own up and say sorry,” Mr Bleijie said.

“Grace Grace is setting an atrocious example to Queensland kids by running away and refusing to apologise.

“Annastacia Palaszczuk needs to stop being weak, take responsibility and sack her incompetent Minister.

“This scandal is reminiscent of Anna Bligh’s failure to sack Paul Lucas despite the Queensland Health payroll debacle,” Mr Bleijie said.

“Queensland students and parents deserve better.”

Mr Bleijie said IT problems were another reason why Queensland parents should be allowed to send their kids to school if they choose.

The Education Minister’s office has been contacted for comment.

Parents, students and schools are today reporting ongoing issues with online learning sites despite authorities working through the night following statewide outages yesterday.

“The Department of Education has advised schools they are still trying to resolve issues with Microsoft-based applications such as SharePoint and OneNote, as well as eLearn,” Balmoral State High School said on social media.

Department of Education Director-General Tony Cook has apologised after Queensland’s online learning systems failed yesterday. Picture: Josh Woning

“These delays have occurred because of the high traffic from online learning across Queensland.

“We appreciate your patience and persistence in working with these platforms to support at-home learning.”

The Brisbane School of Distance Education reported internal services are slow or timing out due to “overwhelming amount of concurrent users”.

The services include Blackboard/eLearn, Microsoft Office online products including OneNote and emails, school websites and The Learning Place, a post on social media said.

“Issues have been reported with the Blackboard and Blackboard Collaborate for those who are able to log in,” the post said.

“This is being investigated as a matter of urgency. Thank you for your patience.”

It comes after education authorities apologised to parents, teachers and students who were unable to use the Department of Education’s online learning system yesterday but has not ruled out that a system outage won’t happen again.

Department of Education Director-General Tony Cook has this morning apologised to Queenslanders who were unable to access their The Learning Place yesterday, and said they had been working overnight to increase the size of their servers to try to prevent the same issues occurring.

“We’ve increased the size of our servers overnight, we did that already during the holiday break period,” he said.

With 1.8 million hits in 30 minutes at the start of the school day, it wasn’t until about midday that the website was operational, he said on ABC radio this morning.

“There was extensive testing and we planned for it, we increased the size of servers but the reality is in that 30 minute period we got a lot of hits, and what often happens is when someone can’t get onto a website they try again and they try again and that affects how it all operates,” he said.

There were also technological issues with OneNote, an application used by many schools that not only impacted public and non-government schools in Queensland yesterday but around the country, he said.

Latticia Byram grapples with online learning with her children Hunter, 11, Connor, 14, Evia, 8. Picture: John Gass

“I acknowledge the frustration around IT and as the Director-General I apologise for that,” he said.

Despite the statewide system outage Mr Cook said there were tens of thousands of operating online yesterday and many thousands of students were using hard-copy learning materials provided by schools.

But he did not guarantee there would be similar problems as the state logs on for day two of Term.

“What I can say is we worked very hard overnight to increase the capacity of servers, there will always be IT issues, some of these issues would be out of our control, such when there’s national organisations or international organisations like Microsoft who themselves were experiencing challenges … yesterday as well,” he said.

“We’re doing our best this morning and we’re absolutely asking people, if you can’t get on, that’s not such an issue, you’ve got material there, there’s other material there you could be using, take some time out to spend with your child.”