We're all set for Back to School

Linn Veronica Bredesen,
Chief Technology Officer, itslearning

I hope everyone has had a great summer holiday. Some of you have already started school, while some others are preparing to go back to school for the new school year. Here at itslearning, we have been using the summer to get ready for the annual Back to School season.

The period between August and September is always the time of year when we see peak usage, so the Engineering Department has been taking measures to make sure that we are ready for higher than average usage to prevent any disruptions in the first few days of people going back to school.

The Operations team has also been busy this summer moving more of our customers and services to Amazon Web Services for easier scalability. One of the major reasons for doing this is to be able to quickly scale up our services if we need to when we see higher than normal usage, especially with many schools continuing with hybrid learning – blending online learning with traditional classroom time.

Preparing for all eventualities

After the usage peak we saw in the first few weeks of March when the pandemic forced schools everywhere to suddenly close and switch to remote learning, we expect Back to School this year to be even more busy than normal. There will be a mix of instruction methods from strictly remote learning in some districts to hybrid learning, while in some regions where itslearning is used, students are going back to the classrooms as per normal. We are also aware that education administrators can close schools on short notice, and are well prepared for that. If ever you need to know how to plan for such an eventuality, or if you are experiencing any issues with the platform, contact your Key Account Manager at itslearning. For support needs, you can get in touch with us anytime via our Support site. And, remember, you can always check the status of your itslearning platform online – as part of our commitment to transparency, all incidents will be reported here.

Additionally, we have reorganized the technical department to facilitate cross-functional teams so that we can go ‘all hands on deck’ for quicker troubleshooting should any technical issue arise.

We are also taking very good care of health and safety at itslearning. Due to the ongoing Covid-19 situation, we have implemented a strict rotation plan on who can be physically at the office to protect everyone across the team and ensure that we keep the virus at bay. Travel remains restricted and meetings continue online for the most part, which has become our ‘new normal’ in 2020. At itslearning we pride ourselves in being proactive, rather than reactive.

Our mission has always been to develop and deliver easy to use (efficient), effective and empowering technologies that help improve education. Security and safe usage of the platform is our top priority as we continue to improve the code every day. If you believe you have found a security vulnerability in itslearning, drop us a note at [email protected] Please read our Responsible Disponsible Policy first.

As you can see, we are planning for all the different scenarios on our end so that you have less to worry about. I’m hoping you will all stay safe and I want to take this opportunity to wish everyone a successful Back to School this year. You can also find more tips on our Back to School page.

Update to my post – August 26

So, talk about Murphy’s Law. Just hours after I wrote this blogpost, some of our US customers reported that they were unable to log into itslearning. Thankfully, as I mentioned above, we had all hands on deck to troubleshoot and figure out what went wrong.

We found out where the bottlenecks were and implemented a fix so we were able to recover service. We also disabled a small component for some of our users and have implemented a code fix for this issue as well. We retested and monitored closely to ensure that the problem did not recur and are happy to report that this issue is now resolved.

I do apologize if you did not have a great first day at school.