Coronavirus: a very disturbed first day of school at health home

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Complicated start for health home education against the background of the coronavirus crisis. Since this morning, too many simultaneous connections have undermined the servers of the tools deployed by the Ministry of Education.

Since this morning, millions of students of all levels discover the distance education set up by the Ministry of National Education, so that the period of confinement is not "a period when students are not working", as Jean-Michel Blanquer wishes. Problem, this "inauguration" of health home courses has turned into a fiasco in many cases.

Thus, the Minister may have said – at the end of February – that arrangements had been made for weeks to manage an influx of connections of at least 7 to 8 million simultaneously, the reality is that digital workspaces (ENT) are saturated. Ditto for the e-lyco portal for college students or Pronote. Indeed, on social networks, messages alerting the unavailability of these platforms deployed since 2009 are legion.

Klassroom, a private web service for organizing classes, the use of which has been encouraged since the start of the school year (particularly for exchanges between pupils, parents and teachers), suffers the same setback, pending a increased server capacity.

System D while waiting for servers to respond

A situation that forces teachers to adapt. Contacted by us, a professor explains to us that she was unable to connect to the platform from which she accesses her timetable, gives homework and fills in the report cards. Even checking his emails was impossible. Resigned, she said she was waiting for the connection to the service to be restored before transmitting the rest of her lessons to her students.

Joined again a little later, she explained that the system sometimes came back online, before becoming inaccessible soon after. Worried that she would not be able to fill out the bulletins for class advice planned for the next two weeks, she decided to go through another channel to contact her students: Messenger, via a Facebook account that she had already created for her classes. .

A real national challenge

The "stress Review" of the distance education system does not start well. Recall that the number of schoolchildren and teachers to put in contact around online teaching tools is gigantic: more than 12 million pupils, 2.7 million students and 870,000 teachers. "The situation is completely new. The answers are necessarily imperfect", is obliged to recognize the Minister.

Saturday, only 220,000 registrations had taken place on the portal "My class at health home" of Cned, capable of managing 15 million simultaneous connections according to officials. In addition to the material concerns posed by distance education, this shows that there is still a lot of pedagogy to be done around the importance of these digital teaching means.

Despite this bitter observation, it is difficult to be surprised. Obviously, such a massive influx of connections on these platforms, in a very short period of time, brought down the system. It is a safe bet that the situation will improve in the coming days, as new habits have been acquired and on the assumption that the connections will be spread out over time. In addition, it is not impossible that new servers will be deployed, so that the "capacity" of digital education reaches the dimension necessary to face the major challenge that is the continuity of teaching in crisis situations.

Let us finish by pointing out that the National Education platforms were not the only ones to be impacted by this first day of telework in France. Several collaborative working tools, like Microsoft Teams, also had to make connection peaks which, again, could force them to resize their infrastructures.

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