By Joseph Friess-Peters
jpeters@statenews.com
If you ask a college student what they do in the morning, you will get a wide array of answers. But many will say that somewhere between hitting the snooze button for five extra minutes of sleep and rushing out the door, they check their emails.
Unfortunately for MSU students, this might not have been possible during the first week or so of the new semester.
It seems like every year it is the same cycle — the first and last week of the semester, a bunch of important MSU sites start crashing. With professors relying on technology more and more, this leaves students extremely vulnerable to these sites going down.
Everything students need to succeed is online. When these servers are flooded, all their resources are (temporarily) lost. That means no access to Angel, Desire2Learn, WeBWork, LON-CAPA or email.
It is very disheartening when I am trying to print lecture notes off before class and D2L won’t open.
Friends of mine have also voiced frustration that they couldn’t do their homework over the weekend because of crashes.
Last semester I couldn’t access my final exam study guides because of servers crashing. In retrospect, I was lucky. Some students had online finals that wouldn’t load.
If these sites crash when we need them most, why not name them something more accurate? How about “e-fail?” If my “Desire2Learn” is being impeded by this software, how much of an “Angel” is it to me?
I don’t understand how this can be such a consistent problem. It is common sense that the servers will be overwhelmed with so many users accessing them in such a sort span of time. Isn’t there a way to plan for that overload and still have the sites operate?
Look, I don’t want to surf these sites. They could load like dial-up and I would be happy. What makes me unhappy is when I try to enter my login information for 30 minutes before my email finally opens. Then I have to stop from pulling my hair out when I click an unread email and I get sent back to the login screen.
I just feel like something could — and needs to — be planned in advance to avoid this frustration.
There are plenty of stressful things happening to students throughout the semester. Do we really need to add logging into our own school accounts to the list?
