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It couldn’t have been worse at the end of the holidays – Berlin’s largest digital learning platform couldn’t have been used at the beginning of Monday’s lessons, so around 100,000 potential users couldn’t work, even though there are no face-to-face lessons in schools that week.
Just a few minutes after the 7:00 am kickoff, the Twitter news feed received the first indications that the “Berlin learning space” was not working. At first there was no information about the reasons, so users sat in front of their devices stunned and annoyed, sometimes even desperate: it was the second failure in a month.
As reported, the study room has not been accessible since 2 p.m. Sunday. For “maintenance work” it was called – just at a time when teachers wanted to stop their material because homeschooling was supposed to start for students on Monday at 8 o’clock with the official end of the Christmas break .
Full classroom teaching is out of the question for at least the next two weeks.
Announcement: “Server unavailable”
“Nothing works at all. From the area selection it goes to the login mask. Then there is a redirect to the area mask. From there, back to the login mask. At some point, a 503: The server cannot be accessed. And before anyone asks: Yes, the login details are correct, “tweeted a mother.
Another parent reports that the study room is completely overloaded and the video conference with his daughter’s class is canceled. Nor could school assignments be made because they are stored on the platform.
Not only the spokesman for the state parents, Norman Heise, lamented the false start, but also the opposition. CDU President Kai Wegner criticized “the Senate’s technical inability” as a symptom of the “flawed” red-red-green education policy.
“Digitization: a foreign word”
“First server problems, then maintenance work and now also login delays – this is the ‘learning room in Berlin’,” said FDP MP Paul Fresdorf. The digitization of schools remains “a foreign word for the Berlin Senate.”
At the beginning of the shutdown in mid-December, there were comparable problems with the study hall.
Apparently, the problems with the “learning space” are now causing a change: According to information from the Tagesspiegel, Education Senator Sandra Scheeres (SPD) wants to allow schools to use the commercial learning platform “Itslearning” for free. His spokesperson confirmed this upon request.
The offer “will be launched shortly”. So far schools have to pay themselves, which is too expensive for many. “There are plans to allow schools to go ‘Itslearning,’ Klesmann said.
The turn towards “Itslearning”: a turning point
This step marks a great turning point, because until now the educational administration had only relied on the “learning space” that teachers had developed since 2004. However, they hardly invested in development.
That changed only marginally when the first lockdown paralyzed face-to-face teaching in March: Instead of using summer and fall to invest in improving the “learning space,” the education administration removed the possibility of further lockdown, according to principals. from schools.
Privacy advocate was not heard
Faced with the immense task of maintaining digital exchange between a third of the students and their teachers, it is impossible to understand why the “learning room” was not better equipped. Furthermore, Scheeres failed for months to implement the state data protectionist’s demands regarding the “learning space.” As a result, the learning platform made headlines through no fault of their own.
However, the “learning room” progressed steadily: the number of regular users had multiplied in the wake of the pandemic, more and more features had been added, so that there were 108,000 users in December.
[Wenn Sie alle aktuellen Nachrichten live auf Ihr Handy haben wollen, empfehlen wir Ihnen unsere runderneuerte App, die Sie hier für Apple- und Android-Geräte herunterladen können.]
In December, the decision was suddenly made to switch to the “Big Blue Button” video conferencing tool, which is accepted by data protection. It is also incomprehensible in specialized circles that this has not been initiated before by the education administration.
The key problem is that within the administration, too, the staff is insufficient to solve all the tasks related to the digitization of schools: the few specialists not only have to deal with the digital pact, but also with the digitization of administrative tasks and educational requirements. The responsible department team does not provide this.
Coalitionists are unhappy
As a result, there is also a dispute within the coalition about how the many digitization tasks should be prioritized and funded – just one main committee meeting in which green housekeeper Stefanie Remlinger does not call for improvements to the digitization concept.
The objective should be “to provide schools with a protected and functional digital framework in which they can work freely and without worry, because there are no problems of capacity, security, codetermination or data protection to solve”.
[Wenn Sie alle aktuellen Nachrichten live auf Ihr Handy haben wollen, empfehlen wir Ihnen unsere runderneuerte App, die Sie hier für Apple- und Android-Geräte herunterladen können.]
The education policy of the left-wing parliamentary group, Regina Kittler, criticized the lack of personnel to be able to cope with all the tasks. “I don’t understand why the ‘learning room’ didn’t work again,” he said when asked. You need more staff and alternatives if there are bottlenecks.
The education administration rejects responsibility for the problems of the “learning space”: “We commission our service providers to increase the computing power so that the growing number of users can be absorbed. The goal was to ensure safe load distribution for up to 120,000 ‘learning room’ users, “said a spokesperson. These capabilities should “be available in sufficient form at this time.”
