College still looking for solution to internet outages

Lara Mills, program coordinator and professor for the public relations program, was teaching the second of three back-to-back classes on Oct. 30 when all of a sudden the internet went out.

“I was about to have the students do an in-class exercise, which involved reading an article I had posted for them on Brightspace, having a discussion about it and then writing something related to it,” said Mills. “Since they couldn’t access the article, I dispensed with the exercise and let them go early.”

Since Oct. 17, the internet at Algonquin College’s Woodroffe campus has been going out repeatedly. Information Technology Services (ITS) has been investigating the cause of the outages, but has been unsuccessful at finding the solution.

“ITS has been working diligently with our service provider to identify and address the root cause of the outage,” said ITS in an email to students and staff on Nov. 1. “We have validated that the incident is not being caused by hardware failure or obsolete software.”

The internet outages have been causing disruptions to students’ learning. Some classes, such as Mills’ public relations classes, have had to pivot mid-class when the internet disappears. Mills said the internet was still out by the time her third class of the day on Oct. 30.

“For the next section I taught of the same class, I was still able to do my lecture and screen the videos I’d planned as I was presenting from the hardwired desktop computer,” said Mills. “When it came time to do the exercise, one of the students suggested bringing the article up on the big screen from the desktop computer so they could read it there. It worked OK and we were able to proceed with the exercise.”

Students are finding it difficult to complete work on campus due to the internet outages, especially those with online classes.

“My online classes get weird,” said Beckie Leach, a Level 2 baking and pastry arts management student.

When Leach remembers to work on their online class, “the Wi-Fi isn’t working,” they said.

Leach lives on campus in R-building, meaning they can never escape the internet outages.

In a poll conducted on the Algonquin Times Instagram account, 25 survey respondents answered how the internet outages were disrupting their classes and how their ability to complete assignments had been affected. The survey found that 56 per cent of respondents believe the internet outages to be very disruptive for completing assignments. Fifty-two per cent of respondents found the internet outages to be mildly disruptive to their classes.

Mills said she has heard of incidents where students were unable to complete their midterms due to the internet going out.

“One of my students was telling me that the week before break, one of his project groups was just about to do a scheduled midterm presentation to a class client (over Zoom) when the internet died,” said Mills.

Despite the unreliable internet, Mills and her students remain positive.

“Having the internet go down so often over the past few weeks has certainly made for an unpredictable teaching experience. One of my students in the second Wi-Fi-free class put a positive spin on the situation, though,” said Mills. “Once they finished the exercise, she commented that it was good that the internet was down, because ‘we had to use our brains.’”

ITS was running tests and hoped to know more about what was causing the internet outages by Nov. 8.