It’s no go for Glow as glitches strike learning portal for home schooling
THE main online learning portal for Scotland’s schools is beset by problems as home schooling gets under way from today.
Pupils in many council areas are expected to log in to the Glow portal to access classroom materials and communicate with their teacher.
But it has emerged that the system has been encountering problems for several weeks because of technical glitches.
The problem means some new users will struggle to join conversations and have difficulty with sending and receiving messages.
It comes after concerns about the number of children using the portal during the last lockdown.
Education Scotland said the error is down to a technical problem related to the Microsoft Teams system, one of the resources it uses.
When she announced last week that schools will not fully reopen until February at the earliest, Nicola Sturgeon highlighted Glow as one of the key measures to allowing school learning to continue.
Linda Holt, a councillor on Fife Council and education spokesman for the Alliance for Unity, said: ‘Nicola Sturgeon stood up and talked about Glow but she didn’t seem to know about these problems. It is a mess and parents are very worried.
‘If this problem continues, pupils won’t be able to communicate with schools effectively, messages won’t get through and teachers won’t be able to come back to them. It is hindering communication on a system that is already difficult to use.
‘This is just another barrier to parents and pupils and the whole system is just a mess. It is children who will suffer and many are already behind.’
An alert on the Education Scotland website says there are ‘intermittent issues with join buttons and chat update delays’.
The issue was identified at the start of December, when Education Scotland said it was working with Microsoft to fix it. An update on December 22, as schools finished up for the holidays, said: ‘We continue to work with Microsoft to confirm timescales f or release of bug fixes for issues relating to missing “join now” buttons and delays to post and receive messaging.
‘We will issue further updates when timescales for fixes have been confirmed by Microsoft.’
Each child is given a username and password, which gives them free access to online resources such as Microsoft Office and Teams or Google Classroom.
Last week, when she confirmed the latest delay for the return of Scotland’s schools, Miss Sturgeon said: ‘Glow, which is the national online learning platform, has seen a huge increase in users and usage since earlier last year, and we are working actively with local and national partners to enhance the online and remote learning options for pupils.
‘That work will continue over the course of next week and for as long as is necessary.’
Education Secretary John Swinney also said last week the technology was in place to allow virtual lessons to take place. An Education Scotland spokesman said: ‘The intermittent issue is a known technical problem within the Microsoft toolset. The issue is not exclusive to the Glow service and is a wider Microsoft Teams issue.
‘We have been working with Microsoft since the issue was identified to ensure a bug fix is implemented, however we have no date for this as yet from the Microsoft product team. There are workarounds in place for our users, so the impact is minimal.’
When schools were closed between March and June, more than 560,000 people logged into Glow over 40.5mill i on ti mes. Figures f rom November 2020 s howed 423,254 unique users generating 7.6million login sessions.
‘Whole system is just a mess’