HOUSTON – Error messages were displaying Wednesday on the online learning portal for the Houston Independent School District.
While the district’s main website, houstonisd.org, was up and running Wednesday morning, several attempts to load the district’s online learning portal, houston.itslearning.com, returned at least two different error messages. One message told users to try again later. The other indicated there was a “partial system outage.”
This is the second day of virtual learning for the largest school district in Texas and the second day in a row that users received error messages when trying to access HISD digital properties.
“As one of the largest school districts in the country it’s not acceptable for it to happen this long,” Margarita Falcon said.
Daniel Martinez, a junior at the High School for Law and Justice, said it’s a frustrating problem.
“I understand it was the first day and I thought you know the first day there’s going to be a problem I thought it would be an hour or two, not the whole day and then today half of the students and teachers can only go to the hub for a period of time then it shuts off,” he said.
In a Facebook post, HISD says ItsLearning, the district’s learning management system, is currently experiencing degraded performance in parts of their application. ItsLearning has identified the problem, and a fix is being implemented.
Please continue to try accessing the site if you encounter issues logging on. Thank you for your continued patience.
“It’s kind of like well I can only do this work and I hope the teachers don’t grade me on this because I can’t log on,” Martinez said.
Many said the district should have had a plan in place.
“I think there should have been a test run done prior to school. They had camp spark that should have been a girls run or even have everyone sign in at the same day at the same time prior to so if they saw this it could be fixed over the weekend,” Falcon said.
On Tuesday, users received several different error messages when trying to access the district’s main website. Officials said that while the main website was experiencing problems, the online portal was up and running.
There are about 200,000 students in HISD. They will all be in virtual learning until at least Oct. 19, when some are scheduled to return to in-person learning.
HISD officials said on Wednesday it will review the incident and details of the measures implemented.