As the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve, schools and districts are transitioning to remote learning nationwide. We understand that while there have been some challenges along the way, we want to reassure you that PowerSchool is here to support and will continue to partner with you in these unprecedented times.
As mentioned in last week’s communication to you, PowerSchool Learning and Unified Classroom continue to experience extraordinary volumes due to an increased demand for distance learning tools. We’ve made several significant improvements in stability and performance and wanted to proactively share these steps we’ve taken with you and share a few recommendations to help ensure teachers and students have minimal interruptions while completing their distance learning work.
As we continue to further optimize our performance service levels, and to ensure that all teachers and students using our solutions are successful when collaborating and working together, we recommend considering the following short-term tips.
- To effectively host your virtual classroom without interruptions, we encourage teachers to, if possible, avoid mass uploading large files and grading between peak hours 9 am - 4 pm EST. This will enable your students to quickly upload and complete their classwork assignments during high use times without interruptions.
- The ‘Discussions’ feature was designed for asynchronous communication over an extended period. It is for this reason; we recommend teachers should not use ‘Discussions’ for real-time chat. When you find that you need to communicate with your students in real-time or over chat, please consider using similar platforms such as Zoom while collaborating and teaching in PowerSchool Learning.
We have a dedicated team working around the clock monitoring PowerSchool Learning and Unified Classroom and are continuing to deploy additional fixes to expand the infrastructure to support the volume. On Monday, March 23, 2020, PowerSchool successfully deployed a maintenance fix to add additional server capacity to our Learning instances and we have immediately seen an improvement in performance. Our team also deployed another maintenance fix on March 24, 2020 at 12 PM PST that will continuously increase the performance and stability of our product.
If you continue to experience high service disruptions, please contact our PowerSchool Support team. By creating a ticket for your product-related issues, we will be able to prioritize your needs faster.
