You wake up on the first day of online learning, you walk over to your school-issued chrome book, type in your login from the back of your school ID, and load in just to find your computer can’t connect to the school’s servers. Once you can connect you find you’re being periodically logged out every 20-30 minutes.

This was the reality for many students come the first couple of weeks of the 2020-21 school year. 

“… It [the logout glitch] happens at the most inconvenient times and having to constantly rejoin Google meets results in me missing out on valuable parts of a lecture,” Senior Olusoji Oduneye said. 

Others had very similar experiences.

“I definitely did experience the log out glitch and it was very frustrating because there were multiple times I was on a Google meet with my teacher and it would log me out so I would have to sign back in and in doing so I would miss what the teacher said. Luckily I had a friend in the class that I could text and get the notes from,” Senior Hayley Moss said.

Luckily our school’s tech support had an answer. 

“The problem that was causing students to get logged out after a certain period of time was related to a sync process the Merrillville Community School Corporation servers and the Google servers responsible for account creation,” said Steven Kerr, coordinator of Network Operations for the corporation.  

“Student passwords were syncing multiple times causing current sessions to become invalid and making students log back on.  After the problem was brought to our attention we quickly worked to resolve the issue.  The resolution was related to our sync process and changing the time of the scheduled process to better fit our needs.”
While the glitch issue has been mostly resolved it does still plague some students. The glitch isn’t the only issue some have with online school though.

“I just miss having kids in my room. I hate an empty classroom,” Mr. Andrew Niksich said. “Social distancing does not mean social isolation.” 

Although he did find some positives with the new online school.

“I appreciate the structure the new online learning brings. Students have been phenomenal at attending [class], way better than the spring,” he said.

Here are some resources to contact the tech support for Merrillville High School if you have any issues:
Phone: 219-650-5376
Email: [email protected]