As if finals weren’t torture enough, the students and staff of Cerritos College faced an even bigger nightmare during the finals week of Fall 2016.

According to Shawna Baskette, Dean of Academic Success, “The Cerritos College campus community abruptly lost service to TalonNet on Friday, December 16, [at] around 3:30pm.”

This was the absolute last day of finals week in which students could submit any work, or finish any sort of test that need to be taken.

Due to the shutdown student’s final grades were put at risk, and some students themselves were forced to make other arrangements with their teachers to turn in any assignments needed.

Students weren’t the only ones affected by the shutdown. Teachers whose work had not been backed up to other places was also lost. This included a semester’s worth of grades for assignments, projects and test.

The shutdown was caused by two failed drives at the server’s location of the contracted company Scriba Corporations.

Scriba Corporations is an outside company, which the school outsourced during its use of TalonNet, and during the shutdown its support staff worked together with the college to get access to the site but has not yet been successful.

While Baskette claims that, “between August and December, TalonNet service [has been] quite stable,” that hasn’t been the case.

Other errors while using the site have occurred not only in recent months, but in past years as well.

Former student, Patricia Mendiloa, class of 2014 said, “It was kind of complicated at first […] and I do believe it needs work so it’s overall more efficient for students. I think it mainly has to do with how the files are uploaded and shared.”

This is a continuous problem that occurred throughout this semester in particular, as students began to have trouble uploading files for homework. Instead, they were forced to input assignments straight into the body text box.

Computer Science major Emmanuel Orantes, “I did not have a direct issue during the shutdown [as i turned in my assignments in early,] but I did have trouble throughout the semester when they had us use the dropbox tool.”

In addition to this minor problem the site also experience a multiple problems over the summer.

Baskette stated, “Scriba encountered multiple problems during the summer of 2016. In June, Scriba experienced a SAN failover that left the system in read-only mode. This left the Cerritos College campus without service for 30 hours.”

The troubles did not stop there, as the issues continued to surface throughout the summer.

“In July, there were network issues, leaving the campus without service for 22 hours,” she continued, “In August, the servers’ virtual machines experienced issues defaulting to read-only mode, leaving the campus without service for nearly 40 hours.”

Baskette made it a point to bring attention to the fact that Cerritos was not the only college effect by the shutdown.

“During the summer, multiple other college campuses experienced the same outages for their course management systems and other Scriba clients are also currently without service after the December outage,” she finished.

The shutdown prompted the school into an early transition onto the Canvas site.

Initially, the school was to run TalonNet and Canvas simultaneously so that teachers would have ample time to learn the new system, and transfer any all information need onto the new site.

“This plan was working well and we did run both systems from June 2016 to December 2016,” she stated, “However, because of the December TalonNet outage and Scriba’s inability to restore service, we cannot utilize TalonNet. We are fortunate to have Canvas as an alternative option for our course management system at this time.”

Not all students agree with the change. Orantes was enrolled in class where they were used as a “practice” group” for the transition, in which he was not satisfied.

He said, “It was really aggravating. In a lot of ways it bothered me because I didn’t feel like there was notice and at the same time there was no understanding of it.”

Orantes emphasized the transition added stress that he and others already face as college students.

“You’re not being heard on [the issue,] especially on online course,” he continued, “I had to teach myself. I had to take a lot of time to do so and a lot of stuff got messed up.”

However, Baskette made it a point to state that, “While Scriba hosted TalonNet for us, Canvas is maintained and hosted by a different company, called Instructure. Instructure has provided us with information on how they manage backups, so this does not occur in the future.”

While technology is constantly progressing, and it is possible that all classes may be done online one day, all these problems bring up just one question: Is online learning really worth it?