• The first day of home-based learning for all primary, secondary schools and junior colleges began on May 19
• Some parents had to handle technical glitches with the online system
• There were hours of delays and they had to put aside work to help their children
• The Ministry of Education said that it had activated more system resources to get things back on track

SINGAPORE — Madam Desiree Yaw started working from home at 7.30am on Wednesday (May 19), earlier than her usual clock-in time, so that she could better supervise her two primary school children, who would begin home-based learning that day.

However, it soon became apparent that her work schedule would be disrupted more than she had hoped, as her children — a girl in Primary 4 and a boy in Primary 6 — took about two hours to log in to the Singapore Student Learning Space (SLS) system.

“My kids were frustrated and worried, and caused me to get frustrated as well, because I am also working from home,” the executive assistant in the finance industry said.

“I told my manager and colleagues that I am facing technical issues for my kids’ home-based learning, and that I will be back online at work as soon as possible.”

Even after her children managed to log in at about 10am, they could not upload or submit any assignments. Mdm Yaw, 44, said that it was only at 1pm that the issues were resolved, but by then, the school day was almost over.

Mdm Yaw was among five parents of primary school students who spoke to TODAY. Most of them had issues logging in to the SLS platform, as well as troubles uploading their children’s assignments.

TODAY also spoke to four secondary school students who ran into similar problems.

Wednesday was the first day that all primary, secondary schools, junior colleges and Millennia Institute shifted to full home-based learning until the end of the term on May 28, following a sharp rise in community Covid-19 cases in Singapore.

The Ministry of Education (MOE) said in a Facebook post on Wednesday morning that it was aware of the slowdown on the SLS portal.

“We immediately activated additional system resources and as at 9.30am, teachers have reported that the system is back on track,” it said.

MOE added that its team at the headquarters is “actively monitoring the system performance and working on the issues so as to minimise disruptions for the teachers and students”.

“We apologise to everyone who was affected this morning.”

However, some of the parents and students interviewed, such as Mdm Yaw, faced log-in and connectivity issues past 9.30am.

Several parents also wrote comments on MOE’s Facebook page as late as 11am stating that the SLS system was still unavailable for their children at that time.

In another Facebook post in the afternoon, Education Minister Chan Chun Sing noted that the SLS did not work smoothly on Wednesday morning for some students, and that “many of us were disappointed”.

“(MOE) is doing a review to identify the issue and will rectify it,” he said. “Thank you for your understanding.”

SKIPPED CLASSES AND ASSIGNMENTS 

For 37-year-old parent Mabel Ng, her son in Primary 4 had a similar two-hour wait to log into SLS on his digital tablet, which he uses for home-based learning.

“He will keep coming to me every 10 minutes to say that the portal cannot load,” the public relations executive said.

“After more than an hour, the school contacted us and said that (the delays) are an issue for many people in Singapore.”

Ms Ng noted that not everyone was facing delays, as her daughter, who is Primary 6, could log in and complete assignments with no issue.

Ms Valerie Ng, who is a parent of four — three of them in primary school — recounted her chaotic morning.

The SLS portal was down for her three of her children who are in Primary 1, 5 and 6. While they were able to log in only at about 10.30am, the portal lagged and stalled at times.

“Whenever one of my kids put in his answers to an assignment, the page would be stuck there forever,” the 37-year-old property agent said.

“It was obviously a lot of inconvenience and I had to keep running around,” she said. “But it was kind of expected, considering that everyone was online at the same time.”

Unlike most parents who faced log-in delays and laggy portals, Dr Chinnu Palanivelu, 45, who has two children in Secondary 2 and Primary 5, was spared of such hiccups.

The auditor said that these glitches happened when home-based learning was used during the partial lockdown last year, but this time round, he was pleasantly surprised that the morning went smoothly.

For Secondary 1 student Justin Goh at St Patrick's School, the SLS server crashed and was inaccessible to him and many of his classmates for about 15 minutes.

When the server connection was restored, his lesson — which lasted only 35 minutes — was disrupted, and the class could not finish its work on time.

“I did not expect these delays at all, since there were no issues last year,” the 13-year-old said.

Secondary 2 student Varun Vinod from Juying Secondary School said that although the SLS system was working fine for him, this was not the case for all his classmates. So when the lesson began at 10am, his teacher opted not to upload the class assignment.

“She just went through our homework instead, and said she will upload the assignment after this problem is fixed,” he said.

SOME WEB SERVERS OVERLOADED

In a reply to TODAY later in the night, Mr Tan Bee Teck, divisional director of the information technology division at MOE, said that the issue was due to an "error logging system process" that unexpectedly caused some of the web servers to be overloaded. 

This was why some users experienced poor system response when loading pages or submitting their actions on a page. 

"While most students and teachers were able to access the SLS for their lessons, we observed that some users experienced intermittent accessibility from 8.55am to 11.50am. The system was momentarily back on track around 9.30am as the team scaled up more resources in an attempt to address the issue faced... After some calibration, the issue was fully resolved at around 11.50am, and there were no further reports of users experiencing issues."

He added that this issue was different from the one encountered last year, which was due to a higher number of users concurrently logging into the SLS platform.

"MOE is putting in place additional measures to optimise system performance during the full home based-learning period... We appreciate the understanding of teachers, students and parents during this period and apologise for any inconvenience caused," Mr Tan said.