Update: President and CEO of Desire2Learn Inc., John Baker, released an apology on Beachboard and announced that Beachboard started running at optimal speeds on Friday.
The new school year is just two weeks old, but the same old issues are already cropping up with Beachboard.
The online learning system has been largely offline since Tuesday, with students and faculty unable to access important class material this week.
Paul Quebaba, a student support representative at Cal State Long Beach instructional technology support services, said the problem was due to server issues at Desire2Learn, the company that powers Beachboard.
“It’s not something we can solve on our end,” Quebaba said. “We are getting word that Beachboard should be back online later tonight. This is one of the longer outages we’ve had.”
CSULB has used Desire2Learn since 2010 and the company also created the foundation for the CSULB mobile app.
Faculty and students at CSULB said they have become increasingly frustrated as the Beachboard problems drag on, especially at the beginning of semester when instructors upload important documents and syllabi online.
Senior marketing major Ashley Talley said that she was able to access Beachboard on Tuesday night, but only after an hour of trying to log on.
“It’s frustrating when you need to get things done,” she said. “None of my classes gave out a hardcopy syllabus. They are all online, so I can’t get them.”
Pari Kasliwal, an economics lecturer, said he had similar issues with the online system.
“I assign homework on Beachboard, and I’m not able to do that,” Kasliwal said. “It is critical that it works at the beginning of the term. It means I have to change my class schedule now. Everything will have to be pushed back a week.”
But Kasliwal also said that he has never before encountered such problems with the website.
“It is a great system when it works, but when it does not work, it is equally as bad,” he said. “I think it is a testament to how much we depend on technology like this now.”
Daniel Astle contributed to this report.
