As teachers enter schools, Stanislaus Office of Education will test its online strength
With distance learning starting this week in at least four Stanislaus County school districts, and about 15 more joining next week, a stress test will be conducted Friday to ensure schools’ internet performance is up to snuff.
Because teachers are back in their classrooms in so few (and far from the largest) districts, the results will have to be extrapolated, said Burt Lo, chief technology officer for the county Office of Education. But he anticipates no problems.
Lo likened the test to seeing now well city streets handle traffic and feed it to a highway. “Consider each of the school districts kind of a town along Highway 99,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday morning. “They have traffic flowing within the town, and that’s their internet. And then at some point, as they gather all of their traffic and send it out to the internet as a whole, many of the school districts come through our county office as their internet provider.”
When schools closed their doors in March and ended the 2019-20 academic year with distance learning, teachers were generating the internet traffic from their homes. But as this school year kicks off with what many educators are calling much more “robust” distance learning, interactive instruction that includes a lot of video, most districts are requiring most teachers to stream from school facilities.
“We wanted to make sure that districts tested their bandwidth between the school sites district office,” Lo said of Friday’s stress test. “And then, as all of the districts send their traffic down 99, you know, us, , we want to make sure that we’re able to support all of those districts streaming classes and that type of thing as well.”
Given that distance learning, necessitated by the novel coronavirus pandemic, is still pretty much uncharted territory, the county never before has tried to coordinate a test like this, Lo said.
When schools were in session, the county office could monitor the internet traffic coming from districts. So now, as it monitors distance learning, it will notify districts if they’re getting to the upper limit of their bandwidth, “or we will have an internal conversation if we’re noticing that there’s so much traffic coming from the districts that we need to increase our bandwidth.”
The test will be done district by district, with superintendents reporting how many teachers were in their classrooms and streaming. Data gathered will be multiplied to give the county office a good picture of how much bandwidth is being used when all districts and teachers are online, Lo said.
Stanislaus County officials upbeat
SCOE has calculated the expected bandwidth of hosting a video stream, multiplied by the number of teachers per district and believes the total is within the bandwidth the county offers to support distance learning. “So we are not anticipating any issues,” Lo said, “but we would like to have the districts run this, so that in case something unexpected happens, we do our best to mitigate it before school starts” for everyone.
And if the test reveals problems?
There are different options that districts or the county office could take, Lo said. One is obtaining more bandwidth. Another is adjusting how much bandwidth each device uses, such as reducing the quality of the video stream.
Friday’s operation, starting at 10 a.m., will test only the ability to support all the streaming that’s going out to students’ homes and other places they may be studying, not whether those sites have adequate internet.
That’s certainly a concern, and districts have been reaching out to families that appear to need internet support. They’ve been doing things like working with internet service providers to get high-speed connections to households, offering mobile LTE hot spots for student checkout and creating WiFi hot spots at schools for students who need a boost for things like downloading videos.
Lo said that from a home perspective, there are two key issues to consider. One is the bandwidth coming from your service provider, he said, and customers of major providers like Comcast’s Xfinity and Charter’s Spectrum should be fine, even with, say, five users at one time. The other thing is to see what bandwidth your wireless router is able to provide to each of the connections that come to it.
“And there are other systems out there like mesh networks, where you can have lots of wireless access points set up throughout the house to talk to each other. That would increase your bandwidth,” he said.
“You start to run into problems when you’re working with DSL that’s down to three megabits per second or five megabits per second. And then that’s when multiple people in the household are going to run into problems trying to watch YouTube videos and streaming video at the same time.”
Russell Selken, Modesto City Schools’ chief technology officer, also recently shared some tips with The Bee:
This story was originally published August 5, 2020 at 1:26 PM.
