The first day back on campus after a long summer break is often a mixture of excitement, anticipation and a little bit of anxiety.
However anxiety tipped the scale this year as both faculty and students were denied access to the most necessary and valuable tool for the classroom.
Single Sign-On (SSO) is a platform all SWOSU personnel are required to use to access information related to classes, school email, student finances and class schedules. Monday, the first day of classes on the hill, students were alerted at 8:50 a.m. SSO was down and not working.
“Single Sign-On is basically a platform that is one way to get into all the different services we use that are digital. The idea of SSO is that it will reduce the number of passwords and reduce the number of logins so that when you sign on you then have the ability to go on to different things you might need,” Dr. Denise Landrum-Geyer said. Dr. Landrum-Geyer is a professor at SWOSU, and she is also chair of the Language and Literature Department. “The idea is that it’s streamlined so there’s one place to sign on.”
SSO was not only down for SWOSU, but it was unavailable for universities and colleges across the nation. Because of the nature of the crash, SWOSU technology support was unable to do anything to mitigate the situation.
Perhaps the biggest difficulty in having SSO crash the first day of class was the inability for students and faculty to access Canvas through SSO.
“Canvas is our learning management system,” Dr. Landrum-Geyer said. All classes, whether in-person or online, depend on Canvas for information and assignments.
“Canvas is supposed to be through SSO, so even though Canvas was still working, we couldn’t get to it. Faculty need it to post things; students need it to get information about their classes and do homework,” she said.
Since students could not access their class information, there was a certain amount of confusion across campus. Not only could students not access syllabi or complete assignments, but they also could not find the locations of their classes.
“You would be surprised how many students were planning to log into SSO when they got here. They didn’t have a paper copy of their schedule; they hadn’t taken a picture of their schedule, so they didn’t know what classes they were in or where to go,” Dr. Landrum-Geyer said.
She described the first day of SSO being down as “inconvenient.” When it remained unavailable a second day, she began to feel the pressure. “When we got into day two I started getting very anxious because you don’t want to start a semester behind schedule for classes and that essentially is what was happening for a lot of people.”
SWOSU Information Technology Services announced Tuesday afternoon that SSO access was restored.