Preparations for 2013 Back-to-School Online Training

It's not too early to be planning your district's use of the online training system this fall. As you’ll remember, our training system server exceeded capacity last August during the peak season, and many users experienced some issues.

We have done our best to increase the capacity, expanding the cap and moving the system on a new server. While these changes help, with the additional trainings we are adding, we could see numbers double again. Therefore, below are some things districts can do to make the experience better for their employees.

1. Encourage employees to take trainings earlier. If your district sends out a welcome-back letter in July, encourage employees to take the trainings at that time. July is a down time for usage for the server.

2. If you are having staff complete the training in August, avoid the heavy usage dates. To the right, you can see our projected usage chart for next August, the darker the color, the heavier the usage.

 

3. Avoid having your entire staff take the training at once. While this practice might be very convenient for the planning of pre-service days, it also greatly enhances your chances of hitting the cap, meaning some will be logged into the site and some will not. Plus, all the individuals from your school accessing the same training could impact your own district bandwidth, slowing down the experience as well.

4. Target district inservice days. Waiting until your first early-out can save a lot of frustration for your teachers.