"Concerns Over 'Online Semester Start' Become Reality... 'Server Down and System Errors' Across Universities"

On the morning of the 16th, the first day of the semester, enrolled students are attending non-face-to-face classes such as online lectures at the Gwangju University Library in Nam-gu, Gwangju. Universities that postponed the start of the semester by two weeks due to the spread of COVID-19 began classes on this day and replaced them with online lectures and other methods. The photo is unrelated to specific expressions in the article. [Image source=Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Shinwon Yoon] Amid the impact of the novel coronavirus infection, universities have started online lectures, but at some universities, students' right to learn has been infringed due to poor lecture systems, such as server crashes.

On the first day of online lectures, the 16th, the servers of major universities in Seoul, including Korea University, Kookmin University, Seoul National University, Chung-Ang University, University of Seoul, and Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, temporarily froze or experienced connection errors. Due to the surge in users, some students were unable to properly attend classes as they could not even access the course pages.

In response, the server management departments of each university are working on server recovery, such as increasing the number of simultaneous connections allowed.

Korea University's e-Learning Support Team announced through an internal notice that morning, "Server crashes due to overload are occurring," and advised, "Please attend classes by connecting from locations with stable wired internet access, and refrain from attempting to log in simultaneously from multiple devices."

A notice was also posted on Kookmin University's website stating, "Due to emergency server maintenance, video upload and viewing services will be temporarily suspended."

At Konkuk University and Hanyang University, messages such as "Cannot load video" and "It is not class time" appeared during lecture playback, and the screen failed to play. Due to video playback issues, some students were informed that "attendance time cannot be recognized."

The situation was similar at universities in the Gyeonggi area. Inha University experienced errors accessing the pre-produced online lecture website from the first period. Initially, 190 real-time remote lectures from undergraduate and graduate schools, and a total of 729 lectures were planned to be conducted as home study via the internet.

The university uploaded pre-produced materials and videos to YouTube for online lectures that were not real-time remote lectures, allowing enrolled students to watch them. However, real-time remote lectures could not be conducted due to system errors, and plans to confirm attendance through quizzes or assignment submissions were also disrupted.

At Incheon National University, a large number of students accessing the website that morning caused connection interruptions or frequent video playback interruptions. Among approximately 660 online lectures, about 20 lectures were not uploaded at all.

The university urgently notified students to participate in online classes starting from the 18th for courses whose lecture content had not been uploaded on the website.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.