Brent Warner 0:00
What do you do when the cloud goes down? Most of us dealt with this recently, and we’ve got some lessons learned. This is the HigherEdTech podcast season seven episode seven.

Tim Van Norman 0:20
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Interim Assistant Director Technology Services at Irvine Valley College and Adjunct Professor of Business at Cypress College.

Brent Warner 0:32
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at Irvine Valley College, we both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about, welcome.

Tim Van Norman 0:43
We’re glad you’re here. So we’ve had some fun lately. Yeah, AWS crashing, causing Canvas to have problems that all kinds of stuff. You know, these systems that don’t allow that, we just assume that are going to work, yeah? Just not working, right? And so that’s the online version.

Brent Warner 1:08
Oh my gosh, yeah. Okay. So before we get into all of this, projectors and stuff like that, so, yeah, for sure. So let’s do a quick pause on this. We could talk about all the technology and different things, but, like, let’s talk about AWS in particular Tim because this came up for a lot of people all over the place, and they’re like, kind of suddenly realized how much everybody relies on one service. So AWS is Amazon Web Services, right? Which is basically, kind of, how would you describe what AWS is? Sorry, a little bit of a

Tim Van Norman 1:48
it is the internet. Yeah. Well, it is the internet basically goes through AWS, Amazon Web Service. Goes through Google Cloud services, or it goes through Microsoft Azure, at least anything that is of any size. So individual, you can host your own site someplace, and that’s a different issue, but any company of any size is going to have their databases, their website, their livelihood on one of these major systems.

Brent Warner 2:29
Yeah, and so essentially, like, and I would say that the reason why, like, you’re kind of rely find your websites reliable is because they’re on these kind of split out servers, like AWS, where it’s like, hey, it’s not working on this particular server. Don’t worry, there’s a backup right over here. It’s going to go that direction, right? And so, so your content, which, by the way, all of pretty much all of Ed Tech, is uploaded on to AWS, like whatever company you’re working with, they probably have the back end of their work going on Amazon Web Services. So when AWS, a couple of weeks ago went down, and if you are teaching the California Community Colleges, you kind of came in, I think it was on a Monday morning, right? You came in and you’re like, Tuesday, Tuesday. Sorry, Tuesday. And you’re like, Hey, where’s my where’s my canvas, where’s my whatever, right? Everything was just gone. And even if you said, Hey, okay, I’m not going to use Canvas today. I’m going to go use Kahoot, or I’m going to go use, you know, some other service that I use a lot of those were gone too, because they’re all hosted on AWS, including

Tim Van Norman 3:45
if you decided to stop at Starbucks and you wanted to order ahead, so you went into the app and that was having problems. So yes, when we when I say the internet runs on it, or it runs the internet, it really does. And they have points of presence pops all over the world, but their major one is on the east coast of the United States and Virginia, and that’s what got hit by an attack up, not a hacking attack. They had a problem in some of their code, right? And it it just blew up the whole system for hours. It was a long time fixing

Brent Warner 4:24
it, yeah. So small thing. I was just reading about this online, too. Another follow up on it. You know, Amazon recently fired you know, 1000s and 1000s of their engineers because they are like, Oh, AI is just going to do their job. Guess what? Ai didn’t do so it so, like all these people who lost, you know, who lost their jobs, who probably would have fixed this in 10 minutes or 20 minutes or something like that, it’s like, oh, it took. Ai, how long was was it out for Tim, how do you remember?

Tim Van Norman 4:58
It was several hours. But worse, the ramifications then rolled yeah for a couple of

Brent Warner 5:04
days, yeah, and it just kept on going. So it’s like, okay, you kind of get some things back, but then you know what’s going on, what’s missing, what, what would I have done inside of that time? Etc, right? So, so we kind of want to understand, like this is like a ripple that went through everything. Number one, maybe all of us should be advocating for the companies that we’re paying to to not have all of their eggs in one basket, right? And I mean, that includes us. And so, you know, it’s not like a blame game type of thing, but it’s like, hey, if we’re actually trying to be, you know, considerate users of technology that are going to be things that are going to affect our students learning, for example, then maybe we don’t just use everything that all uses one single source, so that when it goes down, we’re all in a big pile of trouble. One thing to consider,

Tim Van Norman 5:55
right? And by the way, that’s also part of why so many systems are doing everything they can to be off prem, to be cloud based, is because it does provide redundancy. Take Canvas. Canvas is running on multiple servers in multiple ways, multiple, you know, multiple of all kinds of stuff. It’s just that, in this case, the majority of their stuff was all in one location, right? And that’s what caused a lot of the problems. And the other problem with that, though, is data as it flows through. You might have two systems that aren’t on AWS that were also affected, simply because the data goes through something on AWS, and that’s

Brent Warner 6:44
what a lot of us felt right there, right? That one particular so, so just going to mention this briefly, Tim, but like, you know, a lot of teachers were really stressed out about this, right? It’s like, Hey, hold on a second. Everything that I do is on the system, right? And everything that I run, and what like in the moment people were kind of upset, or quite upset, right? Because they’re like, Are my grades going to be here, or am I going to lose all of the work that I put in, or is all the feedback that I’ve given to students going to be lost forever? Or is that, you know, I mean, like, you just don’t know in the moment, right? So you’re starting to see these things just saying, hey, access is lost, and AWS is down. What does that really mean? Does it mean all of your work was deleted? Does it mean that it was just lost access to it, right? And so we don’t need to worry about that right now, but at the same time, like, is that preparation? Are those things that people are thinking about when they’re, you know, planning out what they’re building, are they? Do they have redundancy backups, right? So, for example, maybe, if you’re using some service, are you downloading your own courses as you’re building and saying, hey, I want to make sure that I don’t lose all the content that I’ve written that goes inside of here, or, you know, access to the information we like to imagine the cloud is kind of endlessly safe, but maybe not.

Tim Van Norman 8:15
And I mean, the reality is, even if you do all of that stuff. It’s all about staying on top of it. Just like, by the way, when we were doing floppy disks about fourth and you had to save it to a floppy disk, and so you saved it to another one, just in case that one went bad. It can be that same thing, but you’ve got to stay on top of it. That’s part of what the cloud has provided, is a little bit of a safety blanket for a lot of people, for everybody. And so even backups, a lot of people are backing up to the same place that their data is stored at. And so it’s, it’s an old one, old thing that we did when we were backing up to tapes. One place I worked, I was responsible for taking those tapes home with me every night and then bringing them back a week

Brent Warner 9:15
later. Yeah. Well, that is kind of the traditional advice right now you have a rotation, yeah, so that you’re saying, Hey, I’ve got a hard drive at at work. I’ve got one at home, and I and I back up to the cloud, right? And then you rotate those hard, those actual physical hard drives of the backup that you have. And so, hey, I’m going to go home on Monday, on Tuesday, I’m going to bring the other drive home and actually cost money and time and effort, right? All of these kinds of things, but it’s, you know? I mean, I think we’ve kind of tricked ourselves into believing that everything is going to be okay just on the cloud. But that’s not real safety or protection, depending on how important all of the work that you’ve done over time is. So it’s up. Going to be, you know, to pay attention to and to be careful about,

Tim Van Norman 10:04
absolutely, but that also understand that everything that goes on the cloud does wind up getting backed up. So it’s not something that you need to create a, you know, five different levels of redundancy to back it up and and spend a whole lot of extra time. It’s more about being cognizant and paying attention to if it’s important, back it up if it’s not important, don’t worry about it

Brent Warner 10:32
all right. So let’s talk about some continuing with this, like some practical short term strategies here. Right? One of these ones that’s kind of interesting. And I think a lot of teachers already kind of have this, but maybe haven’t proactively thought about what it means, which is, do you have a low tech plan ready to go? Right? So, hey, everything’s gone. But you know, for me, like I have folders and folders of, you know, worksheets and prompts and, you know, quizzes and all those things. So even if the internet was down, assuming that my printer is not reliant on the internet to be able to to make the copies, right, I could still go in and say, Hey, I’ve got all these worksheets. I can go print these out, and we can work on paper for the day, right? That could be a possibility. Another, another possibility for, at least for my classrooms, is Tim, we’ve talked about this in the past is, you know, that we’ve got the 360 whiteboards on the wall, right? And so I could just hand out Expo markers to all of my students and say, Okay, we’re just writing stuff on the walls, like this is what we’re doing for the day. It could be a one day solution. Of course, there’s tons of different things you can do when you’re writing on the walls, but just kind of saying, hey, there are, there are some ways do I have, maybe backup plans for start with assuming one day might be a problem, right? And just say, hey, even if it’s not on my curriculum for the day, like, do I have some sort of lesson that we could run into? We could get some value out of something going on. You might want to plan for two days or three days, or something like that. But I would say that like having a couple of different ideas for each of your classes for at least one day that might just be like a, you know, slightly off topic or generalized lesson, possibly, but something so that you’re not just canceling class because the technology isn’t quite working in the way that you want,

Tim Van Norman 12:36
right and and understand we’ve focused right now when we’re talking on like cloud based issues. But we also recently had where the water main broke on campus and we lost water to a couple of buildings, and so had to close off some of those buildings for part of a day. So also think about, how do you communicate with your students? If your building’s closed, you got Internet, what can you do to communicate and so having that pre planning so that you know, oh, hey, by the way, if you hear something check canvas, because it’ll be in Canvas. If I can’t get into Canvas, I’m going to email you. This is the what we’re going to do today, and don’t come in. Do come in, meet me at this location instead, if you’ve pre planned that now you’re prepared, hopefully you never need it. But if you do, you got it,

Brent Warner 13:40
yeah, yeah, for sure. So having a couple, you know? And again, this is, like, one of those things, Tim, where I think we, we kind of say, hey, it might happen one day. Like, do you have a plan in place? Well, set that plan aside, right? Because it’s like, it’s easy, God, whatever. It’s never gonna happen. But we literally just saw it happen, right? Every, every teacher who teaches in the California Community Colleges, at least, had this as a problem for them, you know, within the last couple of weeks. And so this is a reality that we actually need to slow down and truly plan for not just to say, hey, you know, oh, maybe, maybe I’ll have some loose idea of what I’m wanting to do, but to really say, no, let me just build out two or three plans and make this actually

Tim Van Norman 14:35
work. And now let’s talk about, what about that web impact on an asynchronous class. Okay, yeah, so I’m teaching an asynchronous class right now. What do I do? Because it shouldn’t affect my students, right? Well, what about due dates? What about things that are, you know, they don’t have the ability to work on certain things. So, yes, I extended. Due dates because of it, yeah? And just making it, making it happen in such a way, being proactive, and then again, communicating it to students as soon as you can. Yeah, hey, by the way, I know there was a problem. All the due dates are extended by a couple of days. Let me know if you got a problem.

Brent Warner 15:18
Sounds very familiar, Tim, that’s exactly what I had to do, too, right? But for sure, you know, because you’re saying, Hey, hold on a second, you guys, this is no fault of your own, right? And in fact, like you as students, are paying to be here and to have access to all of these things, right? And so, so how do we accommodate the students needs for those right? Be very, you know, compassionate to their situations here, because throwing it off for 24 hours, right? That could be totally built into their schedule. Of like, Hey, this is how I do work. This is when I have time to sit down and do these things. If I can’t access the information, what am I supposed to do right at that time? So 100% you know, be flexible with your students.

Tim Van Norman 16:05
Absolutely. Okay,

Brent Warner 16:07
so, Tim, we’ve got this. These are some kind of short term like, hey, what do you do at the moment? But there’s also, like, some opportunities, maybe to build some long term resilience, a little bit, you know, further future planning. So one thing we mentioned like, Hey, do you have a backup planned? Are you? Are you saving your important documents separately, or do you have your paper versions that are just kind of often tucked away on a shelf somewhere that maybe you can use at some point? All those are great, but there are other things that we can kind of do as well, right? I think one of them is, you know, helping your students have some of that autonomy for themselves, where it’s not just that they’re relying always on the teacher for every single thing that you’re doing, but saying, Hey, we’re trying to plan for ourselves as teachers and for the students on what we’re going to do, but also saying things like, Hey, do you guys have backups in place? Or do you have ways that you can continue learning or showing your understanding of the things as we’re going through this work? Right? Those might be, you know, I don’t know that I’m going to ask my students to do backups of my Canvas shell. I don’t even know if that’s really possible. That’s not what I’m getting to but it could be like, hey, you know, do you have the syllabus? Do you have your own downloaded copy of the syllabus? And do you understand when assignments are due? Right? Maybe if those are synced on their calendar to so let’s say they have, like, the calendar on Canvas, and then they have that sync to their Google Drive calendar. Well, they could still see when assignments are due, and kind of look at all of that information through a separate system, right? That’s not necessarily AWS, and I’m sure there are other ones too. I’m sure you have a couple ideas as well,

Tim Van Norman 17:56
well. So one of the common things that we’ve heard from students is, well, I know I submitted it, but how come it’s not in Canvas? Well, if you submitted it, you should have the original document. Yeah, right. Can you, can you have that? Can you pull it up? Very few people submit everything directly in Canvas and then automatically delete it. Oh, yeah, some people do, but, but encouraging them to think about it, hey, if you’ve submitted something, have the original because if, if I say, Hey, you didn’t submit it, you go, Oh, well, hold on a minute. Yes, I did. I tried to. Here’s the document I submitted. It at least tells me that you are being responsive. And you know, doesn’t mean I’m going to give you full credit, but at least it’s nothing like I know I submitted it and three weeks later they come back, finally, with a document that’s a week old or a day old, you know, no you might have submitted it, but come on, so but encouraging them to to save that document. No, not email it to you, but encouraging them to save it and have it available. Should you need it later, to prove that they or to demonstrate that they know it, or something like that. It’s a really good thing for them to keep, keep track of and teach them how to do that kind of backup themselves, not of your stuff, but of theirs. Along the same lines, if you have videos in your class, where are they stored? Are they only stored in Canvas? Are they stored in YouTube? Okay, if they’re stored in Canvas and something happens and your class gets wiped out. And by the way, that something can happen by you wiping it out (laughter)

Brent Warner 19:48
Not speaking from experience or anything.

Tim Van Norman 19:51
Well, honestly, I’ve done it a couple times on purpose myself, but I did in a couple of cases accidentally. In. Import one class and something went wrong. I didn’t import I didn’t wipe it out, but then I imported another class over it. Now I had double of everything. Yeah, which is worse?

Brent Warner 20:10
Yeah, massive pain.

Tim Van Norman 20:13
It’s a massive pain because you have to go through manually and figure it all out. Well, you get something like that. If you have backups, you’ve got some place to go, and you can do something. If you don’t, you are manually, individually, looking at every assignment and trying to make sure everything is exactly right. Backups just make all the difference in the world. Keeping track of all of your digital backup in a safe location, not in the same location, not in, you know, your Canvas shell and something else is a really nice way of handling that.

Brent Warner 20:48
So you know what? This is also making me think of Tim is like for me, you know, most of my work, we’ve talked about this before, is like most of my work for my students is in Google Docs, which is run through our school system and everything like that, but with Google Docs or with any of your Google Drive, you can you can link it to download every file that you create down to your computer, right? And so if you teach your students how to do that, then they’ve got their own backed up version, right? Because it is a very real possibility that they’re only working in Google Docs on the cloud. And in fact, I’ll say, right now, I’m guilty of that myself, right? The vast majority of my stuff is just on Google docs on the cloud. And if it’s not set to, like, I’ve got some folders that I set pull to download, but I probably should have everything, right? And so it’s like, hey, or the majority of my folders at least, right? So you can say, hey, this, this is my class folder, right? Because once you if you’re using Google Docs, for example, it will move for students assignments into a class folder. It’ll be the name of the class, and you can teach them how to set it up. So at least that one folder always downloads and backs up to their computer so they’ve got the folders separate, the files separately, so that they could re access it if the internet, or whatever part part of the internet is not available.

Tim Van Norman 22:11
And teach them the opposite. So for me, I work on it opposite. I have links basically on my desktop, and every file I download goes into one of those links. In that link, it puts it in my Google Drive, but has a copy on my desktop at the same time, perfect. Yeah, yeah. So one way on my computer, so I don’t worry about, oh, I’m going into my Google Drive to do something. No, I’m going into this folder, and this folder has what I need, and it’s got it all, but it’s also so it’s a copy on my desktop and in Google Drive at the same time. And now when I go to my laptop and I access that folder, now I’ve got a copy there too, yeah, and so yes, it provides that backup automatically, and I don’t have to go look for it.

Brent Warner 22:59
Yeah, yeah. So Tim, as we’re wrapping up here, I kind of want to do just a little conversation on, maybe just an opportunity to reframe, like, the failure of the tech, right? Because it is, you know, like a lot of, oh, everything’s gone, it’s all lost, right? But like, what are the opportunities inside of there, right? So I like the idea of saying, for example, okay, we’re going to do a digital detox day, right? We’re just doing a tech free day, and we’re going to, we’re just going to do things, you know, analog or we’re just going to have a, you know, Socratic conversation, where we’re just developing, you know, real life conversations between people, and it doesn’t need to be tech connected and all of these things, right? So there are lots of different ways that you could reframe the opportunity. And you know, I know some students who say or sorry, some teachers who will be like, we’re just going to do a little yoga exercise, right? And we’re going to do, like, a three minute yoga break, right? And like, let’s just get back in touch with ourselves, right? And so even something like that could just be an opportunity to say it’s not all tech and it’s not all like content we are also need to recognize ourselves as humans and as people. And like, maybe a time when this stuff is not available is a good time to kind of revisit those ideas and recognize each other as people as well,

Tim Van Norman 24:25
absolutely, and if you, if you don’t want to, you know, recognize each other as people. Hopefully, you have a whiteboard on your class in your classroom, and you can use that or or get the students to go up. You were talking about the 360 classroom with the 360 whiteboards, get the students to do, to participate when you’re when you’re live, when you’re online. Can you flip over to discord? Can you just do something different that that will engage the student? Differently and give them a little bit of different experience. And I love when, when I hear of creative things people do, when the projector stops working in class, right? They’re like, okay, hey, tech support, can you come fix my projector? And we walk in and the students are busy doing something else that’s productive, even in spite of the fact that the technology is not functioning, right? So think about that and and especially, like a projector issue, they happen all the time, way too often,

Brent Warner 25:33
more than we’d like, but, yeah, but that is the point, right, though, is like, Are Are you mentally prepared for these kinds of failures, right? Like some of us get so tied into the ways that we do things, that as soon as the interruption comes up, then we’re like, we get, we freeze, right? We freeze out. And we’re like, what do we do with this, right? So, so I love this idea of saying, Okay, no, no, let’s play around with this. Let’s, let’s be creative. And so it is always useful, even if it’s not necessarily a day when the internet goes down. Do you have just an internet free lesson? Can you? Can you do something that is not technology dependent in your class? Have you? Have you so built your your classes up that rely on everything that you don’t have options, and if so, maybe consider that and see what else you can do as you know, an alternative, even if the internet’s not down. Just have a tech free, free option and see what happens.

Tim Van Norman 26:34
Yeah, I love the idea of trying it out. We do this all the time, and technology is we? We just make it. Make it work without this. Today, you don’t have this. How do you function? It’s a great way to, first of all, expand your skills, expand your knowledge and your understanding. Find out what, find out what it would be like before you don’t have that anymore. And you know, how would you communicate to your class and and that, to me, that’s one of the key things, is communication. If you have a way of communicating your with your class, you can deal with almost any issue.

Brent Warner 27:17
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we believe in you all. Absolutely, we’ve made it through other problems. We can continue making it through future problems, but you know, a little planning helps out a lot.

Tim Van Norman 27:29
Absolutely. Thank you for listening today. For more information about the show, please visit our website, at the higher ed tech podcast.com

Brent Warner 27:39
as always, we want your feedback, so please go to TheHigherEdTechPodcast.com and let us know your thoughts.

Tim Van Norman 27:46
If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please give me a call or email me at tvannorman@ivc.edu

Brent Warner 27:56
and if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner,

Tim Van Norman 28:03
I’m Tim Van Norman,

Brent Warner 28:04
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on The road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody.