Strengthen Current E-learning Portal for Schools
Ministry of EducationSpeakers
Summary
This question concerns the robustness of school e-learning portals following a severe outage, as raised by Mr Seah Kian Peng and Mr Dennis Tan Lip Fong. Minister for Education (Schools) Ng Chee Meng explained that the MC Online incident resulted from network equipment limitations that capped bandwidth during heavy traffic. He emphasized that vendors are required to meet specific performance standards and conduct load tests to ensure system reliability. To prevent future disruptions, the Ministry of Education has upgraded network equipment and will work with vendors to ensure bandwidth scalability. The Ministry of Education will also require bandwidth testing before major school activities to accommodate anticipated peak loads during home-based learning.
Transcript
57 Mr Seah Kian Peng asked the Minister for Education (Schools) what steps will the Ministry take to improve the robustness of the Marshall Cavendish (MC) Online e-learning portal for schools, given the recent severe outage experienced by students.
58 Mr Dennis Tan Lip Fong asked the Minister for Education (Schools) what measures are being taken to strengthen online learning portals being used in schools against the prospect of outages that may disrupt the learning schedules of students.
Mr Ng Chee Meng: Vendors of e-learning portals are required to meet the service level and performance requirements stipulated by the Ministry of Education (MOE) for schools. Load tests were conducted with these e-learning portals to ensure that they meet the performance requirements.
During the recent incident involving MC Online portal, the system was still operational but users had experienced intermittent slowdown in access speed and login issues. The root cause was found to be due to a limitation in the network equipment that had caused the bandwidth to be capped instead of being scalable when network traffic became heavier. As a result, additional network traffic beyond a certain threshold was dropped and would not reach the MC Online system.
To better support future home-based learning for the students, MOE has taken measures to upgrade existing network equipment. MOE will continue to work with vendors of e-learning portals to ensure that the bandwidth is scalable to meet the service requirements and that bandwidth testing is conducted prior to major activities with anticipated peak loads.