An integral part of Northwest’s online presence – Oba – recently crashed. That night its affects were felt strongly throughout the school, as students struggled to access the platform. A few years ago, the former online teacher pages, otherwise known as, “Swift Pages,” were laid to rest and a new era of Oba began. It was chosen since it provided a place for students to submit work online, had calendars and made other helpful resources accessible. However, when Oba crashed, students were left unsure of how to go about their nightly homework.
According to Shie, the Educational Technology Coordinator, the outage occurred because “the hosting company that Oba uses made a mistake when processing their payment. This led to their domain expiring.” Shie said,” When I notified Oba, they immediately fixed the hosting issue, but it can take anywhere from 24-72 hours for some internet service providers to refresh their DNS records. DNS means “domain name system” and it is how your browser converts a website name like “nws.obaworld.net” into an IP address and loads a webpage. When this record isn’t updated it can point to old or outdated information, and this is what happened in our case.”
Currently the Educational Technology Committee is reviewing Oba’s functionality and use. When talking to Shie, he mentioned that the committee is reviewing possible replacements for the site. Options they have looked as so far include Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, and Canvas. If you would like to give your input on Oba’s functionality, please head to the Publishing Haus’s Twitter account or website to take a linked survey. The feedback will be given to the committee as they make their upcoming decisions.
