There is frequent forum discussion of online courses. Online elements are now embedded in many brick-and-mortar classes.
A downside is system
outage and downtime, both scheduled and unplanned. For example:
- Pearson had a
planned outage from 8pm ET Saturday June 24, 2017 until noon ET Sunday June 25, 2017. (16 hours)
- This quickly became an
unplanned outage with system downtime estimated at an additional 2 hours, until
2pm ET Sunday June 25, 2017.
- The
outage is now extended indefinitely, and has lasted over 24 hours.
Additionally, downloaded Pearson textbooks are found to be inaccessible, as the Pearson software performs authentication when there is an attempt to access the downloaded materials. With the Pearson servers down, authentication fails.
These problems simply don't exist with
books.
