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.

Yes, unfortunately Pearson appears to be too large to be held accountable in any meaningful way.

Meanwhile the twitter account of pearsonsupport gives some idea of the impact.

This is a warning to be alert to trends in education... a warning against giving away too much power or control to technology... and/or to any entity.

My sympathies. I use Pearson online systems professionally, and have experienced outages before as well. Especially disruptive when they occur in the middle of the school day, when I'm attempting to work.

This is similar to the challenges of a paperless school (which ours aspires to be). Google Classroom doesn't go down often, but when it does, everything comes to a helpless standstill.