The University of Winnipeg will delay the end of classes and its exam period following a cyberattack that disabled the school’s networks, leading to the temporary cancellation of classes just weeks before exams were originally scheduled to occur. 

The school announced that its academic year will be extended by a week during a virtual town hall last Wednesday. Classes will now end on April 12 and exams will run from April 18 to May 8. 

Classes were cancelled last Monday after campus wi-fi went down, along with a variety of online academic tools, including Nexus, a portal where students can find course content, and WebAdvisor, the school’s online course registration tool. 

Courses resumed last Tuesday, but many online tools remained inaccessible throughout the next week, including Nexus, meaning classes delivered through the website were still unavailable. Access to email was restored March 29 and school officials asked students, staff and faculty to reset their passwords at a Monday virtual town hall as part of a campus reset that will allow the school to begin restoring access to Nexus and WebAdvisor. 

U of W biology professor Scott Forbes teaches many online courses, which he said have been “the most severely affected.” 

Last Monday evening, he worried no one would be able to access his Tuesday evening class as the Zoom link is typically posted on Nexus. 

The next morning, Forbes acquired an email list for his course from December. This allowed him to contact his students outside of the school’s network, about half of whom showed up for his Tuesday class, although he said he has “no way of knowing” if he has reached everyone. 

However, Forbes said “the faculty have adapted really quickly.”

“The big problem is the loss of access to course materials, because that’s all stored in our Nexus system and so we had to find an alternative place to store it and then get students access to it.” 

Forbes eventually decided to post class materials on a Google Drive for students. 

Rhetoric, writing and communications and English instructor Murray Leeder said he is concerned that his students have been unable to log into the library’s website and access databases and e-books they may need for “research-heavy assignments.” 

“What I’ve told the students is, because I happen to have access to other library databases, if they find something they can’t access, just let me know and I’ll try to find it and pass it on to them,” he said. 

The U of W initially claimed its network issues were caused by an internet service outage before confirming Tuesday that the school had experienced a cyberattack. 

Forbes said the school did not offer very much information in the first few days. He said the university told students to contact their instructors to discuss alternatives to Nexus for delivering course material, but that faculty were not given “any assistance as  to how we’re supposed to do that.” 

Forbes acknowledged that following a cyberattack, “releasing as little information as possible about the nature of it is par for the course.” 

“You wouldn’t want to give the hackers any tips as to how to improve their attack,” he said. 

Spring registration has been put on hold for the time being.

This has presented challenges for students like second-year English major Kieran West, who is not currently taking classes, but whose spring registration was supposed to be last Monday. He was unable to log in that morning and later learned that registration was being delayed entirely. 

“For a person like me, I have a family, I’m trying to juggle school, and working a job, and my other pursuits in life, like music, and it’s very important that I’m able to build my schedule in a way that is conducive to my lifestyle,” he said.

“The past week has been pretty anxiety-provoking for me, because I’m just not sure what’s going to happen with spring registration, and I really need a certain number of courses this spring.”

West said updates from the school have been “very few and far between” and that he would “definitely appreciate more information,” since the situation is having such a big impact on his life.

“I’m caught between feeling really frustrated with the school, and also trying to understand that it’s a very unprecedented situation.”