How Adjunct Professors Fixed LMS Logout Loops by Restarting Their Browser and Clearing Cache

In today’s educational landscape, Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Blackboard, Canvas, and Moodle serve as the digital backbone of higher education. Adjunct professors, who often juggle multiple roles and institutions, are heavily affected when these platforms fail. One such issue that recently affected many educators was the frustrating and time-consuming “logout loop.” This article explores how adjunct professors identified and resolved this common technical problem by using basic internet troubleshooting strategies—restarting their browsers and clearing cache.

TLDR

Adjunct professors faced perpetual logout loops while using their institution’s LMS platforms. Through trial, communication, and basic troubleshooting, they discovered that restarting their web browsers and clearing the browser cache fixed the problem. This solution, despite its simplicity, restored vital access to grading, content uploading, and student communications. The incident underscores the need for better technical training, shared user knowledge, and institutional support for part-time faculty.

The Problem: LMS Logout Loops Disrupting Education

The logout loop is a recurring issue encountered by LMS users. Professors attempting to log in would be redirected back to the login screen after entering their credentials, with no access to the dashboard or course materials. This issue can cause significant disruption to daily academic operations. For adjunct professors who may depend on these systems for all class communication and content management, it halted course progress entirely.

Here is how the logout loop commonly manifested:

• Persistent login screen, even after entering correct credentials
• Redirection to a login prompt mid-session
• Inability to grade assignments, participate in forums, or upload materials

This problem emerged most often during peak operational hours, particularly in evening courses when IT support was unavailable. Many adjunct professors reported spending hours attempting to troubleshoot independently or simply abandoning important teaching tasks.

Discovery by Necessity: Adjunct Professors as Troubleshooters

Without the immediate support of institutional IT departments, faculty began sharing their experiences on online forums, social media groups, and internal mailing lists. Through crowdsourcing anecdotes and trying different approaches, a pattern began to emerge: users who restarted their browsers and cleared their cache saw their issues resolved.

This organic research, led by necessity and supported by community knowledge, led to a low-tech yet effective solution.

Why Restarting and Clearing Cache Worked

Though seemingly simple, restarting the browser and clearing the cache served to reset corrupted session data stored locally by the browser. Many LMS portals rely on browser cookies and cached pages to retain login sessions. When these stored elements become inconsistent or outdated due to system updates or broken redirects, they can cause conflicts during authentication.

Key technical factors included:

• Stale session cookies from expired LMS sessions
• Cached JavaScript files that failed to reflect LMS updates
• Redirect loops caused by outdated authentication tokens

By clearing the cache, professors eliminated these conflicts. Restarting the browser initiated a clean environment for new login credentials to be properly processed.

Step-by-Step: How Professors Implemented the Fix

Following guidance shared among peers, and eventually posted on academic support sites, professors began following these basic steps:

1. Completely close all browser windows and tabs—not just minimize them.
2. Open the browser again and access its settings or preferences menu.
3. Navigate to options like “Clear browsing data” or “Clear cache and cookies.”
4. Select the appropriate date range, often “All time,” to remove all session conflicts.
5. Return to the LMS and log in with fresh credentials.

These steps, especially when paired with browser updates, resulted in immediate access restoration for the majority of users.

Who Shared the Solution First?

While it is difficult to pinpoint the very first individual who identified the clearing cache method, one of the earliest documented examples came from a veteran adjunct professor of communications at a midwestern community college. She posted a screenshot tutorial on a widely-used academic subforum, which quickly gained traction. Others began replicating her steps and reporting similar success.

Eventually, IT departments took notice and began incorporating this advice into help documentation and automated support bots.

The Broader Implications

This temporary but effective fix has broader instructional and administrative implications. It demonstrates the vital importance of accessible digital literacy and responsive IT support—especially for adjunct faculty, who often do not have the same access to departmental resources as tenured professors.

Key takeaways from this issue include:

• Investing in adjunct training during system rollouts or updates
• Encouraging institutional awareness of lower-tech solutions to common problems
• Creating user-maintained wikis or documentation hubs based on collective experience

What Institutions Can Learn

In response to the logout loop incidents, several colleges and universities have proactively implemented processes to avoid similar bottlenecks:

• Regularly purging LMS cache and cookies server-side during maintenance windows
• Providing brief videos and bulletins on basic browser hygiene for professors and students
• Integrating real-time alerts on the LMS homepage for known technical bugs and quick fixes

In some institutions, adjunct professors were even invited to participate in beta testing groups and advisory committees for new software integrations—a meaningful recognition of their role not just in teaching but in platform usability testing.

Looking Ahead

Although the logout loop annoyed many and cost valuable teaching time, it sparked a grassroots form of IT resilience among part-time faculty. Perhaps more importantly, it spotlighted the need for better digital education among educators, much of which can be implemented through low-cost, institution-supported resources.

Browser restarts and cache clears may not be groundbreaking discoveries, but in the midst of an LMS failure, they gave hundreds of adjunct professors an immediate way back into their virtual classrooms. That lesson—which combines digital competency and mutual support—may well be more valuable than any technology itself.

In the end, it wasn’t a patch update or vendor fix that solved the logout loop. It was the collaboration, patience, and determination of educators who rely every day on systems that aren’t always built with their input in mind.

Conclusion

Technical problems in education technology often feel overwhelming. But the story of how adjunct professors overcame a common LMS logout issue through browser management offers a narrative of empowerment and adaptability. More than anything, it reveals an opportunity to build stronger, more self-sufficient teaching communities supported by user-driven knowledge sharing and proactive institutional practices. The fix was simple—log out, refresh, restart—but the message is enduring: in the digital age, even small steps can make a significant impact.