It is generally recommended that GCU students and faculty access their courses through the GCU Portal, as the portal will always direct to the appropriate link for your specific course.
However, there may be times in which the GCU Portal is temporarily inaccessible due to scheduled maintenance or service interruption. During this time, your Halo | Learn classroom can still be accessed by logging in directly.
Depending on the course level and degree program you are seeking, your class will be located in one of the following links:
-
Online Undergraduate, Graduate, and Traditional Courses
This link is intended to access online undergraduate, online graduate, and traditional courses (course level above 100):
halo.gcu.edu -
GCU Faculty Training Courses
This link is intended to access faculty training courses:
training.halo.gcu.edu -
Lopes Academy
This link is intended to access classes through the Lopes Academy platform for non-GCU Students that have a course level up to 99.
lopesacademy.halo.gcu.edu
If you choose to go directly to Halo rather than use the GCU Portal, you'll be asked to log in. After navigating to the login page, select Sign In With Microsoft and then log in with your GCU email address and the same password used on the GCU Portal.
After logging in, you will see a list of all your classes. Press Go to Class to access a specific class.
FAQs and Errors
While you can access your classroom during the GCU Portal maintenance, you won’t be able to access the class while the Halo classroom is under maintenance. Halo | Learn scheduled maintenance occurs every Friday morning from 12:15 AM – 4 AM Arizona time. During this time, all Halo classes are temporarily unavailable. While Halo is under maintenance, you will receive the following message:
All other GCU websites are still accessible during Halo | Learn maintenance. However, if you need to contact your instructor immediately, you can still do so through your GCU email. See Accessing Your GCU Email in the GCU Portal for steps on accessing your email.
If you are in multiple classes through GCU at the same time, you may need to switch between the classes. To switch to another class, select My Classes in the upper left corner and then choose the class you would like to access.
Some users may have multiple Microsoft accounts. For example, if a faculty member is also taking classes as a student, they will have both a faculty and student account in Halo.
If this scenario applies to you, you may encounter an issue when logging out of Halo with one account and trying to log in with another. After clicking, “Logout” from the upper right corner of Halo, you will be taken to a page with a Sign in With Microsoft button.
Upon clicking this button, you may be automatically logged back into Halo using the same account you just logged out of, rather than being provided an option to enter a different email address. This occurs because your browser remembers your previous login information and enters it automatically. If you need to log in using a different account, you have a few different options:
- Access Halo using an incognito or private browsing tab. See General Brower Troubleshooting for assistance with this process if needed.
- Use a different browser for each account type
- Navigate to office.com and sign out of your active Microsoft session. After doing so, we recommend clearing cache and cookies to prevent that account from being auto logged in again.
This may occur for a few different reasons.
- One reason is if there is a network issue that prevents the Halo platform from loading. Make sure that you have a working internet connection. If you’re using a work network from your employer and continuously experience this error, we recommend trying again once you are using a personal network.
- This error could also occur if the class that you are trying to access does not have a faculty member assigned to it yet. This is generally an issue with scheduling, and you can contact Technical Support to confirm if this is the case.
- You may also receive this error if you are in the wrong role. For example, a faculty may be both an instructor and an instructional assistant for a different class. If you have multiple roles and receive this error after clicking a link to a class from within the GCU Portal, we recommend logging directly into Halo and switching your role. Check out the article (Faculty LMS) Switching Roles for information on how to change your role.
- This error could also occur if you are attempting to access a class too early. Students generally gain access to courses 3 days before the start date, BUT we cannot guarantee access until the start date of the course. Traditional faculty generally get access 21 days before, and online faculty generally get access 6 days before.
You can access previous courses for up to 6 weeks after the course end date. For more information on how to access your previous classes, check out our Accessing Previous Courses article.