Schoology is not just for schools
October 17, 2016
Schoology is not just for schools
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Schoology
We use Schoology with the 300+ high school interns that we train and hire to work at our corporate partners. We are a non-profit organization that builds and teaches a curriculum independent of schools. During our summer program for the interns, we use Schoology to implement our two training courses. We use Schoology courses to share the syllabi and resources, to track assignments and attendance, for tests, and to engage students in conversations outside of the training room. During the school year, we use Schoology for the same purpose but to implement our college access curriculum instead. Schoology has also been a hub for information sharing with all of our interns, for example, we post student surveys on Schoology and remind them of upcoming events. Before Schoology, we used spreadsheets to track course work and grades and attendance, which you can already assume was time-consuming and not efficient when working with hundreds of students. Schoology has cut down on the time that our trainers and instructors spend managing a course.
- The overall layout and the logic for the tools are very intuitive; it's easy to find and use the tools in Schoology. I received a one hour training on how to use Schoology from a Schoology representative and from there, I was able to figure out what I needed to do to set up courses, the grade book, etc... There are so many resources online to help me figure out how to do what I need.
- Schoology tools keep improving! For example, when I first started using Schoology, copying courses was a manual process (I had to enter every assignment due date in the copied courses). Now I can choose to duplicate everything in a course; copying courses now take less than 5 minutes each. This extremely helpful when you have to create the exact same course 15 times.
- The Schoology support team is very helpful and prompted; every time I submit a case online, I get a response within the same day. They either let me know what's going on if there is an issue across all of Schoology or help me address the concerns I have with my organization's Schoology account.
- This summer, there were many instances of Schoology not working well in certain offices; apparently the wireless/security setup at one of our training sites was interfering with access to Schoology and our staff and students experienced delays when loading Schoology pages or sometimes Schoology did not load at all. Schoology was unable to help with this because the concern was on our end.
- Schoology moves quickly to make updates to the site, however, it can be hard to keep up. This summer, I realized that administrative admins for the entire "school" can create grading periods; we have five "buildings" and admins of those buildings need to be able to create their own grading periods, which are all different. This was an update that I didn't know until our building admins were unable to create grading periods. Had we known earlier, we would've planned for it; this delayed course creations at all of our sites. It is very easy for updates to get lost in the Schoology newsletters; there should be a more effective way of communicating changes/updates, especially to enterprise users.
- Using the Schoology gradebook has allowed my team to input grades and share with students instantly. There's no need to track on a spreadsheet/on paper and then import into a tracking system.
- For students, Schoology has become their hub for information; having all resources and assignments in one location has limited the time they need to track information.
Before using Schoology, we used Moodle, which was custom built for us. However, the look and structure of the site was not user friendly. When we decided to switch to a new tool, we looked at several similar products and Schoology came up on top. We chose Schoology for its ease of use, user friendly interface, and ability to engage users in a variety of ways (through courses, groups, school-wide updates and conversations etc.).