Schoology - Making it Easy for Faculty to Go Digital
April 21, 2021
Schoology - Making it Easy for Faculty to Go Digital
Overall Satisfaction with Schoology Learning
We used Schoology to manage "supplemental" sites for all on campus courses, as well as fully online and blended programs. We found Schoology's niche was in the supplemental role, acting as an excellent platform for flipping the classroom and managing supplemental online activity managed by individual faculty members. This was used across the organization and also became useful for faculty groups, departments, and other interest groups in a social-networking manner.
- Schoology has a simple and easy to use interface - it's easy to organize your classroom in a way that makes sense for the particular class you are teaching.
- It is very easy to create dynamic multi-media instructions in simple discussion forums or assignments - many of our faculty found the process of creating learning activities simple to use.
- Communication was a strong point - announcement features were well suited to daily reminders, update videos, quick polls, and other features that are of incredible value in the classroom.
- Schoology is great when you are managing individual courses, but for our fully online and blended programming, it really lacked the back end administrator capabilities to be scaling up well - lack of a template/blueprint feature was really disappointing.
- Third-party Integrations were few and often did not work well.
- As a higher education institution, we saw very little responsiveness to our needs up against K-12. Although promises were made early on, they never came to fruition. Some faculty also felt the platform looked a bit 'juvenile' for higher ed.
- Ease of use! All faculty had to be comfortable and regularly using the platform.
- Ability to communicate easily through courses and faculty/student groups on campus.
- Ability to create multimedia instructions across activity types.
- Early on Schoology was excellent since we saw faculty use skyrocket due to ease of use. This was a big win in legitimizing digital learning for folks not used to it.
- Over time specific attention to higher education feature requests dropped drastically and became incompatible with our institution's vision moving forward.
- Schoology did provide an effective stepping stone into a more feature-rich LMS - it ensured many more faculty were willing to try bigger and better things later on.
- Canvas and Blackboard Learn
Schoology is excellent for ease of use and at the time that was our priority - to get more folks using the LMS and thinking about how to use it well rather than first trying a more feature rich (and more challenging to learn) LMS like the bigger companies. This approach turned out to work well for us.
Do you think Schoology Learning delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Schoology Learning's feature set?
No
Did Schoology Learning live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Schoology Learning go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Schoology Learning again?
No