Item: Schoology Learning
Rating: 3
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Schoology is used as a platform for giving assignments, scoring them, and providing feedback to students. All teachers in my school district are mandated to use it to keep track of student grades. There are benefits in general to electronic gradebooks over paper ones, of course, but that said, this system has so many problems it's hard to know where to begin.

Pros and Cons

allows teachers to upload Google docs, sheets, etc. as assignments
allows integration with our school's report card system (grades in gradebook are automatically imported to report cards for families)
allows different teachers to save and share materials by saving them to Resources

In general, the system is NOT intuitive and there is a lack of customization across all aspects of it. Far too much clicking is required for many tasks. Some examples follow...
When typing comments on assignment, the default is to NOT show the comments to students--for students to see, you must click a box before submitting and there is no way to change that setting.
There is no way to create a bank of frequently used comments (e.g. "This is plagiarized", "Good job!", "You need to edit more carefully", etc.), so the teacher must type comments manually for each assignment.
Once assignments are marked missing, late submissions are still marked missing and there is no automatic way to change this. Teachers must go in and manually remove the "missing" marks from any assignments submitted late. This is a huge hassle, considering our district does not want us to refuse late work.
In consideration of the movement towards mastery grading, there is no way to customize the value of a missing assignment; it can only be zero. Any equity-focused district encourages teachers NOT to count missing assignments as zeroes. The value of missing work was customizable in the Illuminate gradebook that my school previously used.
"Mark empty cells missing" (bulk feature) does not mean "all cells without a submission"; it means "all cells without a grade." You cannot easily mark multiple assignments missing at the same time without then going to manually remove the missing mark from those students who HAVE submitted something that you have not yet had time to grade.
There is no way to sort students by who has the most ungraded work, which would be very helpful in prioritizing.
If a student takes a quiz late, their score does NOT automatically populate. Teacher must go in to view the score and then manually enter it. This is incredibly annoying at a school with a high absence rate.
Assignments submitted late are just marked "late" instead of time-stamped and there is no way to sort late assignments by the order they were submitted. I do not want to grade the work of students who turned in everything the last week of the semester before those who only turned things in one day late.
The Bulk Edit feature does not allow you to change the lock date (last date an assignment will be accepted). Lock dates for assignments must be set and changed individually, which I learned the hard way.
My experience with the mobile app was so frustrating that I never use it. It would be amazing if I could grade student work from my phone, but it's totally confusing.

Most Important Features

It allows off-campus students to access work when not present at school.
It allows integration with out district's report card system.
It creates an individual copy of posted Google docs for each student, and these are automatically stored in the teacher's Google Drive.

Return on Investment

It does allow shy students to share their thoughts on a discussion board without talking.
It allows parents to view grades, although very few parents at my school do, mainly due to not being very tech-savvy.
Motivated students are able to monitor their own grades.

Alternatives Considered

I did not select this system; my district bosses did and the only reason I can think of is that it was probably cheaper than the other bids. It has been more than four years since I used any other system, but I do remember both EasyGradePro and Illuminate being more customizable for teachers.

Key Insights

Do you think Schoology Learning delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Schoology Learning's feature set?

Did Schoology Learning live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Schoology Learning go as expected?

Would you buy Schoology Learning again?

Other Software Used

Google Drive, Google Slides

Likelihood to Recommend

There HAVE to be better-designed learning management systems out there. My suspicion is that this company was the lowest bidder. I have been forced to use it for four years and I have seen few improvements during that time. Teachers are never asked for their input on the system or how to make it better, which is what brings me here. I literally have no idea whom to approach with these issues.

Users and Roles

25000 - All elementary and secondary teachers are required to use it.

Support Headcount Required

I don't even know, and that's the problem. Our school has two technology employees, but they usually can't answer my "Why doesn't Schoology _______?" questions, either. If there is a way to do something on Schoology, they are usually able to explain how to do it; the problem is that there are too many things that Schoology DOESN'T allow you to do.

Business Processes Supported

assigning work
grading/scoring work
submitting grades/marks for progress reports and final report cards

Innovative Uses

I can't think of anything innovative, but it allowed teachers to assign work remotely during COVID-related distance learning. (Unfortunately, many of our families did not have internet access at home in 2020.)

Future Planned Uses

It will probably continue to be used for the same purposes; I can't see much other use for it.

Likelihood to Renew

I have no choice. If I continue to teach in this school district, I am required to use it.

Usability

Not intuitive and not customizable enough: There should be pre-set comments to save time (teachers can add them and save them in a comments bank)--Teacher should be able to set a default to show comments to student instead of having to click the box every time.--When student submits an assignment, missing mark should disappear--Missing mark value should be customizable (not always zero)--”Mark empty cells missing” should be accompanied by the option of “except ones with submissions”--System should have an option to mark empty cells missing automatically once due date has passed (regardless of if assignment is graded yet), instead of teacher having to do this manually--System should allow sorting assignments in order of submission time--Score for quiz needs to update if student takes it late--Teacher should be able to sort students by who has most ungraded submissions--Clicking on a certain kid’s assignment used to take you directly there, but doesn’t anymore (no idea why, but requires even more clicks to get where needed)--Bulk Edit should allow you to change the lock date of multiple assignments at once.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Consistent	Do not like to use Unnecessarily complex Cumbersome Feel nervous using Lots to learn

Easy Tasks

I wouldn't call any of it easy. It all required training, and I still have so many unanswered questions.

Difficult Tasks

I just listed all of these in a previous question.
I can't speak from a student standpoint, but I can name at least ten improvements that should be made to make the teacher experience easier. (And I did in the previous question.)

Mobile Interface Availability and Impressions

Yes - I've tried using it and it's quite different than the desktop version. I was never provided any training on the mobile version and I could not figure out how to easily score student work using it on my iPhone, so I no longer even try. Having a more intuitive mobile app would definitely make me less annoyed by Schoology.

Clearly not designed by a classroom teacher. :-(

Overall Satisfaction with Schoology Learning