Schoology is an online Learning Management System (LMS). It was developed in 2007 by three undergraduate students at Washington University in St. Lewis. It was origianlly developed to share notes and has grown since. Like most online LMSs, it is designed to be useful for K-12 teachers and schools, but it is also geared toward higher education and business users as well. Because it's designed to be useful for anyone who wants to do online or hybrid learning, it looks and feels more like Facebook if Facebook were supposed to be an LMS.
The basic account is free for teachers and corporate trainers, and contains a wide range of features and does not appear to have any limits on the classes and resources each account can have. The only upgrade option the enterprise version, which adds single sign-on (LDAP), and offers integration with most school information management systems, and allows simpler coordination among teachers or instructors within the organization. The enterprise version can be used at the building, school, or district level.
Features
Resources - Resources for course can include assignments, tests/quizzes, files, links, discussions, pages (for the built-in wiki), external tools via LTI link, packages (collections of files that are zipped into one file for students to download), rubrics, badges, and test banks. Resources can be private to your account, shared among your group or school, or shared publicly. You can use other teachers' resources that have been publicly shared or shared in your group or school in your courses as well. Resources can be organized in folders and folders can be organized into collections. The can be used in multiple courses.
Test Banks - Test banks let you create short answer/essay questions, multiple choice, fill in the blank, ordering, true/false, and matching questions, and offers questions tracking.
Badges- You can add badges to any test or assignment for gamification in the course.
Assignments - Assignment can be created in the Course, the Resource library, and the Calendar. They will appear in all three places and for the course and the calendar, you can set a wide range of options including whether or not a submission is required, the points possible, and even the standards alignment. You can even make the assignment for just one student or a subset of your students.
Courses - This is the basic function that all LMSs should have. On Schoology, the courses and the resources are separate and you import resources into your course from your resource library. Creating courses is as simple as giving the course a name, a subject area, and a grade level, then adding resources and assignments. Students access the course by logging into their account and entering the course code. You can add co-teachers, TAs, course designers, or other non-students who you want to be able to create and add content to your course as well.
Calendar - You can add assignments and events to your calendar and your students can link your calendar to their Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or any other app they use that can read an iCal link.
Gradebook - When you grade a student's assignment or test, the grade appears here. The grades are automatically updated so you and the student can see progress
Attendance - Tracks attendance
Groups - You can create groups for your students to do group work in, but you can also create groups tat students or faculty from your school can join, and there are open groups for people who use Schoology to talk about common interests and concerns.
Integrated Apps - You can install resource apps such as YouTube, DropBox, Evernote, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Kahn Academy, and Vimeo that will allow you to search these sites and embed resources into a course or into your a resource folder or collection. In addition, you can add a wide variety of apps such as One Note, and BigBlueButton Conferencing directly into your course (although BigBlueButton conferencing requires that you have the Enterprise version.
Messaging - You can private message any student or anyone in your network (think Facebook Friends or google+ Circles or LinkedIn Connections.
Blog - There is a personal blog associated with your account where you can make long posts. The blog is not the same as announcements, assignments, or course lectures. This is a place where you can post blog articles.
Activity Feed - Your home page is an activity feed, and it streams updates from your connections, groups, classes, blog subscriptions etc., in much the same way that the Facebook Timeline works. Students have one of these as well. You can post updates, which can include files, resources, links, and polls,and can be shared on Facebook and Twitter. You can also post assignments and events for your courses. Everything you post will show up on your students activity feed, assignments and events will only show up for the students who are in the class it pertains to.
Role-based Accounts - You can only have one account per email address, and each account can have only one role: Student, Instructor, or Parent. Instructors are attached to a school, so for those who teach at more than one school, they can have more than one Instructor account as long as the email addresses are different. Teachers who change schools can start a new Instructor account and copy everything from the old account into the new one and delete the old one.
Advantages
Price - It's free to use the basic account, and teachers from the same school can use the free account and get a lot of the benefits from sharing and groups. the free version has no limits as far as the number of courses you can have or the amount of material in the courses. The enterprise version has a lot more bells and whistles, including apps that aren't available on the basic version.
Features - There is a huge number of features and they are well-thought-out.
Availability - Schoology is web based and there are mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Kindle Fire (sorry, no Windows Phone app).
Intuitive - Using Schoology is intuitive, setting up courses and developing resources is quick and simple. The interface is clean and uses similar metaphors as Facebook or LinkedIn, so there is almost no learning curve for instructors or students or parents. Compared to other LMSs I've used (Edmodo, Canvas, Moodle, Google Classroom) Schoology is far more intuitive.
Ease of Use - In addition to the intuitive interface, Schoology is simply easy to use. From the instructor's perspective it's less of a hassle to develop courses than other LMSs I've used.
Disadvantages
The way the co-teacher feature works is limited to making the co-teacher and admin and giving him or her all the same usage privileges as the main teacher. This is fine if the other person is actually a co-teacher, but if they are a TA or course designer, they don't necessarily need complete control of the course and access to student grades. I imagine there is a granularity of control available in the enterprise version.
Page created by: Paul G. Barnes
University of Montevallo
https://www.schoology.com/
Overview
Schoology is an online Learning Management System (LMS). It was developed in 2007 by three undergraduate students at Washington University in St. Lewis. It was origianlly developed to share notes and has grown since. Like most online LMSs, it is designed to be useful for K-12 teachers and schools, but it is also geared toward higher education and business users as well. Because it's designed to be useful for anyone who wants to do online or hybrid learning, it looks and feels more like Facebook if Facebook were supposed to be an LMS.
The basic account is free for teachers and corporate trainers, and contains a wide range of features and does not appear to have any limits on the classes and resources each account can have. The only upgrade option the enterprise version, which adds single sign-on (LDAP), and offers integration with most school information management systems, and allows simpler coordination among teachers or instructors within the organization. The enterprise version can be used at the building, school, or district level.
Features
Advantages
Disadvantages