Last fall I assigned formative grades to the education technology that was keeping us afloat. Schoology earned a C+. I’m sure you remember my summation of the PowerSchool-owned interface, but in case you don’t… 

Personally, I haven’t asked a lot out of Schoology, and my own gripes have been pretty limited in comparison to some of my colleagues. Next week, though, I’ll be using Schoology’s Turnitin add-on, which, by the way, is the third different iteration of that program in as many years. But for now, [the C+] reflects my own somewhat limited experience with Schoology.

After a full year with Schoology, I stand by my grade. Schoology is clunky but functional. While it’s not a total failure of an interface, it’s not nearly as user-friendly as Google Classroom, for high school teachers at least.

Just like an assignment that earns a C+, the grade is due to an accumulation of small mishaps that drag the overall experience down to mediocrity. Like, say, the random outages, which never occurred with Classroom but occur not infrequently with Schoology.

Or take the Turnitin portal. The act of posting a Turnitin assignment to Schoology requires nearly a dozen steps, and a mistake at any point in this results in students not being able to access the portal.

Or how about when students submit regular assignments, Schoology tries to bully you into using its on-site grading tools; the consequence of not using it is 450 “ungraded assignment” notifications? Speaking of notifications, Schoology’s default setting is to send you an email every time a student submits work, a feature I had to quickly learn how to turn off.

Or we could focus on the group feature. Don’t get me started with the group feature. Creating a functioning Schoology group is a bureaucratic endeavor, requiring students to gain admission through a passcode, which often doesn’t work until some under-the-hood group features have been fixed. Once students actually gain admission to the group, you are then limited in what you can actually do. Last year prospective PEER went through a seamless application process with Google Classroom. This spring students had to join a Schoology group to apply. But because assignments can’t be created in a Schoology group, I had to created a convoluted process where students downloaded a copy of the application, completed it, then sharing it with me, which then necessitated a personal email to each student after receiving their application to indicate I received it. No surprise then that only half as many students ended up submitting applications as in years prior.

Then there’s the message feature. An instructor who uses it to communicate with students would be foolish to hope for a response. Students are more comfortable with email and Remind, which they have been using for years now.

And not to burst into a full-out rant, but there’s also the issue of adaptability. Google Classroom consistently changed its features, ostensibly responding to feedback from educators. Schoology hasn’t had any discernible updates to its features all year. The most obvious update they could implement (which would probably raise my grade by a letter) would be the ability to post assignments in multiple classes. After experiencing the ease of posting an assignment to multiple E12 classes using Google Classroom, to trudge over to each section on Schoology and recreate the same assignment is an annoying way to spend fifteen minutes. And that’s for a high school teacher with a half dozen classes. For my wife, who teaches eight times as many classes in her role member of the elementary school music staff at Goshen, it’s downright maddening.

The students I surveyed mostly agreed:

 

 

For what it’s worth, my informal survey of my fellow English teachers at Champe found them ten to one in support of Google Classroom, with a lot of the same Schoology flaws identified as factoring into their decision.

The rebuttal to all this is that there is no point in complaining, since Schoology isn’t going anywhere. And I’d be more receptive to such an air-tight and nuanced argument, if I hadn’t heard such dismissive statements made about the county’s use of Vision back in the 2018/2019 school year. Where is Vision now?

Technology, and virtual learning environments specifically, have been key to maintaining our infrastructure during the pandemic. Given its importance, its frustrating how sudden and sweeping these sort of changes are made.

Schoology, for all its flaws, has gotten us to June. There will never be a platform that satisfies everyone. But if there is a better alternative moving forward, or at least–

/sudden Schoology outage

Uh, where was I? Oh, or at least room for improvement, I think that’s worth expressing.