> Review Summary: Schoology

"A system with a strong focus on academics that doesn't claim to do everything, but claims to integrate with anything."

> What the vendor says:

"Schoology provides a means for instructors, students, parents, and administrators to seamlessly communicate and collaborate.

It combines social networking with learning management to help create and share academic content easily."

> What Software Shortlist says about Schoology:

Schoology doesn't claim to do everything, but claims to integrate with anything; "We do what we do exceptionally well and anything we don't do we find a partner that does what they do exceptionally well instead of doing everything mediocre."

Key strengths of Schoology include:

• Quick to set up
• Easy to learn
• Integrates with other software

Schoology's interface design is based on common social media tools such as Facebook which makes the students, teachers, and parents feel more comfortable since it's a technology they already know. Parents can have their own accounts and lookup student homework, grades, etc. This also helps in providing social media technology to students in a safe and monitored environment.

It allows administrators to grant "good" or well behaved students extra functionality and "bad" or misbehaved students less permissions to functionality. A nice to have feature is the Word filter (bad word list) which replaces defined words with other words so that no "bad" words are displayed on blogs, profiles, posts, etc

Schoology can integrate with anything and it can be used not just for "courses", but also for groups such as team sports, clubs, etc. (What's the team/group doing? What are the upcoming events?)

While there are a lot of things to like about Schoology, business users need to consider that this tool has been built with academia in mind. Although there are some corporate clients, current version was designed primarily with traditional students in mind. Also, the tool was primarily built for instructor-led/technology assisted environments. and was not really designed for 100% eLearning courses. You could probably use it for that, but would work best with instructor-led sessions. It is also not really as scalable as comparable products and misses features like waitlisting, self-enrollment, guest enrollment etc.

You can use Schoology for free, but support, customizations, branding, and integrations will come at additional cost.

> Next steps:

To see if Schoology is the right choice for the specific needs of your business, contact Software Shortlist about our free LMS matching service!