goingon.com

Long before the emergence of Facebook, Emory University pioneered LearnLink, an institution-wide online community and communications environment for engaging students, faculty and staff around both academic and co-curricular activities. Almost 15 years and millions of posts later, LearnLink has become an integral part of the “Emory Experience,” and has helped to set the bar for online engagement in higher education.  Watch the webinar to learn more.   Read Full Article

We are thrilled to announce the newest addition to the GoingOn team: Beth Styles, VP of Product.  Beth is joining Annette DeNoyer, Director of Product Management, in our product team.  Beth is responsible for all aspects of the product life cycle ensuring that we provide innovative solutions that deliver against our mission of building the connected campus and delighting our customers.

With our debut media coverage last month in TechCrunch, Campus Technology  and Wired Campus, there have been a lot of thoughts and opinions posted about GoingOn.   Unsurprisingly, not everyone shares our vision.   This is to be expected in any early market.  In fact, one of the things that I love most about working in the educational technology market is the depth and thoughtfulness of the social debate.  You can work insanely hard, find many early successes, but this market will hold your feet to fire until you have demonstrated tangible results.   We go in with our eyes wide open and embrace the challenge (most days).   

As an entrepreneur, I have found that being misunderstood is harder then being dismissed.  Creating new technologies and building new markets can be like trying to deliver your dissertation in the middle of the faculty holiday party.  But if you wouldn’t mind stepping into this quiet corner near the fireplace, I would offer a few points for your consideration.  Read Full Article

Dr. Rodney Murray, of Rod's Pulse Podcast, recently interviewed our CEO, Jon Corshen, on his e-learning tech podcast.  Listen to this fireside chat style podcast for the following nuggets:

• How GoingOn got started at University of Pennsylvania
• What we learned from students at Emory University about how they want to consumer academic info streams and how we've updated our UI to reflect that
• How we help clients integrate with LMSs 

-->Listen now.   Read Full Article

   Read Full Article

The Engineering Team at GoingOn has months of work lined up for action. Notifications, Syndication, Channels, Twitter & Facebook integration, Inline Help, and a Mobile App are amongst the exciting new projects in our pipeline. Some are ideas in their formative stages while others are elaborately spec’d out documents or moving through development. New functionality comes from research, best practices of the Web, and the needs of our customers as they flow through Client Services and into our R&D process. (More on that another time.)

How should an engineering team prioritize, schedule, and then build out all those exciting new features?  Read Full Article

Somehow I missed this video interview of our CEO, Jon Corshen at EDUCAUSE in October.  But, better late than never.  For your viewing pleasure, a 10 minute interview with GoingOn's CEO about our company's vision and goals.  

Watch the video to learn

• Why Jon is so passionate about higher education student engagement
• Why it's time to move beyond the course 
• How social web technologies applied to campus communications can enhance student engagement. 

The best part of my job is getting to see what amazing projects our clients are working on, and it is particularly gratifying when the GoingOn platform is a key component in making those projects work. We recently announced a partnership with SUNY Empire State College and we are already seeing the great work they are doing.  Hosted on the GoingOn platform, the Project for Critical Inquiry (PCI) at Empire State College is a "venue for interdisciplinary work in an open learning environment."  By combining access to a wealth of educational resources with the mentorship of a faculty member, the Project for Critical Inquiry develops students who are not passive consumers of information, but rather have a deep understanding of the context and implications of a body of knowledge.   Read Full Article

As 2011 draws to a close, it is a natural time for reflection and prognostication with respect to some of the trends that stand out above the rest. Since GoingOn’s mission is to improve the quality of the academic experience by innovatively applying social networking and other internet-based technologies to structure and drive academic engagement, the continued growth of online education for institutions of all sizes is of particular note. Clearly, from an administrative and revenue based perspective, online education offers huge potential for gain as witnessed by Saint Leo’s exponential revenue growth that was heavily fueled by building a robust online program. But beyond that, more mainstream institutions of higher learning are embracing online as a viable quality delivery modality for education as evidenced by Stanford University’s decision to allow its name to be attached to an all-online high school program for gifted students.  Read Full Article

At GoingOn, I’m in charge of working with our clients on systems integration. Integration means a lot of different things to different people but here I’m referring to connecting existing systems for a seamless experience in navigating from one system to the other. In short this usually means single sign-on or trusted system point integrations. GoingOn supports a variety of single sign-on and trusted system integrations including CAS, Shibboleth, and IMS BLTI (Basic Learning Tools Interoperability). 

I was reading through the National Survey of Student Engagement report (NSSE, or affectionately called “Nessie”) as well as an Inside Higher Ed Article about it which got me thinking: Why do we go to all the effort to deploy SaaS e-learning systems and integrate them with other learning systems within the institution?  Read Full Article