goingon.com

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.

 “Let me start by saying that GoingOn is a social….”

 ”Wait come back…I meant no offense…”

“I was going to say platform…socially-enabled communication platform, not a social network. It’s not Facebook for schools.  Yes, I did say that students don’t want to be “friended” by their professors, and vice-versa, but I did not mean to suggest that we should, therefore, replicate Facebook inside of the university. It is a bit more complicated than that…Here, sit down and have some eggnog, I’ll keep it to a few short bullet points.

• It is not about the course
  • Education is so much more than what happens inside a classroom during a set time each week. Much of the best learning occurs when students and faculty interact outside of the course.  Many of our clients are looking for ways to enable outside the classroom learning online – for on-campus students and distance learners alike.  The LMS does a great job of bringing the course online.  The problem we are tackling is enabling and enhancing the rest of the higher education experience in an online format.
• It is about communication
  • GoingOn’s central function is to streamline communications from disparate users, organizations, and systems across campus and parse them into one intelligent, central stream of information tailored to each user. (Click on TOUR here and here for screenshots of this functionality.) This is not just another place to post the same content you just posted on Facebook and Twitter.  This is a network that has been designed for academic communications.
• Streams make sense
  • A campus is a vibrant place. Lots of things are happening at all times. Students can’t possibly be aware of all events and opportunities.  Our goal is to take the many events, conversations, happenings, and opportunities across a university, turn them into streams of information and intelligently route them to the most appropriate students and faculty.  GoingOn lets users find out what is going on of interest on their campus (virtual and/or physical).
• Collaboration takes many forms
  • We try not to get stuck on the collaboration features that are preeminent today (wikis, chat, forums).  We are constantly looking at the ways that students want to collaborate and then re/designing tools with the specific use case of higher education.  With GoingOn, students can create workgroups and invite classmates to collaborate on a class project.  Faculty can share files and work together on curriculum.  Administrators and students alike can contribute to campus wide events calendars. Everyone on campus can send messages, post on each other’s walls, curate their portfolios and invite comments.  
• There is value to social recommendations and connections 
  • In academia, friends and classmates will often have great advice when it comes to what might be of interest. Being able to see what they’re doing, reading, writing, and commenting on is valuable.  GoingOn is built to leverage both social recommendations as well as learn from a user’s interests and habits over time.
• What we are
  • GoingOn optimizes campus communications such that students, faculty and administrators can connect and collaborate across course and campus boundaries.  By seamlessly integrating streams of information across legacy systems, course websites and social media, the GoingOn Academic Engagement Network creates an accessible central space for a thriving online campus life.

If you’d like to learn more, request a demo today and a GoingOn representative will be in touch shortly to give you a live demonstration.