News

GoingOn Shares New Community Platform for Educators

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 11/05/09

San Francisco start-up GoingOn has launched its open source community platform for educational institutions at Educause 2009 taking place this week in Denver. GoingOn Community bundles social networking, collaboration, and publishing technologies into an online service that allows educators to deploy an institution-wide network of user configured communities built around specific courses, programs, activities, or interests.

The service is based on the open source applications Moodle, a course management system, and Drupal, a content management system. It provides a means for campuses to publish user-generated content, including blogs, podcasts, and videos, with ratings, reviews, comments, semantic tagging, and other common Web 2.0 components. For content management the program includes a graphical editor and publishing queue that allows for real-time updates.

"The evolution of the social Web and the emergence of the Facebook generation have fundamentally changed the way people communicate, share ideas, and manage relationships," said Jon Corshen, CEO of GoingOn. "For schools, this is both a challenge and an opportunity--by building online communities, schools can dramatically improve student engagement, increase faculty productivity, and enable new models of social learning, collaboration and knowledge management."

One user, the College of Liberal and Professional Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, sought a platform that would provide a more engaging and participatory environment its online courses. "At the same time, we also found great internal demand for building communities that extended beyond the classroom for our various departments, programs and groups," said Marni Baker Stein, director of program development for the college.