On the State of Ning and Education

By Schoology ⋅ April 22, 2010 ⋅ Education Technology ⋅ 
1 comment

  1. The recent news that Ning will no longer be offering their free social networks for free is unfortunate.
  2. The news that they are forcing existing users to either pay or leave instead of just charging new customers is unsettling, especially for educators and academic institutions who have spent months migrating from their existing systems over to Ning, who had promised free social networking.
  3. Facts 1 and 2 combined with their lack of an open API is even more troublesome.

At first glance, Ning was an olive branch to innovative educators: a free network in exchange for occasional advertisements.  Adopters soon learned that because of the advertisements, the domain was being blocked by many school networks.

It is no surprise that Ning’s free advertising-backed model could not support it. Most of today’s biggest free services (such as Facebook, Twitter) use advertising as a supplement to additional revenue streams, and others (such as SurveyMonkey) do not rely on ads at all.

Although there were many holes in today’s educational web 2.0 offerings that were filled by Ning’s services, one simple fact remains:

Ning was not created for education.

That is why it was blocked on many school networks.  That is why they are forcing schools, who often take months if not years to migrate, to pay or move off their network in a short amount of time. That is why it is not important for them to have an open API to allow communication with other educational software such as school information systems or school portals. Ning is concerned about catering to individuals and small groups who can pull out a credit card and quickly buy the premium service.

Ning’s strategic shift might seem like a blow to all free web services, but it really just shows the flawed nature of an advertising-backed free model.

Schoology is a learning management system built on a fully configurable social network for schools and universities. We understand the importance of information accessibility and offer ways to import and export all information on our system. We are working to develop an open API for even more accessibility. We strive to make it as easy as possible for everyone from individual teachers to entire institutions to sign up and use as few or as many features as they would like.

Educators that wanted to bring social networking and online collaboration into the classroom used Ning as an adopted educational social network. Schoology has gone one step further and done all the work for them – we are a social network built for education.

We are supported not by ads, but by supplementary “add-ons” that any organization can choose to buy.  You can get started for free with plenty of features; if you decide to buy or stop buying add-ons, your students’ educational experiences will go uninterrupted.

To learn more about our features, customers, and company, visit us at http://www.schoology.com.

  • April Capuder

    I found a link to schoology.com in The Big Deal Book of Technology for K-12 Educators list under Quality Quests for the Curious. I can’t tell you how excited I am to have found schoology! This past school year, I along with my team of 7th grade teachers and all of the 7th grade students started a NING Network with advertisements removed. You are correct in that it was not designed for education purposes but it did provide a wonderful opportunity for our students to engage in “safe” social networking opportunities. Students posted their writing and received feedback. We created groups for all kinds of interests (sports, books, movies, etc). I was disappointed when I received the email from NING this spring stating they would no longer be offering “free” network to educators.

    I’ve been on the hunt for a social networking alternative ever since. I was introduced to Edmodo this spring at the the Illinois Computing Educators conference, but it still lacked all that I wanted. I’ve already signed up and have been “playing” with the features. I love that you’ve added the content management piece with the social networking components. Unfortunately, I will not be attending the ISTE 2010 conference. I did attend back in 2008. I do have a few questions: How does one become the “administrator” of the school network? When I signed up, I was not given the option to be the administrator, even though my school was not on the network yet.

    Thanks again for providing this terrific product! I look forward to introducing it to the other 7th grade teachers once I get all the features/options sorted out and can put together an example for them.

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