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We are pleased to announce GoingOn Networks has been named a finalist in the SIIA CODiE awards for Best Education Community Solution!  Read Full Article

Activity streams, by themselves, are a simple concept. They are a list of recent activities performed by a user on a website or system. The first incarnation of activity streams were news feeds, which were all the rage back circa 2004. At the time, many pundits predicted a future where the web would be reduced to millions of autonomous feeds and where RSS aggregators would become the new browser. They had it partially right, they just didn’t imagine that the feeds would come from your “friends” and the aggregator would be called Facebook.

Recently, Yammer received an $800M pre-money valuation and Instagram was sold for a reported $1B. Like Facebook, and Twitter, both of these companies have activity streams and big data concepts at the core of their user experience and technical architectures.  Read Full Article

A few weeks back, I met with the Provost of a major four-year university. We started talking about some of the challenges she faces in engaging her students and faculty. “We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, actually millions, developing programs and resources,” she emphasized, “and I would hazard a guess that the majority of people at this school know about less than 10% of them.” With that, she pulled up her institutional portal and we couldn’t help but laugh. There on the home page was a giant widget showing the campus weather report for the next 5 days (as well as a random list of school news and events). “I may be wrong,” she declared, “but I just do not think that today’s students are coming to our portal to get the weather report.”  Read Full Article

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.