Uncoology - A Review

by Wesley Andrus, Reporter

Technology & Education, Op-Ed

Click click click. Perfect. Now I can see the grade I have in one class, as well as an inconveniently sorted and obtrusively long dropdown menu of every single assignment for said class. Click. Good: with the assignments menu closed, I can see the grade and scroll to the next class easily. Click click. That’s the next one… I wish I could sort the order of my courses so it matched my schedule… okay. It’s only taken fifteen clicks to get the most convenient possible overview of my grades.

I can see three classes at once.

Let’s compare this with a competitor to Schoology, School Loop.

Oh, I don’t have to click! My grades are all in a table on the homescreen. I don’t have to open a dropdown to see them, clumsily spewing out all of my assignments into an ugly mess on the screen. What else do competitors of Schoology have to offer, and how does this expose its uncomfortable drawbacks?

Well, there’s plenty to review.

Homescreen - 4/10

Let’s start with the first screen you see when you log in. Schoology will show you posts and updates from your enrolled classes, as well as open assignments. Useful enough, except that every assignment that is on-paper, graded with Schoology, and happens to have a due date attached to it, will forever be consigned to clog the “Overdue” tab to oblivion. This pushes open assignments into an aether region where events are sorted with assignments, so it becomes difficult to differentiate them. There is a redundant “Course Dashboard” button which displays the same content as clicking “Courses” in the navigation bar. Helpful. In summary, while the homescreen can provide some news, it is nearly useless for pursuing academic endeavors.

Now to compare with other applications. Google Classroom’s home screen shows you your classes. School Loop shows you your grades, classes, news, and assignments. Canvas’ website shows a checklist of upcoming assignments that actually displays upcoming assignments. But Schoology has no such luxuries.

Navigation - 6/10

Ah, yes, time for the “School” part of “Schoology.” The navigation bar consists of:

A home button, useful.

A “Courses” dropdown, useful if clumsy.

A “Groups” dropdown, seemingly redundant next to “Courses.”

A “Resources” button. We’ll get to that.

And the “Grades” dropdown. Can somebody please tell me what the heck “Mastery” is, and why it’s there? Please. It does nothing. Just make the “Grades” button link to your grades. You had one job.

Competitors require very little navigation because they have far more efficient website design than Schoology. Google Classroom, for instance, has one-click access to any class or their well laid-out “To-Do” page. Phrases such as “one-click access” and “well laid-out” do not tend to be applicable to any aspect of Schoology.

The Courses Page - 5/10

Schoology has wonderful course pages jam-packed with useful features, not the least of which are the obnoxiously small navigation buttons on the left menu. The average student is likely to use… none of them. They’re not useful. They take up space. The “Upcoming” box on the right side of the screen certainly looks promising, though. How excellent that it improperly displays upcoming assignments and often fails to show students every active assignment in their class. Both students and teachers fall prey to assignments suddenly disappearing.

So what does the course page offer? Materials! The only part of Schoology that succeeds in helping a student accomplish a task assigned to them in school. It has an ingenious GUI technique of putting these stupid invisible little gray arrows next to folders so you click on the link instead and get redirected to a completely unnecessary page displaying the contents. If you do manage to click the arrows, you are rewarded with a dropdown and your schoolwork experience can progress.

Course pages in competitors’ options are not universally better, however. Google Classroom’s one-column scroll may become cumbersome if the assignments pile up… but at least they offer the alternative of only using “To-Do.” Canvas, though, has a useful and straightforward navigation section within course pages for greater productivity.

The Groups Page - 3/10

This has no reason to exist. Whatever a “Group” is supposed to be, the end result is a lazy copy-and-paste job of a “Course” with far fewer features.

The Resources Page - 0/10

Why is this here?

What does it do?

Who made this?

The Grades Page - 0/10

I won’t go into much detail, as most of it has already been said. Grade viewing in Schoology is a nightmare. Everything about it is badly designed and atrocious.

But it was certainly put together with the user in mind; how else could they make it so un-user-friendly?

Submitting Assignments - 5/10

Let’s start with the problems. You can’t unsubmit anything. If you add a document, it is automatically submitted. That is not a good combination.

The first labeled submission option is adding a comment.

Teachers can only see one submitted file at a time, starting with the most recent one, sometimes tricking them into overlooking multi-file submissions from a single student.

Fun times.

But luckily for Schoology, it has some elements of basic functionality. Submitting various types of files after locating the tiny gray “Submit Assignment” button which for some reason has its own column is somewhat efficient and effective. If you have Google Drive files, there are added steps, but it’s not the worst. You only have to click two extra buttons and wait for Google Docs to be converted to ‘.docx’ for some unknown reason. It’s not like they integrated with Microsoft Word.

The built-in text editor is passable, and has enough features to make decent documents given a short time-frame or when a student is too tired to go through the hassle of uploading from a third-party application.

When compared to other services, though, the happy train takes a happy jump off the tracks. Google Classroom is thoroughly integrated with Google Workspace applications, the undisputed kings of free productivity software. Canvas has good integrations (including that same Google Workspace) and a smart submission system that specifically tells students the type of file required. This means, for example, that teachers don’t have to deal with a document containing a link rather than just the link itself.

Embedded Apps - 4/10

And now for one of the defining features of Schoology: embedded applications. Google Docs, Slides, all of the above: they can work in the same tab! You don’t have to go and open some other page just to view your files.

Except it’s far more convenient to go with the extra page. An added layer of interface surrounding an embedded app is not worth dealing with just for supposed streamlining, not to mention the visual mess. Editing Google Docs within Schoology is a painful experience because of the minified nature of the working area.

One bright spot in Schoology embeds is Google Slides: they can add a set of teacher-given information into Courses pages that makes it easy to use and access. You can’t edit the slides like this, but that would be superfluous.

What about Schoology competitors, though?

They don’t do this. It’s dumb. Just use the app by itself.

Other

There are some parts of Schoology that are, simply put, the worst. “Admin” privileges within courses have less of a point than your average sphere. Maintenance on the website leads to inconsistent performance and inconvenience; going with a larger and more respected service such as that run by Google would be far more reliable. Notifications are sometimes missing. The integrations with useful services or programs are abysmal. And let’s just admit it, the developers set their bar so low for graphic design that you’d need a shovel to find it.

Final Takeaways - 4/10

What makes Schoology so counterproductive? What gives it any appeal at all, really? Well, nothing. It falls flat when compared to alternatives such as Canvas, Google Classroom, an MS Paint drawing of school software, or one guy memorizing everyone’s grades.

It’s easy to fix this situation. Certainly, switching to another software would be preferable for everyone involved. Students who have gone through a switch of software at other schools report that it’s nowhere near as difficult as it might seem. A hybrid system of Google Classroom (for assignments) and School Loop (for grades) is noticeably more efficient for students, despite incorporating two different applications. Students who have used Canvas can tell you that it blends features of both.

Schoology blends its unique suite of features in a physical blender so they don’t work anymore. Let’s do something about it. If you are a student or teacher concerned by this, make your voice heard. School administration is here to make sure that everyone has a meaningful learning experience. Let them know how they can make that experience the best it can be. 

DISCLAIMER: The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the various authors in this paper do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of Kamiak High School or The Gauntlet.