Social Tech Gets Academic: GoingOn Brings Modern Social Modalities to Higher Ed in Latest Release

GoingOn Networks, Inc. today announced the latest release of the GO Platform, a modern, socially powered campus communications and collaboration environment that allows faculty, students and administrators to more effectively connect, converse and engage across all aspects of their academic life experience.  With this release, GoingOn has significantly enhanced its Virtual Commons, providing users with easier ways to search, share and manage their Facebook-like activity streams, and expanded its powerful Community-building environment with two new modules, GO Conversation and GO Channels.  These new additions to the GoingOn academic social network enable users to dynamically create collaborative spaces to connect with fellow students, cohorts and faculty members within minutes, as they extend the academic experience beyond the course and the confines of a classroom.

CEO Jon Corshen will showcase the platform’s new functionality as he discusses current social technology trends in higher education and best practices implemented by several client-schools, including Arizona State University and the University of Pennsylvania, during a web presentation being hosted on June 12 and again on June 19.

“When it comes to sharing resources and collaborating, campus portals are dying a slow death and using email to deliver ‘institutionalized SPAM’ is not a viable alternative,” said Corshen. “To see where it is all going, you need only to look at the modalities used by Facebook, Twitter and others, such as push, share, like, follow, comment and recommend.  GoingOn provides the fastest and easiest way to build an engaging environment that supports these modalities and, more importantly, lays the foundation for a more engaged and connected campus.”

The GoingOn academic social network was launched in 2009 as a social classroom platform at the University of Pennsylvania and has evolved to become a much broader, socially powered campus communication network.  It is being deployed at more than 30 of today’s top academic institutions.

Features of the latest release include:

Conversation Spaces

Conversations are easy-to-create web spaces that facilitate highly engaging and efficient information sharing and collaboration between as few as two users or as many people as desired. Conversations may be created around school programs, student organizations, study groups, research projects, informal courses or event discourse and debate. GO Conversation spaces combine the power of Facebook-like activity streams with rich content capabilities.

Enhanced Personal Commons

The Personal Commons uses intelligent Facebook-like activity streams to provide users with a private home page and hub for all communication relevant to his/her interests and group memberships.  In this release, the Personal Commons has been enhanced with a new UI design, real-time status updates, sharing and advanced search and filtering.

Email Notifications

Notifications provide a critical engagement functionality in which users are alerted to ongoing network activity pertaining to their group memberships, content and connections. Users may set their preferences for the frequency of notifications, as well as the types of updates that would trigger a notification.

Enhanced Task Management

Enhanced Task Management provides group owners with the ability to create and share tasks with any/all users in the group and to track completion of tasks.

Updates to Site Roles

New site-level roles are being introduced, including Advanced Content Creator, Channel Builder and Community Builder.  The new roles will expand the options available to Site Owners for delegating specific permission sets to any user across the network.

Directory Categories

Categorizing communities, conversations and channels (feeds) will make it easier for users to discover new groups by interest category, or even for filtering their existing membership groups.  Site and Group Administrators will have the ability to create and manage the categories, while Group Managers will have access to choose from the available categories when building or managing their communities.

New Group Status Settings: Active and Inactive

Community Builders, Channel Builders and Group Managers may now control the Active/Inactive state of their groups.  In doing so, access to the group and its content will be blocked to all visitors, including its general members.  Only Administrators and Managers will continue to have access until the 'Active' status is reinstated.

Enhancements to Search

The site Search now has a filter for "Everywhere" and "Here" to provide the user with a way of targeting their search to the local group or the entire site network.  If the user chooses to limit their search to their current group space (Community, Channel or Personal Commons), they simply choose the "Here" filter.

Bulk User Enrollment

Site and Group Administrators can now mass enroll all or any filtered lists of users into one or many groups using the Bulk User Enrollment workflow.  This workflow adds to the other user enrollment options previously available to Administrators and Managers, including the Invitation workflow or the Sub-community member transfers.

Content Management & Administration Updates

Various content management and administration updates have been added to further improve administration efficiency and expand content management options for managers.

For more information about GoingOn Networks or to register for one of the web presentations on June 12 or June 19, visit www.GoingOn.com.

About GoingOn Networks, Inc.

GoingOn provides colleges and universities with an innovative, On-Demand communications and collaboration environment where students, faculty and administrators can more effectively connect, converse and engage across all aspect of their academic life experience.   As the reliance on social and mobile technologies continues to accelerate, institutions are being challenged to create a more modern connected campus, where students and faculty can more easily communicate, share resources and connect with each other, from anywhere and at any time.

The GO Platform allows institutions to build a privately branded academic social network where users can more easily access school-wide information and resources and come together to converse, share ideas and expand their knowledge base.  The GoingOn solution can be easily and quickly deployed without requiring development or technical resources and will grow organically across the campus.  The platform combines an intuitive Personal Virtual Commons with Facebook-like activity streams, self-service tools for building collaborative spaces and integrated academic networking features.

For more information or to learn more about GoingOn, visit www.GoingOn.com.