A notice from Jonathan Farley, Director of Information Technology, and Amber Matty, Technology Integration Specialist

While Microsoft Teams is our supported and preferred tool for hosting conferences and meetings for distance learning, we know that some individuals have explored using the Schoology Conferences tool within our Schoology platform. During our monthly Schoology meeting with our support specialist, we received information concerning this tool. We want to pass along this information to you so you can make an informed decision if you are choosing to utilize this feature within the Schoology platform.

Every district Schoology account comes with a complimentary, basic Schoology Conferencing package. It was brought to our attention that this complimentary package supports a district-wide total of about 250 participants at any one given time. This means that if 10 teachers each had 25 students on a meeting using Schoology Conferences, and they were all using it during the ten o’clock hour, this would max out our district-wide meeting capacity during that time. It would be possible at that point for users to experience instability with the tool — class participants or teachers being “kicked off” meetings, the inability to join or re-join a meeting, sluggish performance, lags in video, or other degraded service issues.

While Schoology Conferences is convenient and handy, our district did not purchase the tool as an add-on because of cost and our existing licensure for Microsoft Teams (part of the Office 365 Suite) that has been purchased by the WVDE.

While Schoology Conferences is still available for use, please note that if you choose to use this tool, you and your students may experience degraded performance during your meetings. We do not have a way to track or limit the number of users of Schoology Conferences, so please use with caution and at your own risk.